Stains of Oil in Helon Habila’s Oil on Water

This paper seeks to comprehend how environmental concerns and representations of the oil's presence are captured in literary and other cultural forms, and how these representations facilitate an understanding of the social world of the Delta in relation to oil production. Habila uses militancy and kidnapping as a defining context for understanding the oil encounter. Again, the issue of oil control is emphasised in this novel, but the author makes an intriguing point about how the militants gain access to the oil wealth using the hostages they have taken. In this novel, an amateur journalist, Rufus, is tasked with investigating and writing the story of the kidnapped wife of an oil company expatriate official. This raises the difficult question of authorship. He becomes embroiled in the conflict. In order to tell their story, Rufus is compelled to experience and witness firsthand what it means and how it feels to exist in the oil scrublands of the Niger Delta. Habila adopts a journalistic perspective to project a semblance of objectivity, but in doing so, he also seeks to authenticate what is already known through participatory engagement. Consequently, he emphasises experience and participation as the criterion and condition for negotiating meaning, which can only be realised by observing and immersing oneself in the quotidian space of the Delta (5). Habila appears to urge the reader to enter this troubled space and relive the Niger Delta's existence through their imagination.