50 pages • 1 hour read
Helon HabilaOil on Water
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Oil
Oil serves as not only a physical substance that drives the plot of Oil on Water but also as a motif that illustrates The Environmental and Social Effects of Neocolonialism. Oil spreads, running in rivulets and expanding into a slick. It pollutes, corrodes, or corrupts many of the things that it touches. When it gets into a water supply, it makes that water unusable and dangerous. As the oil industry spreads throughout the Niger Delta, it does much the same thing to the land and its peoples. Their homes are abandoned and then bought up by the oil companies. It is no wonder that in Chapter 5, when the major is lecturing his prisoners, he blames oil:
What, you can’t stand the smell of oil? Isn’t it what you fight for, kill for? Go on, enjoy. By the time I’m through with you, you’ll hate the smell of it, you won’t take money that comes from oil, you won’t get in a car because it runs on petrol. You’ll hate the very name petrol (61).
The oil is both the object of the men’s desire and the mode of their punishment, which mirrors its status in the larger 
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