by Lucy S.
This is a
short, informal paper I wrote for a transformative class I was fortunate enough
to be a part of during the fall 2012 semester. The class focused on literatures
of resistance from around the world in our time. Our last reading was the 2011
novel Oil on Water by the Nigerian
author, Helon Habila. The protagonist Rufus,
a young reporter, accompanies his sort-of-mentor, Zaq, a legendary reporter descending into alcoholism, cynicism, and physical illness, on a search into
the delta for the kidnapped wife of a British oil executive. I include it here
because it connects to my ongoing effort to explore not only the contradictions and
challenges of art, but the ways in which care-labor manifests.
I continue
to think about the goal that Zaq names early on in this novel with regard to
his and Rufus’s quest – not the kidnapped British woman or the leader of the
militants, but “a greater meaning,” that is, “the meaning of the story” (5) The
evocative power of this imperative lies in its not being returned to and
spelled out in didactic fashion later as Rufus’s epiphany. But I am nonetheless drawn to this question of
the “greater meaning.”
Seriously
raising the question is itself (to invoke Edwidge Danticat) “creating
dangerously.” As an artist, one may be discredited if overtly seeking a meaning
to the story seems too reductive, utilitarian, and moralizing. Furthermore, the
meaning of this story inherently includes the oil companies and their powerful
government allies as entities in this narrative, as well as others living in
Habila’s Nigeria, some carrying out inevitably imperfect forms of resistance
amidst corrupted present realities. Habila’s
challenge is to tell some of this story without constructing simplistic
‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ or, on the other hand, revealing the flaws of all characters in such
a way that too many readers conclude that nothing can be done and that
everyone’s resistance is either wrong or futile.
There is
additionally a legacy of mortal danger for Nigerians confronting the oil
companies’ devastation. Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight others were executed in 1995
after years of actively confronting Shell and the Nigerian government for the
havoc they have wreaked on some of the rural Nigerians, particularly on the
more marginalized Indigenous groups.
In
a, Habila's Library of Congress talk highlighting him and his work (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8eHI2NmWzA),
he noted that these upheavals in people’s ways of life have happened quickly,
in the course of one lifetime. The passage that he chooses to read at his
presentation is the story that Chief Ibiram tells Zaq in answer to the
question, “Are you happy here?” (42-43)
The chief
tells a story of living in a “close-knit” village, meeting their needs easily
enough by fishing, hunting, and farming. He calls it “paradise.” But Western oil companies have already
intruded into other villages, tempting the people with the money that buys the entertaining
gadgets of what many of us are used to thinking of as modern life. The oil
companies are implicitly compared to the devil (in Christian terms, the snake
in Eden tempting the inhabitants of paradise to eat the fruit of the knowledge
of good and evil), and what they offer is thus that fruit. But in this incarnation of the story, these
particular villagers are forced to partake of this knowledge and are cast out
of paradise whether they do or do not succumb to the temptation of selling out
their ancestral lands because of a manufactured desire for what cannot make
them happy. They are invaded, and their attempt to defend themselves becomes
the pretext used by the oil companies and their corrupted government allies to
fully invade and occupy the land. That particular ecosystem – the humans, other
animals, water, soil, trees, and everything ‘knit’ into that place – is an Eve raped
by the invaders. What was close-knit is ripped apart in ways that cannot be
re-knit. This is one version of what has been happening for so long now – a
microcosm of shockingly rapid devastation.
The corporate
colonizers want what they want, period, and are determined to take it. Perhaps
the final violation is to insist that those whom they dominate either learn to
‘like it’ (pretend in some sense to be “happy”) or else become the ostracized,
tainted criminals – somewhat akin to the Adivasi women in a part of India whom Arundhati
Roy says are raped by the policemen and then themselves imprisoned while the
policemen walk around free. The question is how to respond to this infiltration
of Nigeria, begun by Britain and continued by the multinational oil companies
and their American / European governmental allies (as well as the Nigerian
government, corrupted into selling out the land and people of Nigeria for oil
money). The chief’s story makes it clear that this is not something done once;
it is specific and repeated, village by village, and it has yet to be done to
still more ecosystems.
Meanwhile,
the chief and those ten families are on the run, trying to find a safe place in
which they might live and perhaps tell the story of their village’s violation
without retaliation by the rapists. How
do people keep themselves and their environment healthy enough to survive and,
at the same time, resist? And how should the story of this continual mass rape
and possession of Nigeria by the oil corporations be told in order to make it
stop?
Applying
the term ‘rape’ to what has been done to land and cultures by colonizers is, of
course, commonplace now. This connects to the story Zaq tells five years
earlier about the journalist who must come up with an attention-grabbing
headline for the already written story of the escaped lunatic who has raped the
washer-women (20-23). The story, he says, has already been written; only the
headline is now needed. That headline, says Zaq, must be “witty, truthful,
intriguing, compelling and with some literary appeal.” In the largest sense, the ‘story’ of
colonization, industrialization, corporate devastation of people and the earth with
government assistance has already been written, and the writer attempting to
tell a part of it could be said to be writing a ‘headline’ to draw readers in. The
writer’s occupation depends on getting enough people to pay for the story. Achieving the multiple aims of getting the
story out to enough people (grabbing their attention), making it artful, and
eliciting not only an aesthetic response but an ethical one from readers – this
is a continual dilemma for the writer.
In his
essay, “Art as Technique,” Viktor Shklovsky has written that “art exists that
one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to
make the stone stony.” How can Habila tell this story of contemporary
devastation of a former British colony and do this? The story itself is a
repeated one in the largest sense. And how does any writer engage year after
year with issues which encompass real people’s lives and reconcile being ‘glad’
to find and write a good ‘story’ about something serious and horrible? Can the
writer make rape (of a person or a culture and land) freshly recognized and
felt as rape by her/himself as well as her/his readers, year after year, or
must novelty of representation even remain a goal? Must we in some sense be
entertained by stories of atrocities in order to take an interest in them? I
believe that is what Habila interrogates by writing that memory of Rufus’s into
his story.
There is,
I believe a weary, often gloomy tone in Oil
on Water, which surely comes from the pain of the continuing pollution and
damage to humans in Nigeria, but perhaps also comes from being tired of having
to represent atrocities in ever more novel ways for a reading audience. And it
is not only the atrocities which are supposed to be represented freshly, but
also the possible ways to resist. Readers may feel that they ‘know that one’
and thus find every possible response formulaic. But ‘making it new’ (as
fascist Ezra Pound commanded) cannot forever be the only point, and that goal
itself has become old.
It is
fitting, then, that as Habila’s story nears its conclusion, the militants
continue on with their flawed but sometimes effective strategies; Zaq has died
after helping to create another journalist like himself who will continue to
get the stories out; Rufus’s sister Boma decides to stay with the Indigenous
worshippers in a traditional rural rather than urban life; and Rufus himself
sets off to write the story, on his way back to the city as he begins his
“descent” (239). Boma will heal by
returning to a way of life lost, in her case, before she was even born, but
continually fought for and reconstructed, as the worshippers reconstructed the
broken sculptures after the government soldiers moved on. Rufus will go back
down to his city to do his work.
Novelty
for its own sake is not what is needed, but a tenacious determination to keep
doing what is needed to heal and resist. The meaning of the story may be to
keep creating the story – to keep moving, doing what others, too, have been
doing for a long time
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