The New Global Atlantic: Oil, Ships, and Multi-Nationals

Bessora was born in Brussels to a Gabonese father and a Swiss mother. With her family, she has lived in Switzerland, France, Gabon, and the United States. After graduating from the Faculty of Business and Economics of the University of Lausanne, she pursued a career in finance before dramatically changing course. After a long stay in South Africa, she enrolled in a doctoral program in anthropology in Paris and published her first novel in 1999. She obtained the 2001 Fénéon Prize for her novel Les taches d’encre.Footnote ¹ The Grand Prix Littéraire de l’Afrique Noire was awarded to her in 2007 for her novel Cueillez-moi jolis messieurs. . . .Footnote ² Perhaps unsurprisingly, questions of finance, labor, and natural resources play an important role in her literary work. Referring to Bessora’s first two novels (53cm and Les taches d’encre), Susan Ireland argues: “In both of these zany works, humor is Bessora’s main strategy for making serious social commentary. The wide range of comic devices used in the texts—farce, irony, intertextual allusions, pastiche, parody, quid pro quos, and every kind of word-play imaginable—produces a generically hybrid form, a metafictional novel. . . .”Footnote ³ Even though in Petroleum Bessora no longer focuses on African immigrant communities in Paris but rather on the international business community in Gabon, humor and parody remain her main weapons. These literary devices are, however, combined with an extensive knowledge of the history of oil extraction in Gabon (Bessora completed a PhD thesis in anthropology entitled “Mémoires pétrolières au Gabon”/ “Oil memories in Gabon”) and a very serious critique of contemporary societies’ overt reliance on oil. The Ocean Liberator is a microcosm where class, race, and gender dynamics of the fossil fuel economy are accentuated.

On board the ship we encounter an array of characters including Médée, a young French geologist, who has been recruited from British Petroleum because she has thus far never failed to successfully locate the resource, which the narrator suggestively names the black nomad and black gold. The main suspect for the crime is Jason, the local cook and Médée’s love interest, who disappeared after the accident. Jason grew up with an aunt capable of communicating with local spirits, deeply angered by the geologists’ continuous profanation of the local land and water. Alidor Minko, the company’s communications director is also deeply involved in the investigation. The oil ship is thus situated at the intersection of different people and capital flows because it belongs to a French multinational company, is situated off the coast of Gabon, and employs Gabonese, French, British, and workers of other national origins, including Malians, Italians, and Filipinos. The organization of the company is in fact ironically described as an adventure in multiculturalism, where the expat manager/national worker duo has replaced the now outdated colonizer/colonized pair. Although some characters, like the Swiss engineer Etienne who died in the explosion, have been in the country for a long time, many of the expat managers are transitory, with no permanent relation to their country of work. The reader thus learns, for instance, that Mister X has been in Gabon for only four years and that Médée arrived only recently. Even those expats who have been in the country for an extended period of time circulate primarily between the ship and the compound where they live, designed specifically for Elf-Gabon managers. In fact, corporate multiculturalism is based on the idea that the corporation is a world of its own. Dissociated from local history, not seeking to build a permanent identity or permanent relationships, the Ocean Liberator has only a contractual purpose: to extract oil. As such, it resembles a non-place.

In his groundbreaking book, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Augé establishes a distinction between an anthropological place and a non-place: “The hypothesis advanced here is that supermodernity produces non-places, meaning spaces which are not themselves anthropological places and which, unlike Baudelairean modernity, do not integrate the earlier places: instead these are listed, classified, promoted to the status of ‘places of memory,’ and assigned to a circumscribed and specific position.”Footnote ⁴ The anthropological place, according to Augé, serves three purposes for the people who inhabit it: it is a place of identity, of relations, and of history. By opposition, non-places, such as hospitals, supermarkets, malls, airports, and means of transportation, can be defined neither as historical, relational, nor in terms of identity. This opposition is, however, never absolute. The place never fully disappears, and the non-place never fully takes over. Non-places can be modified by those who pass through them, and relations can be restored through an array of what Michel de Certeau calls “practices of everyday life.”Footnote ⁵ A non-place, however, designates “two complementary but distinct realities: spaces formed in relation to certain ends (transport, transit, commerce, leisure), and the relations that individuals have with these spaces. Although the two sets of relations overlap to a large extent, and in any case officially (individuals travel, make purchases, relax), they are still not confused with one another; for non-places mediate a whole mass of relations, with the self and with others, which are only indirectly connected with their purposes.”Footnote ⁶

