From Niger Delta to NATO: Literature as Geopolitical Witness in Nigerian Oil Narratives in Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2010)

Tortivie Sorbo Abasi

doi:10.56201/ijelcs.vol.11.no7.2026.pg188.196

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From Niger Delta to NATO: Literature as Geopolitical Witness in Nigerian Oil Narratives in Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2010)

Tortivie Sorbo Abasi

Abstract

Nigerian oil usually appears in public debate as barrels, revenue and ransom demands. Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2010) asks what those figures leave out. This paper argues that the novel works as geopolitical witness, a literary record of the human cost of the global oil system, made at the point where that system is hardest to see and set against the way distant institutions describe the same oil. Three bodies of thought carry the argument. Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence explains why pollution, displacement and delayed death resist reporting. Petrocriticism, drawn from Amitav Ghosh’s essay on petrofiction and Stephanie LeMenager’s Living Oil, explains how oil shapes feeling, habit and narrative form. Michael Klare’s work on resource wars explains why states treat oil supply as a matter of security. The link to NATO is the paper’s own claim. The alliance’s declarations at Riga in 2006 and Lisbon in 2010 treat the disruption of energy flows as a risk to its members, and they do not address the people who live where the energy is produced. Read against that gap, Habila’s journalist narrator, his kidnapped Englishwoman, his army major, his militant Professor and his dispossessed villagers sit at different points on one chain of value. The paper concludes that the novel makes a slow and scattered harm legible without turning it into spectacle, and that it also shows how easily witness becomes one more commodity in the oil economy.

Keywords

Helon Habila; Niger Delta; slow violence; petrofiction; resource wars; NATO; witness

References

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From Niger Delta to NATO: Literature as Geopolitical Witness in Nigerian Oil Narratives in Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2010)

Abstract

Keywords

References

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