Re-evaluating the Image of the Niger Deltas in Kaine Agary’s Yellow Yellow
Author: Dr. Chinyere T. Ojiakor Nigeria
Abstract: It should depress us that aside from the Government and oil companies in the Niger Delta, the indigenes also constitute the problems of the area. According to records, the expatriates who created the Nigeria Delta States set in motion the constitutional and legal framework for the future betterment of the Niger Delta. It is most regrettable that in spite of the establishment of Niger Delta Development Board (NDDB) with a view of embarking on the physical development of the area as an equitable recompense for its majority oil reserve which feeds the entire nation, it is still replete with narratives of deprivation, violence and confoundedly the life of pleasure code as is displayed by the work’s central character Zilayefa. Critics have commonly viewed Kaine Agary’s Yellow Yellow as a sordid account of the deprivation of the people’s subsistence livelihood by oil despoliation and the provocations of the displaced male image as it affected the work’s central characters. This assertion is made without much regard to the repressed and manifest avarice profoundly displayed by the novel’s protagonist and inhabitants of the area. The present study through the analytical research design interrogates the actions of the people of the Niger Delta in their quest to attain existential fulfillment. Besides the main characters’ heeding of some kind of pleasure code, the super-structural attitude of the people of the area hangs, like an unseen shadow, over and above Yellow-Yellow’s major characters, motivating their actions and inactions.