Another characteristic of non-places is that they’re defined by images and text, sometimes prohibitive, sometimes prescriptive or informative. These instructions are addressed to each customer or passenger indiscriminately; it’s a formal neutral language that does not rely on local references but creates a common identity through the anonymity of the user and the mode of address. The relation between the user and the non-place is thus purely contractual as the passenger is always reminded of the existence of the contract. The person who enters non-places “tastes for a while—like anyone who is possessed—the passive joys of identity-loss, and the more active pleasure of role-playing.”Footnote ⁷ Stripped of identity and history, unable and not having time to establish relations, the person inhabiting a non-place experiences nothing but solitude and the weight of the present moment, a moment that no longer exists in a temporal continuity.

In his analysis of non-places, Augé focuses primarily on European settings, where the principal figure is the traveler. Augé’s non-places imply an ability to travel and a voluntary transience. The airport is accessible to those who have a passport and will not be turned away at checkpoints. Augé considers non-places like malls, hospitals, or airports from the point of view of people transitioning through, rather than, for instance, those working there. I should also say that although I find Augé’s description of supermodernity useful, I have certain issues with the term. My primary concern is that terms like modernity, postmodernity, and supermodernity frequently get dissociated from the economic and political systems that created them. Many of the phenomena that Augé associates with supermodernity are connected to the global spread of neoliberalism.Footnote ⁸

As a result, it may seem strange to think of Bessora’s oil-extracting ship as a non-place. The Ocean Liberator is a workplace, where workers come on a daily basis and where relationships between co-workers are bound to develop. And I am in fact not claiming that the novel fits neatly into Augé’s theory but rather that it takes this theory in new directions. In the novel, we are no longer dealing with airports and malls, but rather with the new non-spaces of production, similar to special economic zones or maquiladoras. These non-spaces operate as a state within a state, employing international labor, which never fully settles in the country of work. This is, in fact, quite different from the non-spaces of travel or consumption. Yet the non-places of production share certain characteristic with Augé’s non-places as they position themselves as non-historical and non-relational. I’m interested particularly here in Augé characterization of a non-place as a space embedded in the present, which dissociates itself from earlier spaces and times. Corporate multiculturalism presents itself precisely as a new world, a new era, and an ideology that has replaced colonial power relations now relegated to the “place of memory.” In fact, two discourses are imbricated and juxtaposed in the novel. Corporate multiculturalism positions the corporation as a world of its own, bound only by a contractual purpose, dissociated from local history and not responsible for local society. But the reader is also exposed to what Bessora calls the “mémoire bléssée” (“wounded memory”) of oil, a collection of oral memories, stories, and myths that attempt to place the corporation into a long history of colonial and postcolonial resource extraction; a history that has deeply shaped and continues to shape Gabon.

The Non-Place Workplace

The choice of the ship gestures toward a transcolonial understanding of the Atlantic. At the basis of the Atlantic economy, there has always been a ship. Paul Gilroy has mobilized the image of the ship in order “to rethink modernity via the history of the black Atlantic and the African diaspora into the western hemisphere.”Footnote ⁹ The slave ship has, in the novel, been replaced by the oil ship. The ship still operates as a metaphor of the world: it contains all the race, class, national, and gender divisions while at the same time being positioned outside of a national territory. It is, additionally, a metaphor of the world as a workplace.

