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.
Chapters 10-12
Chapter 10 Summary
When Rufus returns to Irikefe, Zaq is lying on a mat under an acacia tree, recovering at the shrine but still cold and weak. Rufus brings two bottles of Johnnie Walker, one of which he gives to Zaq, who starts drinking it greedily. The priest is happy to see Rufus and hopes that he will take Zaq back to the city with him. He tells them “Nurse Gloria” will be attending to him once she returns from her trip to Port Harcourt, where she is buying more medicine. Rufus and Zaq go to the hut they will be sharing for their stay overnight and discuss the religion of the people at the shrine, which they are unsure about.
Rufus tells Zaq about his visit to the editor of the Star, the paper where Zaq works. Beke Johnson, the editor, knew Zaq from the time they were rookie reporters together. He told Rufus all about how Zaq has fallen from grace. Zaq had been one of the best and was assigned to the news desk with Beke, but he wanted to do human-interest stories and feature stories about everyday happenings instead of just fact-based news. One day, he quit and went to Bar Beach, where he befriended a number of sex workers. He interviewed them and began to tell their stories, especially that of a young woman named Anita, whom he quickly fell for: “Zaq saw the story in that when the rest of us only saw prostitutes selling sex” (119). These stories made him a star overnight, propelling his career skyward:
People cried as they read the intimate stories of these girls. The politicians were compelled to act. Governors’ wives started a scholarship scheme to send the girls back to school, they called it “A Better Life For Fallen Women.” Speeches were given on TV, international organizations invited Zaq to talk about his experience of living with the prostitutes in order to write about them (121).
After this, Zaq got political and eventually “stopped being the man behind the news and became the news” (122). Anita reentered his life, and the two became public figures. Eventually, while Zap was traveling, the authorities discovered cocaine in Zaq’s bag. After a month-long prison term in Nigeria, he was set free and disappeared from Lagos. His political career and his reputation had been irrevocably damaged, and Beke hired him to work at his paper. He told Rufus to let Zaq know that if he doesn’t come back tomorrow, there will be no further pay.
Chapter 11 Summary
Zaq falls asleep while Rufus talks, so Rufus climbs up the nearby hill to read. He ends up watching the religious order of the shrine go to the water instead; they are all in white robes and perform a ritual. Rufus is startled by Gloria coming up behind him. She explains that the shrine-goers “believe in the healing powers of the sea” (126). She and Rufus begin to talk and flirt, finding out a bit about one another. Gloria is not a worshipper, having only been at the shrine a few months. They go to have dinner together with the people of the shrine, and Rufus comes to understand that the water is important to these people because of the history of the area:
[T]he blood of the dead ran in the rivers, and the water was so saturated with blood that the fishes died, and the dead bodies of warriors floated for miles on the river […] the land needed to be cleansed of blood, and pollution (128).
The worshippers go to the river each day as a promise never to create such an abomination again.
A little later, Gloria checks on Zaq. She disapproves of his drunkenness, and Rufus apologizes for his part in getting Zaq inebriated. After Gloria leaves, Zaq teases Rufus, telling him that she obviously likes him. Rufus thinks about his last serious girlfriend, Mary, and how it didn’t work out because he couldn’t see spending the rest of his life with her. He tells Zaq none of this. The next morning, Zaq is a new man, waking Rufus up early and asking him if he’s ready to move on. Zaq is going to Lagos to start his own paper; he says, “I have plans. I can get backers. Come with me to Lagos and we’ll start a new paper, a real paper” (133). Rufus thinks about Boma and his job and is unsure whether the risk is worth it. Zaq finally admits to Rufus that he now remembers when they met before, but he reveals that he never actually made the call to help Rufus get his job, even though he meant to. Rufus got his reporter job all by himself.
Chapter 12 Summary
Rufus and Zaq find the priest changing robes behind the worship room. Zaq boldly asks the priest what he knows about the kidnapping and then inquires about a man known as “the Professor.” The priest resists at first but eventually breaks down and takes the men into the forest and then to a clearing, where a cemetery stands surrounded by chicken wire. Tamuno tells them that the militants were at the cemetery for a few days, shows them a fresh mound of dirt, and tells them that the Professor told him that if anyone came asking after the white woman, he should show them this grave.
Zaq doesn’t believe the priest and thinks that Isabel Floode is not buried in the grave. He tells Rufus to go see Gloria and ask her for information. Rufus does and ends up having dinner with Gloria at her home. They quickly become intimate and spend the night together. The next morning, Gloria tells Rufus that she attended to the white woman and that her symptoms—diarrhea and weakness—would not have killed her.
The following night, Zaq wakes Rufus in the middle of the night and tells him, “Our job is to find out the truth, even if it is buried deep in the earth” (143). They go back to the cemetery and dig up the fresh grave. Instead of the body, they find a rock: They now know that Isabel is not buried there and may in fact not be dead at all. Understanding that people who wish them harm might be aware of their activities, they decide to leave in the morning.
Chapters 10-12 Analysis
Zaq in the throes of his illness contrasts sharply with the Zaq from Beke Johnson’s story: a capable, daring reporter who refuses to play by any rules but his own. This attitude has gotten Zaq quite far and is the reason that James sought him out in the first place: Zaq is someone who is unafraid to go through unusual channels to pursue a story, and he doesn’t allow danger or “propriety” to dissuade him. As a character who lacks the typical heroic characteristics that telegraph a positive outcome, Zaq is an example of an antihero; Zaq takes risks that may not necessarily pay off. This is even clearer later in the section, when Zaq takes Rufus to the cemetery to dig up the recently dug grave. Zaq is willing to desecrate a burial mound, which could have had dire consequences for him if his hunch did not pay off. As it is, Zaq’s disregard for the social taboos of the societies he is reporting on allows the pair to discover the truth about Isabel Floode’s disappearance.
Besides developing the theme of The Fallibility of Mentors, Zaq’s moral ambiguity and physical deterioration parallel the situation in Nigeria, where both social and environmental corruption are rampant. The two are intertwined, as Gloria’s description of the river highlights; she depicts the blood of those killed in the conflict as a kind of pollution akin to oil itself. Her explanation of the worshippers’ goals therefore implies a dual resistance to both the environmental degradation of the river and to the political structures that give rise to it, furthering the novel’s exploration of The Environmental and Social Effects of Neocolonialism. However, the fact that the priest must apparently work with the militias to safeguard the shrine and its surroundings hints at the limitations of such resistance in a society where corruption is so widespread.
In this environment, Habila implies, the work of a journalist is more important than ever. Zaq’s metaphor about digging to find a buried truth links journalism to the project of Searching for Order Amid Chaos; it also takes on a literal meaning as he and Rufus excavate the supposed grave. However, what they discover raises more questions than it answers, underscoring the difficulty of finding or creating meaning in such a violent and unpredictable environment.
