Mimetic designs in Helon Habila’s Oil on Water

Abstract

The stark condition of the Niger Delta region is a factual reality, and Helon Habila’s Oil on Water has been read by several critics as a plausible reflection of this reality, glossing over the novel’s fictive nature and the aesthetic choices of its configuration. This paper argues that what is perceived as plausibility in the representation of reality in Oil on Water is instead a simulated appearance of reality suggested by Habila’s aesthetic choices. It demonstrates this with insights from the principle of mimesis and by accounting for three aesthetic choices in Oil on Water such as metafictionality, the animist worldview, and metaphors. These aesthetic choices not only attempt to imitate reality, but they also challenge conventional narrative, problematize the relation between fiction and fact in its simulation of reality, and imbue the novel with mimetic paradoxes.