The City in Crisis: Terrorism and Kidnapping in Helon Habila’s Oil on Water

Abstract

The spate of terrorism and kidnapping has become a global concern in the twenty-first century. These social vices and their corollaries have dramatically increased as preferred tactics of militants. This happens anytime and anywhere, and no community, city, or country is immune from these threatening phenomena. This paper seeks to use Helon Habila’s novel Oil on Water to delineate the perilous issue of terrorism and kidnapping apparent in the oil-producing Niger-Delta region—and Nigeria by extension—where these apprehensions have become a misnomer. Consequently, Habila’s Oil on Water is a cultural alternative on the role of literature to provide an imaginative opening in addressing hostage taking and disquiet in the Nigerian social space. The novel of study illustrates the air of truth through which a literary work becomes a speaking entity in the actual world. The writer suggests that the rising rate of poverty, hunger, corruption, underdevelopment, environmental despoliation, violence, and marginalization of dispossessed people have brought about the surge of kidnapping in Nigeria. Thus, terrorism and kidnapping constitute a crisis that demands urgent political, personal, legislative, and sustainable actions. The paper utilizes New Historicism as a theoretical site to appraise the concerns under study.