Of nondescript lives and landscapes: blood, scar, and resilience in Habila’s Oil on Water

Helon Habila’s novel is also relatively uninterested in both the grand debates of global warming and of capitalism’s myriad defects, including its atrocious impacts on the environment. Rather, Oil on Hater articulates in cinematographic form the ruins of local environments and peoples whose existence unfolds in proximity to oil extraction. Reading scenes in the novel is grisly; it is an excursion into a world in the aftermath of an apocalypse wrought by oil wars in the locality, ones of sheer brigandage and reckless rivalry:

But the soldiers came early the next morning. First they came in a boat, and there were only five of them. They were on routine patrol; they hadn’t known the militants were here, and they ran into ambush—it was a massacre. They were all killed, instantly. The militants had machine guns and grenades. It was awful. But the soldiers must have called for back-up because this morning the helicopter came and started shooting at everything beneath it, indiscriminately. People running and jumping into the water. It was awful. Awful. The water turned red. Blood, it was blood. But in the confusion the rebels slipped away and left the villagers to face the soldiers.

(Habila 2010, 154)

It is a tale of the militarized sociality of oil extraction in the Niger Delta, a sociality played out in minute details of local quotidian life, their everyday misery featuring as the very “speech act” of those abstractions presented in Anthropocene discourse by means of graphs and algorithmic projections. The results of this are climate refugees, “abandoned villages, hopeless landscapes, [and] deserted beaches of these tiny towns and islands” (24; 175) rendered uninhabitable by a combination of industrial pollution and human violence between local militias and state military. These quotidian preoccupations of the novel’s narrativity are what Louise Green in a relatively similar reading describes as “the insignificant details which are also the substance of the real” climate situation, but which often get “lost in the process of abstraction” (2018, 249)—the means by which the Anthropocene discourse articulates. The narrative strategy of infusing globalized climate discourse with localized substance of the real (actual violence) is not in any way another case of postcolonial victim mongering—far from it. Rather, Habila s text is an attempt, perhaps, to bring the Anthropocene debate back to the concrete substances of its implications by scripting out of the grand scales of its thoughts the particular ways in which to track and apprehend the extant dimensions of its present impact to better conceive of a future that befits the Anthropocene time scale.

Thus, Habila turns his writerly gaze on poor fishing communities and nondescript fisher-folks located along the Delta who, faced with terrible alternatives, must make a choice: either surrender their lands and familiar existence to oil extraction, and in the process benefit from its ephemeral gains, or resist the promised lucre, albeit shortly, until forcibly removed by the militarized forces that govern oil extraction, including the Nigerian postcolony. In the novel, communities that give in to the latter option get compensated in exchange for their land with flat screen TVs, DVD players, and second-hand four-by-fours. But these soon break down: “the cheap televisions and DVD players ... gone ... the rest of the money thrown away in Port Harcourt bar rooms, or on second wives and funeral parties, and now they are worse off than before” (Habila 2010, 29). There is a third category, though: the ones who neither actively resist nor blindly join in the consuming frenzy of the oil money, but are nevertheless caught up in the inevitable upheavals that ensue. Enter Boma, a character who emerges in the novel’s end as the oil survivor and embodiment of hope in the post-oil world that the novel gestures to in the end.

To be sure, although the narrative appears woven around the search by two journalists, Zaq and Rufus, for the kidnapped wife of James Floode, a British oil company worker, it is also a journey into self-awareness by the protagonist, Rufus. It is a coining to terms with the fate of his family caught up—as part of the third category'—in the social and ethical collapse of their community as consequence of oil extraction. Rufus’s sister Boma is a victim of petroleum fire disaster caused by their father, who is himself a victim of circumstance, driven to illegal oil trade after losing his oil company job, “just like half the town. They all worked for the ABZ oil company, and now the town, once awash in oil money, watches in astonishment as the streets daily fill up with fleeing families, some returning to their hometown and villages” (61), others seeking refuge in nearby villages and islands in search of alternative means of livelihood.

The petroleum fire takes the lives of many in the village, including the father of Rufus’s best friend. Even survivors are maimed permanently: families disintegrate, Boma’s face is permanently scarred, their mother grieves inconsolably, and their father is arrested and jailed. As the novel ends, Boma comes to terms with her condition. She finds a home among a community of worshippers on Irikefe Island, a religious community that experiences its own trauma by the fact of its proximity to the unfolding violence and environmental catastrophe—their shrine desecrated, religious figurines destroyed, and some of its adherents killed or driven into the ocean. As Boma arrives in this community, her fate is soon tied to that of the worshippers, united by their experiences of trauma and of displacement as discounted victims of extraction. However, these villagers soon begin to rebuild from the rubble of their collective suffering: “Boma was with the group of women at the hearth. I could see her from here, her red blouse standing out in the cluster of white robes around her ... she looked really happy, and for a moment I almost started to believe that the worst really was over” (166). The narrator (Rufus), who appears to witness this process of transformation, describes the scene by juxtaposing the moods of grief and resilience through concatenating images of blood and the colors of red, representing pain/affliction and experience, and white, representing purity and resilience: “Some tried to wash the blood spots off their white robes, without much success” (165). The image ofbloodstained robes indexes the resilient transition to a new possibility beyond the one offered by oil. It shows how an attempt to begin anew need not, must not, be oblivious of the incumbent but, rather, must proceed from the experience of the past, must begin in the wake of the defunct regime—that is to say, not in spite of but because of the end of the current regime—and, therefore, has to carry vestiges of that experience.