ABSTRACT
Helon Habila’s 2010 novel Oil on Water indicts the ecological devastation and human suffering visited on Nigeria’s delta region. Through his journey upriver, the novel’s protagonist-narrator, Rufus, is initiated into a condition of structural helplessness, of being trapped and immobilized, by three contending but mutually enabling forces (international petroleum corporations, national elites, and bands of armed militants), each pursuing wealth via direct and/or indirect violence. Rufus’s increasing emotional solidarity with bullied and brutalized local communities becomes a means of initiating readers, including those who benefit daily from faraway corporate predations, into moral awareness of the price that many pay so that a few may enjoy a lot. But the journey’s unexpected movement from reasons for despair to sources of hope reshapes the emotions elicited, in Rufus and thus in the reader. This in turn raises probing questions about what sort of hope in a just and sustainable future literary education of the emotions might rationally sustain.