The Ocean Liberator carries an ambivalent association with a specific national context. Removed from a specific local setting, its purpose is to serve the global flows of capital. As such, it no longer has a clear historical and relational identity. It is stationed off the coast of Gabon, yet it belongs to a multinational French corporation. In his A Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey explains that globalization has not necessarily led to the waning of the nation-state, as often assumed, but rather to its changing function. The purpose of the nation-state in this context is to create favorable conditions for the establishment of new markets, to create markets in sectors where they do not already exist, and to use its power to repress any popular opposition to the functioning of global capitalism.Footnote ¹⁰ It is in this context that we have witnessed a rise of non-places, spaces that are falling in the cracks between national and international responsibility, leading to what I call the “non-places of production.” These non-places enable the creation of precarious, disposable subjects.

On the Ocean Liberator, the process of oil extraction, a material task, is accompanied by the immaterial labor of the geologists, Médée and Etienne, and their endless calculations and predictions.Footnote ¹¹ The entire staff of the ship is at the same time supported by the material labor of Jason, the cook. Bessora traces the entire international chain of labor, which originates with the natural resource extraction in Gabon and ends in financial speculations on Wall Street. These unlimited financial speculations and accumulation in New York City, are, in fact, made possible by the material labor in Gabon. The abstractness of the financial market and its supposed capacity for infinite expansion collide with the concrete and finite nature of both material labor and natural resources, leading to the current economic and environmental crisis. This dynamic adds another dimension to the discussion of non-places. Financial speculators on the other side of the ocean have no historical, relational, or identity links to the Ocean Liberator. For them it is a non-place; a place that in no way impacts them while they impact it greatly.

Although the novel provides a history of oil extraction in Gabon since colonial times, what characterizes the managerial class is precisely its dissociation from this history. The oil ship is no longer seen as a product of national history, one that has defined and been defined by colonial and neocolonial relations, but rather as performing a contractual purpose: the extraction of oil. Its positioning off the coast of Gabon in the Atlantic Ocean is emblematic of this dissociation from the national space and its control. It belongs to a French company, is run by French and British managers, and is dependent on the success of the company’s shares on Wall Street. Where the control and power over this space lie is quite unclear: Is it the Gabonese government, the French multinational, or the US financial institutions that have control over these workers’ lives? In fact, two discourses collide in the novel: one of which tries to return to the Ocean Liberator the status of a place, by inscribing it into a long history of colonial and neocolonial relationships. It operates through the oral stories and myths shared by the locals. And another one, endorsed by the managerial expat class, which attempts to precisely extricate it from this history and approach it as nothing more than a contractual non-place.

The choice of an oil barge, as a site of reflection about the contemporary division of labor, is significant because it gestures toward contemporary modes of worker control. On board the Ocean Liberator local workers, in charge of the physical extraction of oil, are located at the bottom floor of the ship, under the constant supervision of the foreign technicians located straight above them: “Au sommet, les directeurs et cadres très supérieurs . . . Au milieu, un agrégat d’agents techniques et administratifs, classe moyenne à deux vitesses, la blanche et la noire, avec ascenseur dans le premier cas . . . En bas, les classes laborieuses strictement indigènes . . . Marne à engraisser les deux premières.”Footnote ¹²

The organization of the ship as workplace not only reflects, but rather perpetuates the race/class hierarchy because it curbs workers’ potential for resistance. Although it could be argued that the Ocean Liberator serves as a metaphor for a generic contemporary workplace, the specificity of the oil industry is emblematic of contemporary forms of labor organization. In Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, Timothy Mitchell explores the relation between carbon energy and modern democratic politics. According to him, the rise of the oil industry and its progressive replacement of the coal industry, enabled a new form of labor politics: “An important goal of the conversion to oil was to permanently weaken the coal miners, whose ability to interrupt the flow of energy had given organised labor the power to demand the improvements to collective life that had democratised Europe.”Footnote ¹³ Spending most of their days in the mines, with no supervisors nearby, coal workers enjoyed a certain degree of autonomy. They also controlled the transportation of coal and were thus in a position to significantly disrupt the system. This led to several significant miner strikes in both England and the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. The shift to oil entailed closer supervision of workers and significantly curbed their political power. Sharing their workspace with their supervisors, oil workers no longer benefited from spatial autonomy. Furthermore, oil pipelines, which require very little worker supervision, have been a lot less affected by labor actions.

