by Helen Kapstein
What follows is an annotated bibliography, of the kind you were asked to write in college for a term paper. Here, it’s a cheat sheet to the best, most compelling, strangest examples of what I call “petroforms,” in my new book by that title. Petroforms are aesthetic petroleum products. They are art forms that can only exist because they have been profoundly shaped by their efforts to grapple with the oil industry. Like plastics, lubricants, solvents, and pharmaceuticals, they are, in a way, by-products of crude oil. At the same time, and sometimes paradoxically, they exist in tension with oil, challenging its authority, its omnipresence, and its impact. This highly subjective list draws from Petroforms’ bibliography, concentrating on primary sources, not petrocriticism, with a few new items added in.
What to read
Adetunji, Lydia. Fixer. Nick Hern Books, 2011.
Lydia Adetunji’s play captures the absurdities of the oil industry as we see various stakeholders jockeying to benefit from a militant attack on a pipeline. I imagine that the fact that we never see the pipeline (the only set is a row of airplane seats) is a powerful absence, speaking to oil’s ability to structure relationships even off-stage.
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Americanah. Anchor Books, 2013.
Adichie’s novel needs little introduction but is rarely read as a book about oil. It’s a great example of the fundamentally constituent nature of petroleum for our modernity. Once you start looking for it, it’s everywhere—in cocktail party chitchat and in the cars, cell phones, and traffic jams. In Petroforms, I read Americanah as a particular kind of romance novel whose structure is shaped by its characters’ movement through the infrastructures of petromodernity.
Atta, Sefi. “A Union on Independence Day.” Eclectica Magazine. Oct./Nov. 2003. Web. 13 July 2015. https://www.eclectica.org/v7n4/atta.html.
This short story captures the point at which ecocriticism meets postcolonial theory and spawns petrocriticism: “There are no fish in our rivers, no bush rats left in our forest. We don’t use natural gas in our homes and yet we have gas flares in our backyards. We can’t find kerosene to buy and we have pipelines full of the products running through our land.”
Eghagha, Hope. The Oily Marriage. Malthouse Press, 2018.
Everything in the world of this play revolves around “the slick product” that is oil. Eghagha shrinks the scope of the “romance between unanswerable corporations and unspeakable regimes” (Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor) down to the most intimate levels of family, marriage, and sex—to the extent that it’s gross and icky (and sticky); that’s on purpose.
Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. U of Chicago P, 2016 and The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. U of Chicago P, 2022.
Ghosh’s recent works of public intellectualism are not themselves examples of petroforms, but he is the father of petrocriticism, having coined the term petrofiction. Also, having turned his attention to climate change, he offers explainers on how our fossil fuel-fueled Anthropocene exists on a continuation with colonial resource extraction.
Habila, Helon. Oil on Water. W. W. Norton: 2010.
It’s interesting to ponder why there are so few overt petronovels out of Nigeria, even though there is plenty of other petro content. Oil on Water is the exception to the rule and appears on energy humanities syllabi with great frequency as a result. I don’t actually spendmuch time discussing the book, but Sule Emmanuel Egya makes an excellent case for how the novel “performs” petrofiction. Egya, incidentally, was one of the scholars who helpfully corresponded with me about how petrofiction gets taught in Nigeria.
Okorafor, Nnedi. Kabu Kabu. United States, Prime Books, 2013.
Okorafor is a big deal in what she calls Africanfuturism. Oil infuses a number of the short, speculative stories in Kabu Kabu, including “Moom” which is an excellent example of petroform. First, its subject matter is oil: a swordfish attacks an underwater oil pipe which makes “the world bleed black ooze that left poison rainbows on the water’s surface.” Second, the third person limited narrative, through which we access the swordfish’s experience, sabotages the official narrative given at the end in the form of a brief news item. And thirdly, Okorafor repurposes “Moom” in her novel Lagoon, morphing its form from story to prologue.
Saro-Wiwa, Ken. Basi and Company: A Modern African Folktale. Saros International, 1987 and A Forest of Flowers. Longman, 1997.
Ken Saro-Wiwa’s influence and his untimely death remain at the core of Nigerian petropolitics. In addition to being an activist, he was a prolific author, best known for his Biafran War novel Sozaboy, but I recommend Basi and Company (the textual version of his television sitcom) and A Forest of Flowers (a short story collection) if you can find them. Each excoriates (to use Saro-Wiwa’s term) Nigerian society and its corruption in its own way.
Wainaina, Binyavanga. “How to Write about Africa.” Granta 92 (2 May 2019): 92–95.
Speaking of excoriating, Wainaina’s Granta essay is laceratingly funny as it slices and dices Western stereotypes.
