Militant Metaphors: Precarity and Violence in Niger Delta’s Conflict Literature

Abstract

Drawing from two texts on Niger Delta crisis, this paper argues that precarity breeds insurgent violence. Micheal Peel’s A Swamp Full of Dollars (2009) features a real-life journalist with a penchant for literary devices, whereas Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2010) features a fictional journalist with social realist and picaresque proclivities. Despite their generic distinction or classification, by employing what I call here ‘militant metaphors’, both texts – as this paper aims to show – reveal that precarity breeds insurgent violence. Given the ethical bind to facts or verifiability of factual claims in narrative journalism, Peel’s A Swamp Full of Dollars is best positioned to uncover the ‘absent presence’ of violence. Habila’s Oil on Water, on the other hand, unravels what I would call ‘presence absence’ of the Niger Delta conflict. In doing so, this paper argues that both texts treat Delta militantly as a metaphor –a symptom of the larger yet absent inequalities crystallized into insurgency – and set out to trace the other absent metaphors that are laden with militancy: area boys, bookshops, urban gangs, ecology, landscapes and so forth.