“Barrels of Blood”: A Book Review by Pope Pen

TO START with, let me point out that I was one of three members of the Association of Nigerian Authors, ANA, to have met with the Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas, NLNG, company to set up the Nigeria Prize for Literature. The other two were Professor Olu Obafemi, President of ANA at the time, and Dr Nduka Otiono, now a professor of literature at Carlton University, USA, who served as General Secretary. I was editor of ANA Review. At the end of discussions in Lagos when the NLNG wrote back to thank us for our suggestions, I was referred to as Professor Nengi Josef Ilagha. Ask my wife. For some reason, I was mistaken for a professor. I still look forward to the possibility of becoming one.

In any case, I was replaced by Professor Charles Nnolim when the maiden edition of the prize was certified in 2004. Nnolim, as you probably know, ranks as Africa’s foremost critic of the novel as an art form. He passed away recently, and I have it on good authority that his remains will be laid to rest in September this year. Allow me, therefore, to call for one minute of silence in his honour. May God rest his gifted and ebullient soul. Amen. He was my lecturer, and I count myself as one of his favourite students, especially because many years after I left his class at the Department English and Literary Studies, University of Port Harcourt, he called me up and requested me to edit his book with the title “Pessimism As Dialectic: The Form of Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness.”

I was flattered that my own lecturer, a renowned professor of literature, should single me out amongst all his students to undertake such a delicate assignment for him. I did as he requested and published the book in 2005 on the Treasure Books label. He was so impressed with the outcome that, in 2009, he gave me a second book to edit and publish likewise, entitled “Issues In African Literature,” a seventeen chapter exploration of disparate themes and concerns in African literature. I learnt a great deal from my interaction with Professor Charles Nnolim, and took interest in the novel from then on, even though I am yet to write one.

As a pioneer judge of the fiction prize sponsored by NLNG, Professor Nnolim told me something in confidence, and I don’t mind sharing it. He said Nigeria has a great deal of talented novelists, but many of them are too impatient to get their works published without going through the rigours of thorough editing. He said one of the parameters of judging the fiction prize is that any book which has more than five obvious errors should be disqualified. So, no matter how good your story may be, no matter how profound the thematic preoccupation, or how grand the scale on which it is conceived, no matter how attractive the cover may be, if there happens to be graphic infractions or excessive infringements in grammatical collocation, that book must be set aside.

Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, I am unwilling to set aside the book under review, namely Barrels Of Blood by Binaebi Oyeghe, even though it has far more than five errors. For two reasons, I actually accepted to review it when the author insisted that I do so. The first is that, in 2018, I had an opportunity to flip through the first draft of this novel in the course of the long road trip from Lagos to Yenagoa, after the annual convention for that year. The copy in hand was full of red correction marks, and I was glad that editorial work on the book was ongoing. I took interest in the book specifically because of the subject it deals with, namely the existential ordeal facing oil producing minorities in the Niger Delta. The second reason is that I identified with a character called Owei, who transformed into a militant warlord.

By the way, a few years ago, I read a novel with a simple title: “The Fishermen” by Chigozie Obioma. The book was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2015, and I was wondering what an Ibo man knew about being a fisherman that an Ijaw man doesn’t know. If such a novel is being written, it should come from a son or daughter of the Niger Delta. When I read the novel, however, I saw reason as to why it rated that high. It was very well written, a true work of art. It tells the story of four brothers living in a rocky Yoruba terrain who take to fishing for six weeks in the forbidden Omi-Ala river, a stretch of water that does not compare with the smallest river in the Niger Delta swamp.

Since then, I have been looking forward to reading a novel by a son of Ijaw land that would evoke our marine environment faithfully. I think Binaebi Oyeghe deserves an applause for approximating that ideal in the body of this novel. In this book, he evokes the Niger Delta environment on a grand scale, and infuses his story with all the drama and pathos surrounding the most topical issues in the region.

Barrels Of Blood is a novel of thirty boisterous chapters that follow the travails of Odumu, the main character, a young man who grows up to recognize the pervasive deprivation suffered by denizens of the swamp. His story becomes even more poignant because it takes its bearing from Oloibiri where, as you and I know, oil was first discovered in commercial quantity in 1956. Odumu makes a lifelong friendship with Prosper, Timikie and Moses who constitute a special squad under the command of Owei, and they become the arrowhead of the agitation for resource control and self determination, following the Kaiama Declaration of December 1998.

Their singular concern is to secure recognition and respect for the oil producing communities, and fulfill the expectations of Isaac Adaka Boro and Ken Saro-Wiwa, two of the foremost crusaders of the Niger Delta struggle for equity and justice in a Nigeria that remains unsympathetic to the pollution of the environment and the crass neglect of the people whose resources virtually sustain the economy. This is a subject that is well-nigh familiar in the everyday rhetoric of the nation, but this novelist explores every thematic strand of the matter, and is able to conjure the widespread discontent amongst the people.

