ETHICAL RESPONSIBILITY AND POLITICAL WITNESSING IN J. P. CLARK-BEKEDEREMO'S ‘THE CASUALTIES’

Abstract

This article positions J.P. Clark-Bekederemo's ‘The Casualties’ as a signal text within the poetics of affective minimalism, an aesthetic mode where emotional restraint functions not as political withdrawal but as a strategy for reconfiguring ethical perception. Through analysis of the poem's accumulative syntax, controlled diction, strategic pronominal shifts, and restrained imagery, the article argues that Clark-Bekederemo constructs a ‘pedagogy of implication’ that trains readers to recognize their embeddedness within networks of political responsibility. The poem's repudiation of conventional elegiac gratification, its flattening of affective peaks, and its expansion of ccasualty’ beyond physical harm reshape the witnessing of suffering and the distribution of guilt. Drawing on affect theory and political philosophy, the study concludes that affective minimalism functions as a technology of ethical attention, cultivating civic consciousness by transforming readers from consumers of suffering into participants in a shared moral and political community.