Whatever our misgivings, oil has been driving the world for well over a century. Its multiple derivatives serve our consumption habits and so oil pervades all human relations. For as long as we have been wedded to petroleum and its byproducts, writers have been trying to fictionalise our predicament, through a genre formally identified – back in 1992, by Amitav Ghosh – as “petrofiction”.
Since oil is transnational, pipelines and tankers taking it across the globe, so too is petrofiction. Loaded perforce with large themes, it is also coloured by a distinctive image-repertoire. Petrofiction’s primal scene is “the gusher”: that calamitous moment in the early days of explorative drilling when crude would simply erupt from its high-pressure confinement. “The inside of the Earth seemed to burst out through that hole; a roaring and rushing, as Niagara, and a black column shot up into the air...”, reads a line from the first big petro-novel, Oil! (1927) by Upton Sinclair, a writer who was tirelessly concerned with exposing the material basis of society.
Gushers have the forbidding, mephitic appearance of hell unleashed, yet really they represent only the desired outcome of another foundational petrofiction scene: the community gathering, where prospective drillers and local landowners meet to strike a deal on who will be entitled to what, whenever oil has been proven in the territory.
Ghosh originally proposed his concept of petrofiction in a review for The New Republic of the Jordanian Abdul-Rahman Mounif’s quintet of novels Cities of Salt. The first of these focuses on the “Livingstonian” aspect of what Ghosh called the “oil encounter” between the US and the Middle East in the 1930s. A Bedouin community watches perplexedly while American geologists come prospecting around their oasis in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province. Soon, “hellish machines” are rolling in to drill, inflicting “butchery” on the locality. (The trees themselves “cried for help, wailed, panicked, called out in helpless pain.”) The Bedouins petition the emir, protesting that no oil revenues could compensate for the peace they knew “before those devils came along”. But the emir is in league with those very devils.
This colonial larceny – where Big Oil invades a place to loot raw materials and spirit them away overseas, the local powers-that-be acting as its armed guarantor – leads us to the case of Nigeria, where Shell struck oil in 1956, four years before independence. Drilling would cause grievous contamination to the ecology of the Niger Delta, spurring the famous resistance of writer-activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who mobilised marches of 300,000 Ogoni people in January 1993 and paid with his life by execution in 1995.
Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2010) may be Nigeria’s finest petro-novel, haunted by Saro-Wiwa’s courageous stand and built around a Conradian river trek by two journalists into the Delta, through “claustrophobic mangroves” and “ominous swamps,” in search of the wife of an oil executive kidnapped by militants. They become witnesses to one desecrated village after another; and we hear the tale of village chief Malabo, visited incessantly by oilmen offering deals, like snakes that “kept on hissing.” What Malabo realised too late was that his visitors would not be taking no for an answer.
“They all arrive here believing they have the power to take from us or give to us whatever will satisfy their endless wants.” So insists a holy fool named Konga in Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were (2021), set in an imaginary oil-laden African village, Kosowa, where insurgency unexpectedly catches fire. Briefcase-toting men from a company called Pexton have been chauffeured into the village square to hear complaints about the “poison” that has been in the air, water and food ever since “the day Pexton came drilling.” Offering only smiles and platitudes in return, the oilmen are heading back to the car when Konga emerges with their key and tells them they are going nowhere. This mutinous spirit will pass into a village girl named Thula, who commits herself to political activism so future generations might not suffer as Kosowa has for the sake of oil.
Petrofiction’s vision of the prospects for our world will probably grow darker yet, amid Anthropocene nightmares of humanity’s wants finally making the Earth uninhabitable. The speculative form of “cli-fi” has potential for prophecy here. My petro-novel The Black Eden is a more familiar realist pageant of recent history: the first North Sea oil boom, when Texan wildcatters descended on Aberdeen, the lure of “black gold” turning heads and overturning relations. But the novel’s themes – political skulduggery, threats to life and ecology, the energy needs of nations and their dreams of national sovereignty – are themes for both today and tomorrow. Petro-novels are fiction for our times and we should expect to see more of them.
• The Black Eden by Richard T Kelly is published by Faber & Faber (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
