Navigating the Land of the Dead in Helon Habila’s Oil on Water

The only story from Prison Stories excised from the Waiting for an Angel revision was “The Iron Gate,” which describes the response to a multi-national oil company’s “advertisement for ten truck drivers.” Showing up outside “the company’s high walls with barbed wire and broken bottles on top, and the huge iron gate at the front,” […]

The only story from Prison Stories excised from the Waiting for an Angel revision was “The Iron Gate,” which describes the response to a multi-national oil company’s “advertisement for ten truck drivers.” Showing up outside “the company’s high walls with barbed wire and broken bottles on top, and the huge iron gate at the front,” hundreds of men “like a mighty wave breaking on the shore […] throw themselves at the yawning, beckoning space, moaning with a million unnamed longings, only to be forced back again by the gate closing.” The story is one of Habila’s earliest critiques of the destructive lure of “paradise” offered by multi-national oil companies in Nigeria. Ten years later, he returns to the topic in his third novel, Oil on Water (Penguin and Norton, 2010), set in Port Harcourt and the surrounding delta region.

Like Lomba in Waiting for an Angel, Rufus, the protagonist of Oil on Water, is a rookie journalist, employed at the Port Harcourt newspaper The Reporter. When Rufus volunteers to accompany a contingent of reporters on a risky meeting with militants who have kidnapped the British wife of a foreign petroleum engineer, he hopes to learn the job by shadowing the legendary journalist Zaq. But the alcoholic Zaq’s star has long fallen, and what was supposed to be a simple day trip to confirm that the woman is still alive becomes a frightening ordeal when the reporters are caught in a military ambush. Despite the danger, Rufus joins Zaq to wander the creeks in a quest for a story he hopes will kick-start his career and revive Zaq’s reputation.

Rufus narrates the page-turning story by interspersing the phantasmic chronicle of their journey through the swamps with flashbacks that fill in background. His description of their wanderings on the water reminds me of myths of the underworld and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s haunting poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” The two journalists and their guides, a fisherman and his young son, drift “almost aimlessly on the opaque misty water,” “soundless as a ghost ship.” When they venture on to land, they happen upon “eerie field”s where “pipelines sprout […] from the evil-smelling, oil-fecund earth,” through abandoned villages, where they find a cage full of dead chickens “the maggots trafficking beneath the feathers,” and wells poisoned with the smell of something “dead and decomposing […] its stench mixed with that unmistakable smell of oil.” The water they travel is also is full of death, “a dead fowl, a bloated dog belly-up with black birds perching on it, their expressionless eyes blinking rapidly, their sharp beaks savagely cutting into the soft decaying flesh.” One of the most haunting images is Rufus’s description of “a human arm severed at the elbow bobbing away from us, its fingers opening and closing, beckoning. In my dreams I still see that lone arm, floating away, sometimes with its middle finger extended derisively before disappearing into the dark mist.”

This delta was not always the mythic land of the dead. Chief Ibiram, brother of their guide, describes the pollution of the land as a fall from Eden. Before the coming of the oil companies, “they lived in paradise,” as “custodians of the land.” But when the oil-representatives and politicians from Port Harcourt came courting with the “whispering, winking, hissing” snake of the oil flares, TVs and video players and tales of sending their children abroad for education, villagers began to sell their land. Once the “cars had broken down, and the cheap televisions and DVD players were all gone,” and the money “thrown away in Port Harcourt barrooms, or on second wives and funeral parties,” the people are left with polluted rivers “useless for fishing” and land that “grew only gas flares and pipelines.” Those who do not sell their land face unjust arrests and seizure of the property. Ordinary people are caught between militant rebels and an abusive military. Soldiers in speedboats bearing the names Mami Wata I and Mami Wata II shoot up the old fisherman’s canoe and take them to a half-mad, Major who drenches his prisoners with corrosive oil.

While Habila’s mythic allusions and vivid descriptions are powerful, they tend to make his locations feel vague. He also occasionally romanticizes the delta people. The mysterious white-robed community of worshippers on Irikefe Island who maintain a sculpture garden and whose healing rituals are tied to the rhythmic rising and falling of the sun, for example, reminded me, perhaps, a little bit too much of an idealized Bollywood ashram. But then again the dignified treatment of the group was also a welcome relief from the stereotypical treatment of indigenous religions by Nollywood movies. There are no witches here, just a community of healers who maintain a fragile balance between the militants and soldiers.

While Habila’s locations do not always feel very precise, his characters, as they almost always are in his novels, are strong, complex and memorable. There is Rufus’s sister Boma, who grew up hunting crabs and is disfigured in a fire when their father’s black-market petrol business explodes; the gnomish fisherman Tamuno who dreams of a better life for his young son Michael; the dignified Chief Ibiram who leads the small community of itinerants; and Salomon, the university educated driver who is tempted into crime after betrayal by his fiancée. Even the kidnapped white woman, while a peripheral character, is given a chance to tell her own story.  And although the villains can be brutal, they too are given back stories that humanize them. The militant “Professor,” though he orders murders without flinching, speaks passionately about “how we are hounded daily in our land,” and the mad Major who tortures his prisoners lives with the memory of a heart-wrenching family tragedy. Even the caddish British petroleum engineer, representative of multi-national exploitation, is emotionally torn.

Overall, I am struck by how Habila’s novel about the devastation of the “oil curse” on the delta region gives readers outside the region the ability to imagine the horror the people have suffered. As I read, I realized that though I knew of the destruction in the delta, had read the reports and remembered the flares that lit up the night when we lived in Port Harcourt in the late 1980s, I had not paid enough attention. It had not entered my imagination in the same way that the Jos crisis had. Habila’s exquisite prose reminds me how, preoccupied with our own griefs, we so often focus on the tragedies we know and forget the rest. At the 2001 ANA convention, I felt keenly the lack of attention to what was happening in Jos yet I did not pay enough attention to the devastation of the communities on whose oil the rest of the nation feeds. Habila, who in Measuring Time (Hamish Hamilton, Penguin, Norton and Cassava Republic, 2007) has touched on sectarian crisis in the north and in Oil on Water describes the devastation of the delta region, demonstrates the ability to imagine both tragedies. If  the rest of us could do the same, perhaps we could come together to address the root cause of both, rather than letting our afflictions tear us apart.

The Nigerian edition of Oil on Water will be published by Parresia Press in October.