50 pages • 1 hour read
Oil on Water
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Themes
Searching for Order Amid Chaos
Content Warning: Both the novel and this guide reference alcohol and substance addiction, sexual assault, suicide, imperialism, and wartime violence.
Oil on Water explores what it means to be human in a turbulent world controlled by faceless oligarchy. In Chapter 7, Rufus and Zaq hire a guide who is physically imposing and armed, yet this ultimately does no good. In Chapter 20, when Salomon talks about how the kidnapping transpired, he reveals that Jamabo, for all his attitude and toughness, was killed coldly by a character who could easily overpower him. Many of the conflicts in the novel show how quickly chaotic and dangerous forces can reveal order and safety to be an illusion. Lives are often taken without a second thought, and villages are destroyed or abandoned. Military forces that are supposed to be protective of the people in the region are anything but, instead perpetrating violence, keeping citizens from traveling freely, and in some cases torturing prisoners. In much the same way, the militants say that they represent the people of Nigeria in their stand against the oil industry, but they too bring chaos to the islands, causing havoc with their illegal actions, kidnapping innocent people, and shooting anyone they believe to be against them. Every time the characters reach a place that seems safe, these forces of chaos arrive and displace and traumatize residents.
Thus, there is no sense of clearly delineated good and evil in the novel, and little sense that it would matter if there were. Habila accentuates the atmosphere of chaos by showing how a sense of ephemerality and purposelessness haunts even those events not directly tied to the work’s political conflict—e.g., the characters’ love lives. As Habila frames them, Zaq’s relationship with Anita and Rufus’s relationship with Mary seem predestined to fail not because of any lack of feeling but simply because of a general tendency toward entropy.
At the same time, the novel centers on a pair of journalists, whose job is essentially to make meaning, as Zaq explains: “Remember that the story is not the final goal […] The meaning of the story [is], and only a lucky few ever discover that” (5-6). Zaq’s comment is at once cynical and optimistic. On the one hand, Zaq notes the steep odds they are up against. At the same time, his remark suggests that journalists—and specifically these journalists, who understand that their role is not simply to relay facts but to interpret significance—are perhaps the only people who can find order in the seeming chaos. In this way, the book encourages action rather than passivity even amid widespread violence and disorder.
The Environmental and Social Effects of Neocolonialism
Oil on Water shows the devastation that is occurring in Nigeria for the sake of oil. This taking of land and resources functions as a new mode of colonialism, with Western business interests playing different local factions off of one another while the corporations gain money, influence, and power. As a result, the oil extraction process not only harms the local environment but also contributes to widespread violence and unrest.
In Chapter 9, Rufus has a conversation with oil executive James Floode. Floode is trying to convince Rufus to take his money, and his message to Zaq and expresses his frustration with Nigeria and its people: “Such great potential. You people could easily become the Japan of Africa, the USA of Africa, but the corruption is incredible” (103). This is typical of the colonial attitude toward indigenous peoples; despite not being from Nigeria, Floode feels that he knows what is best for the country. He takes it as a given that Nigeria would like to become a global superpower itself and consequently fails to appreciate the many reasons that Nigerians might not appreciate the money and jobs that the oil industry brings (at least to some, and at least temporarily). He also takes no responsibility for the corruption he cites, which is a direct result of the oil companies’ relationships with the Nigerian government. Instead, he implies that corruption is somehow intrinsic to the nation’s character—an idea undercut by the literal, physical pollution that follows in the wake of oil extraction.
Rufus responds to Floode by pointing out that Nigerians do understand the nuances of the situation—perhaps better than the oil men who come in to tell them what is good for their country. He cites the case of Junction, a town that was devastated by the oil industry, and points out there are many other stories like Junction:
I don’t blame them for wanting to get some benefit out of the pipelines that have brought nothing but suffering to their lives, leaking into the rivers and wells, killing the fish and poisoning the farmlands. And all they are told by the oil companies and the government is that the pipelines are there for their own good, that they hold great potential for their country, their future. These people endure the worst conditions of any oil-producing community on earth, the government knows it but doesn’t have the will to stop it, the oil companies know it, but because the government doesn’t care, they also don’t care. And you think the people are corrupt? No. They are just hungry, and tired (104).
The novel thus implies that Western powers have yet to truly come to terms with their colonial history and acknowledge the role their economic interests play and have played on the international stage. Two brief interactions with Floode constitute the only personal interactions any of the characters have with the oil companies, which are somehow both ubiquitous and invisible. These interactions go nowhere, as Floode seems to genuinely believe he is doing good for the region by attempting to enrich it, not seeing that the effect of his intervention is only bloodshed and ruination.
The Fallibility of Mentors
The early chapters of Oil on Water encourage readers to assume, as Rufus does, that Zaq is a sage archetype whose role is to mentor Rufus as an apprentice and lead him to greatness as a journalist. That Zaq has wisdom to offer is never really in doubt. In fact, it is Zaq who repeatedly articulates the novel’s stance on journalism’s role in discovering and articulating the truth. Although the murkiness of the narrative complicates the idea that truth is easily discernible, the idea that journalists have an important societal role to play survives intact. Over the course of the novel, however, readers and Rufus learn more about Zaq’s history and character, which ultimately lead to his undoing.
More specifically, Zaq’s methodology proves questionable, and he has little control over his urges (something Habila symbolically suggests through Zaq’s struggles with addiction). Rufus’s attachment to him as a father figure is implied to stem partly from Rufus’s troubled relationship to his own father, who became addicted to alcohol while resorting to crime to survive. Rufus’s father implores him to leave for the sake of his career, yet Rufus’s efforts to follow this advice lead him back into danger as Zaq takes Rufus down a path of risk-taking and adventure. Zaq thus emerges as both a double for Rufus’s father and as a potential savior, as he and Rufus hope to expose the tragedy of the region and thus remedy the socioeconomic conditions that led to Rufus’s father’s decline.
Whether they are successful remains ambiguous. In the end, Rufus loses his job just like Zaq did, potentially signaling that his own life will follow a similar downward trajectory. The fact that Zaq led Rufus on a wild goose chase for Isabel as unseen forces manipulated and endangered all the characters implies that even those mentors one relies on to give meaning and shape to existence are not making deliberative decisions with all of the knowledge in hand. At the same time, if others’ disdain for Zaq’s ambiguous moral compass never leads Rufus to abandon Zaq, Rufus also never internalizes his mentor’s methods. As the novel ends, Rufus has learned from Zaq, but Habila also hints that he has learned to be his own man.
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