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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 August 2018
Petroleum, a 2004 novel by Swiss-Gabonese writer Bessora, takes place almost entirely on the Ocean Liberator, a ship extracting oil off the coast of Gabon. I argue that the Ocean Liberator operates as what Marc Augé calls a non-place, a place that cannot be defined in terms of history, identity, or relations. Non-places, frequently under neither national nor international supervision, facilitate the creation of a precarious international labor force. I furthermore underline the relation among the non-place workplace, environmental degradation, and the choice of detective fiction. Petroleum is what I call a supermodern detective novel, which moves beyond local violence to deal with transnational networks of capitalist power and oppression.
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7 Ibid., 103.
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12 Bessora, Petroleum (Paris: Denoël, 2004), 9 Google Scholar. (“At the very top, the senior executives and directors . . . In the middle, an aggregate of technical and administrative agents, a sort of two-tier middle-class, White and Black, with an elevator for the former . . . And at the bottom, the always indigenous working classes . . . Marl that fattens up the first two.”) Unless otherwise noted, all the translations are my own.
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15 Mawuna Remarque Koutonin. “Why Are White People Expats when the Rest of Us Are Immigrants?” The Guardian, March 13, 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2015/mar/13/white-people-expats-immigrants-migration.
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22 Henri Astier. “Elf Was Secret Arm of ‘French Policy,’ ” BBC, March 19, 2003. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2862257.stm.
23 Bessora, Petroleum, 192–93. (“Now, the hard hats were rummaging through the water; would the water genies, disciples of Mamiwata, ask for their share?”)
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29 Bessora, Petroleum, 239. (“collective adherence to the oil legend,” “collective adherence to the colonial legend”).
30 Ibid., 245. (“Oil is the Golden Fleece and Elf is its guardian.”).
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35 Ibid., 38.
36 Bessora, Petroleum, 87. (“Bongo, de Gaulle, Elf-Gabon, there are no signs marking the names of these avenues. It’s understandable that the cadastral reality is concealed, because there’s nothing to crow about. Yes, this reality is invisible.”)
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40 Bessora, Petroleum, 125. (“The answer can be found in time, she says. What happened on the ship, it’s . . . It’s memory that you should question.”)