Oil on Water is a poignant novel that talks about the devastation of the once rich Niger delta that has sustained life for millennia. The environmentally rich marshland and mangrove landscape is laid barren by oil pollution that has followed nearly fifty years of drilling. With farming and fishing seriously endangered, it is a saga of the threatened livelihoods of local populations for whom, oil could mean anything but prosperity. Caught between militancy and the military it has become a dangerous game of survival as well. The sky lights up with a thousand oil flares whose ghostly flames dance through the night with unsuspecting women drying edible stuff in those poisonous fumes, completing the macabre picture! The novel's plot centres around a senior journalist and a young eager reporter journeying through the delta on the trail of a kidnapped English woman, the wife of an oil company employee. Helon Habila comes from a long line of illustrious Nigerian writers that goes back to Chinua Achebe. This is Habila's third novel after Waiting for an Angel and Measuring Time . Excerpts from an interview:
You join a long list of successful Nigerian writers writing in English. To what do you attribute this success?
Firstly, we have a rich indigenous story telling tradition. I grew up in Northern Nigeria listening to folk-tales in Hausa, my native tongue, which also drew a lot from Arabic literature. The colonial encounter grounded us in English education and writing traditions. And perhaps, above all, we have suffered dictatorships, gone through social upheavals and turbulent times. And that has spurred much writing and literature in Nigeria, I would say.
You have often quoted Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera who spoke about literature lending voice to the individual and Ben Okri, fellow Nigerian writer, who spoke about an African reality. How do you see their ‘world views?
I am not sure of the context of Okri. But I am a Marechera scholar and his position comes from a kind of frustration. When Marchegra was asked what inspired him as an African writer, people expected him to say “African History” or “African Culture”. Instead he referred to the suffering of the people, the helpless who are denied justice every day by the very leaders who promised so much. I found that insightful.
As long as the nation continues to fail the individual by denying him the most basic freedom and civil rights, so long will the writer continue to walk away from the nation, to focus his attention on the individual. Gradually we are witnessing new kind of literature emerging in Africa and I would like to call it “post-nationalist”.
Oil on Water is your third novel. Your first two were well received. But with Oil on Water you have the world's attention. How do you see that?
It came out in the wake of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster in the U.S. and the world's attention was on issues like oil drilling and pollution disasters. The activities of oil companies were in focus and people were watching. They were looking for important additions to the conversation on oil. What started as a local issue of violence in the delta soon became a national and then an international issue. People want to listen to the views of others affected by this huge industry, besides the oil companies themselves. Oil has become such an important thing; that is the price we are paying for driving our cars. We are wiping out the environment; we are wiping out communities and creating circumstances where violence thrives. All this leads to lot of thinking and interest and that could account for the book's popularity.
There has been much interest in what's going on in the Niger Delta for quite some time now. There have been other books, particularly lot of non-fiction, documentaries etc. Oil on Water is perhaps the first novel to talk about the problems of the Niger delta. Have you redrawn the focus in any way?
The discussion and the focus, in my view, were to a large extent on the kidnapping and violence happening in the delta. My book takes the focus to the environmental catastrophe taking place there, perhaps the basis of the other disasters we are witnessing in the region. The reason for this lies in what I call the tragedy of Africa. Most of our narratives are driven by Western media that are looking for sound-bytes and sensationalism and a stereotypical manner of looking at Africa. They fail to humanise the African character. This has been at the heart of Achebe's criticism of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Even though Conrad's mission may have been laudable —he wanted to throw light on colonialism and the exploitation of local communities — Africans are portrayed as this huge horde of black people!
In Waiting for an Angel and Oil on Water, the protagonists are journalists. One gets an impression that journalism is unable to bring about real change. Is there an element of disillusionment there?
I am not suggesting that they can't change things. But I place these characters in the context of witness literature. They are there to witness and document; that is their primary role. As you know that Thomas Blom's documentary “Dirty oil from Shell” led to an enquiry in the Dutch Parliament on Shell's operations in Nigeria. So journalists by themselves cannot bring about change. Change needs to come from elsewhere. Governments, institutions responsible and political bodies should play their role in regulating and safeguarding natural wealth and local people. I think the Nigerian government has to get its act together on the ground as well. Oil, I think, has made us complacent and lazy. It is difficult to imagine that once we were, after all, a large agricultural nation.
