“An owl is the wisest of all birds because the more it sees the less it talks.”
This is a book packed with literal incident and events, which is to say that it is not one of those novels that is all about the style and texture and without a story or easily comprehensive narrative. Taken out of context, some of the most memorable quotes might give exactly that impression. Just as some movies provide a wealth of great quotes that have the side effect of making other screenwriters seem a little lazy, so does the author here take the time to fill the mouths of her characters with expressions that can have the effect of making other writers a little too dependent upon mere exposition. Grandma, in particularly, consistently proves to be deeper and more mysterious than even the narrator realizes.
“It’s like a palace. The Western Oil Company compound. A completely different world. Everything is clean, even the floors. There are seven swimming pools, a golf course.”
The narrator’s mother gets a nice job at a bar where the oil company workers hang out early in the text. This development is part of a chain of events which ultimately lead to a showdown between those less enfranchised by the oil company’s obscene wealth and the corporation itself over issues of environmental rape and abuse of the land.
“No daughter and mother ever live apart, no matter what the distance between them.”
Speaking to Mama several years after the first exposure to the temptations of offered by the oil conglomerate, the narrator provides a sense of understanding and acknowledgement of mistakes and decisions that must be viewed with the perspective of time. Not everything is necessarily as it seems and this is a lesson that both characters and readers will discover by this point in the story.
Beauty found a way to grow in the ugliest of places.
The concept expressed here is expressed in various other ways throughout the novel. For instance, in the juxtaposition of the two immediately preceding quotes excerpted above. Another example is when the narrator is in the garden which proves to be symbolically important and which has been described in imagery that focuses on the quality of its darkness. That quality is then unexpected contrasted with a blinding brightness of the stars in the sky. The Niger Delta is presented in the book as a place that has been made ugly by the intervention of man and money, but which is inherent so beautiful that can one still see it if one only looks for it.
