Postcolonial Nature? Or, “If Oil Could Speak, What Would it Say?”

Among Ed Kashi’s (2008) arresting photographs documenting the ravaging effects of oil extraction in the Niger Delta are several images of women laying out little white mounds of tapioca to bake near menacing tongues of smoky flame thrusting out of oil pipes. These gas flares are not an aberration but a standard industrial practice. When petroleum is tapped, natural gas is often dissolved in it or layered above it. For the oil corporations, it is often cheaper and more convenient to simply burn off this gas than to collect and sell it. Thus even the extraction of oil contributes massive amounts of CO₂ to the atmosphere well before refined fossil fuel residue spews out of vehicle exhaust pipes. Furthermore, this byproduct of oil drilling would be entirely wasted if it were not for the ad hoc transformation of the flares into communal kitchens by the poor.