What to watch
Black November. Dir. Jeta Amata. Wells & Jeta Entertainment. 2012. Film.
You’ll love to hate this movie, which frantically switches gears between fervent political commentary, hostage crisis suspense, and action adventure. Variously called an issue or message thriller, it perfectly encapsulates what I call petrocinema—feature films that blur into documentaries.
Blood & Oil (Oloibiri). Dir. Curtis Graham. Netflix. 2015. Film.
Look for the Adaka Boro t-shirt the character Gunpowder wears, aligning him with a tradition of militant action. SPOILER ALERT: he dies wearing it, as a jerry can of oil spills over him.
Daughters of the Niger Delta. Dir. Ilse Van Lamoen. Abuja, Nigeria: Media Information Narrative Development (MIND); Nijmegen, the Netherlands: FLL. 2012. Film.
A documentary made by Niger Delta women about Niger Delta women, this film presents viewers with the ordinary, everyday, gendered horrors of life in an oil zone.
Delta Boys. Dir. Andrew Berends. Sundance. 2012. Film.
Delta Boys might seem like the flipside of gendered experience in the Delta, with its hypermasculine, strutting, sadistic militant menfolk, but they also form a sort of care economy for each other—a group of Lost Boys led by their own Peter Pan, vigilante Ateke Tom. I discuss both Daughters and Delta Boys in the petrohorror chapter, arguing that, due to their subject matter, oil documentaries can’t resist horror tropes.
Niger Delta: A Documentary. Zina Saro-Wiwa. 2015. Film. https://vimeo.com/125399876?fl=pl&fe=sh
This very short, looping art documentary and the longer Karikpo Pipeline, both by Zina Saro-Wiwa, Ken’s daughter, create a palimpsest of multiple truths about the Niger Delta, layering history, beauty, nature, and tranquility over and around pipelines and plastic chairs.
“Shell: We are Sorry.” The Yes Men. Youtube.
Form-busting at its best. The Yes Men deliver a straight-faced apology “for the oil and gas spills that have made your rivers toxic…for the gas flares that stink up your villages…for the fact that you cannot eat your fish. That you cannot grow on your land, and that you cannot drink your water,” ostensibly on behalf of the Shell corporation, turning press conference into parodic public protest.
Water No Get Enemy: Counter-Cartographies of Diaspora. Dir. Remi Kuforiji. Disembodied Territories. 2023. https://disembodiedterritories.com/Water-No-Get-Enemy-Counter-Cartographies-of-Diaspora.
“Spatial practitioner” Kuforiji challenges our received ideas of film, performance, and the masquerade tradition.
What to look at
Douglas Camp, Sokari. https://sokari.co.uk/
Sculptor Douglas Camp works with oil barrels and other materials to actively deconstruct the forms that contain and organize oil neatly into a transportable commodity and therefore the ontology of oil itself as a known thing.
Gordon, Glenna. Diagram of the Heart. Red Hook Editions, 2016.
Not your run-of-the-mill coffee table photo book, Diagram of the Heart offers glimpses of the domestic (in every sense) industry of Northern Nigerian women writing romance novels.
EJAM. https://ejam.squarespace.com/oilfrontiers/4ynxs5bwqsw2bkhc8s0lk7fxyjnx0j
The Environmental Justice Art Museum includes the virtual gallery “Oil Frontiers,” with works by Douglas Camp and Zina Saro-Wiwa as well as art by fellow Nigerians George Osodi and Victor Ehikhamenor.
Shell. https://www.shell.com/
As I write in Petroforms, Shell’s main website and its Nigerian counterpart are exercises in digital shell games, with links, pdfs, and other informational pages constantly appearing, disappearing, and being shuffled around. My current favorite section is a “Cautionary Note” which can (for the time being) be found under Sustainability/Safety. It warns us that everything other than historical fact should be considered a “forward-looking statement” and that circumstances “could cause actual results, performance or events to differ materially” from those future aspirations. Listing terms and phrases such as
“aim”; “ambition”; ‘‘anticipate’’; “aspire”, “aspiration”, ‘‘believe’’; “commit”; “commitment”; ‘‘could’’; “desire”; ‘‘estimate’’; ‘‘expect’’; ‘‘goals’’; ‘‘intend’’; ‘‘may’’; “milestones”; ‘‘objectives’’; ‘‘outlook’’; ‘‘plan’’; ‘‘probably’’; ‘‘project’’; ‘‘risks’’; “schedule”; ‘‘seek’’; ‘‘should’’; ‘‘target’’; “vision”; ‘‘will’’; [and] “would”
as exculpatory essentially evacuates its content of real meaning, leaving just a hollow shell behind. I encourage you to explore for yourself.