The Representation of the Sea in Nnedi Okofor’s Who Fears Death and Derek Walcott’s Omeros

The ocean in postcolonial literature carries the weight of the Atlantic slave trade, colonial transportation, and diasporic longing, and its symbolic and cosmological functions in Nnedi Okofor's Who Fears Death and Derek Walcott's Omeros reveal how two writers from the African diaspora and the African continent use the sea as a space of trauma, transformation, and spiritual power. This study examined how both texts construct oceanic space as simultaneously a site of historical violence and a site of spiritual and narrative possibility. A postcolonial ecocritical methodology drawing on Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic and Caribbean literary theory was applied. Walcott's epic poem, set in St. Lucia, rewrites Homer's Odyssey and Iliad through the eyes of Caribbean fishermen and their ancestral African memories, while Okofor's speculative fiction set in a post-apocalyptic Sudan uses elemental forces including the desert and water as markers of spiritual power and political resistance. Both texts construct a cosmology in which the non-human world participates in the historical and moral dramas of the human. The analysis showed that while Walcott's oceanic vision is shaped by the specific history of Caribbean slavery and creolisation, Okofor's is rooted in West African mythological traditions adapted through speculative narrative. The study recommends this pairing for courses on African and Caribbean comparative literature at universities in the South South geopolitical zone.

Keywords: ocean symbolism, postcolonial, Okofor, Walcott, Black Atlantic