The Poetics of Ecobordering: Ecofeminism and Border Dynamics in Flora Nwapa’s Never Again and Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra

This paper reads Flora Nwapa’s Never Again (1975) and Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra (1982) as accounts of how the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970) damaged land, water, and women’s bodies as a single process, a connection that studies of the war’s ecological toll and studies of its gendered violence have so far treated separately. Extending “ecobordering,” a term developed for petrofiction and resource extraction, to state warfare, and reading it alongside a non-essentialist ecofeminism, the paper offers close readings of the novels’ language to show how military campaigns, scorched-earth tactics, and blockades devastate local ecosystems while tightening patriarchal control over women’s bodies and movement, and how hunger itself becomes a means of sexual coercion. It argues that both novels present women as agents, not only victims: their mobility, labor, and dissent challenge masculine militarism from within, even as hunger, class, and the state’s recruitment of women limit that agency. The paper contributes by showing that ecobordering, developed to describe environmental exploitation in peacetime, also names how war turns a national boundary into a single field of ecological and bodily violence, and by showing, through Nwapa and Emecheta, how women’s survival labor becomes the ground for postwar repair.