Analysis Of Oil On Water By Helon Habila

Journalistic or even “nonfictional novels” have had their impacts on the readers for a while. Reading Helon Habila 's novel „Oil on Water“ as a novel of that genre leads unavoidable to rebuilding the view of the oil wars since the chosen set of the Niger Delta also exists in reality. Yet it is the point of view Habila provides through her two journalist characters Rufus and Zaq -not otherwise named- which induces the deeper reading into the journalist fiction. As stated by Hollowell, the nonfictional novel is based on three ingredients. He claims the first to be the timelessness of the theme, the second the unfamiliarity of the setting and the third the (…) cast of characters that would allow [the author] to tell the story from a variety of points of view. Considering this, I claim that Helon Habila uses fiction to bring light to the environmental and human rights abuses and to draw attention to the conflict between idealism and disillusionment currently occurring to the people in the Niger Delta in the real life. To prove this point I will provide evidence of the three ingredients stated by Hollowell which are clearly exhibited throughout the storyline of “Oil on Water”; the timelessness of the oil wars in the Niger Delta gets introduced by LeMenager as she indicates examples of documented oil exploration, showing that “the problem isn 't that we 're running out of oil, but that we 're not” by works of photographer Subhankar Banerjee as well as the nonfiction writer