The Loud Family
Imagery is put into overdrive early in the book to drive home the idea that the family unit at the center of the narrative is a happy one; especially as it pertains to the father and his two offspring, the narrator and Ezikiel. The novel opens with the assertion “Father was a loud man” and then goes on to contain and define that image by sharpening it into specificity by delineating the patriarch not as loud in the sense of angry and violent, but just the opposite:
"We laughed and laughed on Father’s shoulders, tickling behind his ears. The laughter flew around the room like a hungry mosquito…Suddenly, Ezikiel’s wheeze appeared. It was louder than the television showing a Nollywood film. It was louder than the hum of the generators. It was louder than Father’s laughter.”
Environmental Devastation
The family drama plays out against a broader canvas of environmental devastation and economic degradation of the Niger Delta culture and community. An almost nightmarish utilization of imagery is engaged to convey to and from the narrator the full unrealized sense of the extent of the impact upon the land resulting from oil industry economics:
“The water was still in some parts and rushing in others. An area in the middle was umping like the space between my cornrows. The water was dark, dark, dark. It looked like thick mud. Swirly patterns colored the top. I could not see the reflection of the strange twisted trees. I peered in, half closing my eyes, but there were no reflections. Not mine.”
The Stench of Unread Books
The author’s love of books and reading is perhaps unwittingly (or, just as likely, done with intent) characterized throughout the novel with imagery that fuses the idea of books no longer being read with the foul odor of the pursuit of knowledge having been disposed unceremoniously:
“The air smelled like a book unopened for a very long time”
“The river smelled like Warri, of old books that had been left in the rains.”
“I chased after Grandma’s legs until my slippers turned back into flip-flops and the smell of the old books turned into sewerage.”
What Can Foolish Women Do to Hurt a Powerful Corporation?
So inquires—with the rhetorical insult of misogynistic indifference—a security agent working for Wester Oil Company when hundreds show up to protest the environmental indifference demonstrated by the company. The answer is one of the simplest and most unadorned examples of imagery in the book and one that upon expansion of its details becomes an assertive answer to that question to which the man expected no answer:
“There is nothing more powerful than a naked woman. Nothing in the world.”
And if that is true—and it certainly seems to be—then what happens when multiplied by hundreds? Ask the guy from the security. Or, for that matter, ask anyone who was inside the gleaming mirrored-glassed façade of the Western Oil Company building that day.