In Petroleum, the workers’ lack of autonomy and the constant presence of the company are conveyed through the spatial organization of both the ship and the city. On the one hand, there is a mental lack of separation between life and work. The explosion on the Ocean Liberator and the subsequent search for the perpetrator extend the workplace into all realms of social relations. Every conversation is interpreted as a potential “clue,” and every moment outside of work is used to uncover the truth about the workplace. This mental inability to not be at work is reinforced by a physical inability to escape the domain of Elf-Gabon. Most of the novel takes place on the ship, in the office building on shore, or in the gated apartment complex built for the employees of Elf-Gabon. Moreover, the city is divided by the Elf-Gabon Boulevard:

The city’s landmarks are thus neither national nor colonial symbols, but rather industrial because urban planning has been conducted in light of the existing natural resources and industries. The passage articulates a transcolonial understanding of capitalism, as well as the inextricability of race and class. The colonial racial division has been replaced by a class division, yet, in fact, not much has changed aside from semantics.

Through the spatial organization of the city, we can see that neoliberal restructuring is often experienced as a fight for space. The representation of space within the novel is dialectical. On the one hand, the economic domain is continuously expanding through space. The novel thus outlines the progressive expansion of Elf-Gabon through the national territory of Gabon in constant search for oil. On the other hand, this spatial expansiveness is accompanied by the confined spaces within which the characters operate. Public and common spaces have mostly disappeared. The characters rarely find themselves in open spaces given most of the narrative unfolds in private spaces, such as the boat, the Elf-Gabon office building, and the company’s apartment complex. When the plot takes us out of these private spaces, the city is still navigated through the enclosed space of a private car or cab. The extension of the capitalist logic of exchange into all spheres of life is materialized in the restriction of space, the physical impossibility of escape, and autonomous life. Spaces are privatized, segregated, and highly supervised. Characters (especially those belonging to the expat class) pass through them, without developing meaningful or long-lasting relationships to them.

Centering the narrative on a non-place also allows Bessora to discuss a specific aspect of immigration: temporary, work-related immigration. The novel stages the relation between the immigrant and the expat. As of late, the term expat has come under scrutiny. A blog post that originally appeared on SiliconAfrica.com entitled “Why Are White People Expats when the Rest of Us Are Immigrants?” went viral when republished by various websites including The Guardian, Alternet, and Wearechange. In the article, Mawuna Remarque Koutonin argues that the term expat, unlike the term immigrant, carries no derogatory connotation: “an expatriate (often shortened to expat) is a person temporarily or permanently residing in a country other than that of the person’s upbringing. The word comes from the Latin terms ex (‘out of’) and patria (‘country, fatherland’).” In light of this definition, one would expect the term to apply to all nations and races equally. This is, however, not the case. The term expat is reserved primarily to white people moving abroad to work for the public or private sector: “Africans are immigrants. Arabs are immigrants. Asians are immigrants. However, Europeans are expats because they can’t be at the same level as other ethnicities. They are superior. Immigrants is a term set aside for ‘inferior races.’ ”Footnote ¹⁵

