Poetics of cartography: globalism and the “oil enclave” in Ibiwari Ikiriko’s Oily Tears of the Delta

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which ideas and discourses generated by global phenomena (such as the Oil Encounter) travel and get reframed in local topographies. It asks how one might reposition hermeneutics appropriate to a particular context without falling into the trap of an epistemology that is purportedly global but representing other interests? The environment in which crude oil is extracted has been termed heterogeneous and international. Amitav Ghosh describes it as one that is “lacking in a sense of place,” while James Ferguson considers it an “insular and socially thin neoliberal landscape of deregulated enterprises.” This paper goes against the grain by challenging the formations that undergird some of these assumptions. It takes the Niger Delta as a landscape in which quotidian life and the oil infrastructure are intimately intertwined and asks what insights might literary depictions of this context give about the form of globalism that operates within the industrial complex through which oil is extracted. Reading Ibiwari Ikiriko’s poetry collection Oily Tears of the Delta, the paper reflects on how the text stages a dialogue with the global by addressing itself to the oil infrastructure in that environment. It discusses Ikiriko’s poetry as one that encourages the reader to think about locality and geopolitics as possible sites of conflict, as sites of understanding power and the kinds of agency that they enable in the environments where oil is extracted to feed global consumption.