ABSTRACT
This article is informed by the centrality of consciousness-raising in ecocritical ideology, which, according to Christine Gerhardt, “has come to hold the many different perspectives and techniques in ecological criticism together”. It seeks to examine a selection of contemporary Cameroon poetry in English to foreground its concerns with the environment and its futures. The paper aims at showing that through familiar, comprehensive and meaningful culture-specific metaphors, the poems increase general environmental awareness first, by foregrounding the effects of human-nonhuman nature dynamic and secondly, by suggesting some solutions to the environmental crisis. This perspective, it will be shown, is rooted in an African tradition that assigns a functional dimension to art.