The book opens with the capture of the agitators, and the apparent incarceration of Odumu and his friends at Kuje Prison in Abuja. But that is only the opening gambit. The story picks up momentum from the second chapter, and compels the reader through twenty-nine succeeding chapters that beam a searchlight on the brutal inequities that prompted otherwise peace-loving youths to embark on a lifetime adventure of confronting the Nigerian establishment in a bid to correct structural imbalances in the polity, and redeem the people of the swamp from the denigration they had endured in spite of the wealth of oil and gas beneath their land.

Odumu, in particular, is propelled by the agony of losing his younger brother, Kalasuo, an idealistic youngster with grand dreams who gets shot by the police over fifty naira on the first day he goes out to eke a living for the family as a bus conductor. The pain of his loss drives Odumu to become fully involved with the search for justice, and sets him on a path of war against law enforcement agents, with particular regard to the police.

He finds a primary impetus in the agitation for minority rights, and envisions himself as a younger version of Isaac Boro with a will to undertake a military campaign against the state beyond Boro’s adventures in the course of the Twelve Day Revolution. He places great faith in the power of the gun to reverse the injustice in his terrain, and volunteers to embark on a revolution that will compel government to reason with the new born militants. The boys switch faith to the powers of traditional Ijaw religion, identify with the Egbesu revolutionary front, and take to the creeks to enforce their right to control the oil and gas industry at the grassroots.

In spite of their belief in wresting some measure of respect for the disgruntled community of youths, Odumu and his fellow agitators vehemently oppose any attempt to bleed the local economy through the menace of bunkering. They object to bursting pipelines for the simple reason that every oil blow-out, every spillage in every community, causes more harm than good to the inhabitants of the swamp.

Odumu proves to be an impetuous young man with the drive of a go-getter who is constrained by the circumstance in which he finds himself to confront the lopsided realities of living in Nigeria. After a long stay in the creeks, taunting the military who come after them with their gun boats and higher caliber ammunitions, Odumu and three of his friends emerge from the remotest corners of the swamp, having endured the harshest conditions that only their idol, John Rambo, could have survived. They receive help from Nimizuo, a lonely fisherwoman in an isolated fishing port who conveys them back to civilization and to Oloibiri.

The strength of the novel also lies in the fact that, even though the author works with the familiar history of the people, he doesn’t fall to the temptation of overlaying the pages with historical data and statistics. His forte is in telling the story itself, believing in the authenticity of his authorial voice, and pulling the reader through one significant event after the other, in much the same way that a camera would focus on minor details in a long-drawn cinematic script.

The result is that the author is able to bring the reader face to face with events as they unfold. The fight between Smoking Joe and Opogo at the sand dump comes alive as vividly as the premeditated killing of Kalasuo at the motor park which sparks a revolt in the spirit of his elder brother, Odumu. In much the same way, the frenetic fever that overtakes agitators at the venue of the Kaiama Declaration is as crystal clear as the spill of crude oil in Perebai’s farm at Oloibiri, and the explosive burst of pipelines which results in a huge conflagration that sets the community ablaze, and gets everyone running to safety.

In the end, this mindset of refusing to profit from the disaster turns Odumu against the latter-day business merchants as epitomized by Don Didi, the opportunist who seeks to join the wealthy gang by exploiting the options offered by bunkering. Barrels of Blood could easily pass for a densely poetic novel suffused with recognizable imagery, and a great narrative power. The author gives attention to detail in his description of incidents and his unveiling of character. More than that, his stamina for propelling the story forward cannot be disputed.

The major minus for this novel, which the author will do well to correct in a future edition, is to decide whether he wants to tell the story in the past tense, or the present continuous tense. This vacillation is evident in the narrative progression of the novel, chapter after chapter, so much so that the author tends to mix tenses and leaves the reader flustered as to whether a given incident is being reported in the past, or as a current reality.

The symbolism of this novel should be grasped from the start. What we thought to be barrels of oil, barrels of wealth, barrels of restoration, barrels of prosperity, have amounted to nothing but barrels of frustration, barrels of denial, barrels of blood, because even though the oil and gas resources are right underneath our land, their control and ownership is dictated by political forces outside our vicinity.

The novel tells us that we have not been able to summon the courage to lay claim to our own, in spite of all the grandstanding of our youth bodies. For all of sixty years plus, the Ijaw people have held up the map of the Nigerian nation virtually with open palms extended to God, in much the same way that the oil and gas resources from their land have continued to sustain the nation for this long. But have we been able to act in concert to receive due recognition as a people? That is the big question.

Barrels Of Blood is a 500-page tour de force that qualifies to be called a novel of epic proportions. As tedious as the narration is, it is well worth the trouble to wade through the pages, and to recommend it to a discerning literary audience as a work that could benefit from a quick revision in order for it to earn the lofty placement it strives to attain.