To support his argument, Koutonin cites a blog by the Wall Street Journal dedicated to the life of expats. In a featured story, “In Hong Kong, Just Who Is an Expat, Anyway?” the author similarly concludes, “Some arrivals are described as expats; others as immigrants; and some simply as migrants. It depends on social class, country of origin and economic status.” The author further notes that “it’s strange to hear some people in Hong Kong described as expats, but not others. Anyone with roots in a western country is considered an expat . . . Filipino domestic helpers are just guests, even if they’ve been here for decades. Mandarin-speaking mainland Chinese are rarely regarded as expats . . . It’s a double standard woven into official policy.”Footnote ¹⁶ Koutonin ultimately proposes the effacement of the word expat and a more democratic assignment of the immigrant label. Koutonin’s clear-cut opposition between European expats and non-European immigrants could be complicated by, for instance, the panic in British public discourse when Romanians and Bulgarians finally received the right to work in the European Union.Footnote ¹⁷ Though White and European, Romanians and their fellow eastern Europeans seldom fall into the category of expats. On the other hand, Koutonin’s claim is sustained by Étienne Balibar’s recent argument that immigration has become the term used to talk about race in a postcolonial context.Footnote ¹⁸ Furthermore, sociologists such as Saskia Sassen have argued that although the economic immigrant has become the representative figure of the past few decades, globalization has in fact been characterized primarily by the rise of short-term, business-related travel.Footnote ¹⁹

Petroleum encourages a different engagement with the concept of immigrant labor. The problematic figure is no longer the worker from the global south living in Europe or the United States. Rather, it is European and American expats working in a country of the global south. The multinational corporate workplace, managed by the expat class, becomes devoid of relations of history and identity. As such, it is the perfect place to create precarious, disposable labor; one that does not require much accountability. Furthermore, there is a connection between the disposability of labor and the disposability of natural resources.

Globalization, Eco-criticism and Anti-capitalism

The novel depicts a more than a century long history of “progress” and “development,” founded on the continuous extraction of resources, which has come to its point of exhaustion. In fact, Médée is recruited by Elf precisely because existing oil reserves have been depleted. She is meant to fulfill the geologists’ prediction that, in spite of scarcity, untapped oil resources will be discovered: “Après un long périple, l’Or noir rencontrera la faille. Son voyage s’achèvera par trois mille mètres de fond. Le Libérateur le délivrera des entrailles de la terre.”Footnote ²⁰ This dialectic between liberation and an impending apocalypse permeates the plot. Written in 2004, the novel inscribes itself into a growing global environmental movement that has pushed back against the principles of extraction, production, and consumption. Petroleum is clearly set in our contemporary moment in history, where planetary resources are depleting at an unprecedented rate. But what has reached an end is not merely the natural resources. Economic and social paradigms of infinite growth have also come to a halt because they have stumbled against the finitude of our planet. Mitchell argues that the relative accessibility of oil since the 1950s and 1960s has enabled the predominance of the economics of growth. Due to its continuously declining price, relative profusion, and easy transport, oil appeared inexhaustible. Furthermore, economic growth, measured in terms of GNP, did not, until fairly recently, need to take into consideration the depletion of energy resources. Nowadays, however, it is becoming evident that oil resources are limited. We are no longer operating from a position of abundance and accumulation, but rather, from one of exhaustion and lack. The novel raises the question of where we go from here. Are the notions of exhaustion and lack emblematic of an unavoidable collapse or apocalypse, or could they be the foundation of a new form of liberation? The neoliberal answer has thus far been refusal of a paradigm shift. The liberatory act, within the context of Elf-Gabon and the Ocean Liberator, is the discovery of untapped resources meant to postpone the apocalypse caused by the lack. It thus promotes the same logic of capitalist expansion into unconquered markets, including the crust of the earth.

Although it is not without referential dimensions, the discourse of depletion/exhaustion like that of discovery/progress is a discourse that reflects various kinds of ideological and sociopolitical investment. Recently, for instance, it has been used in several European countries to justify austerity measures and cuts to public services.Footnote ²¹ Furthermore, in his analysis of the oil industry, Mitchell argues that oil companies themselves have, from the beginning, promoted the concept of scarcity in order to keep oil prices high. The environmental crisis, thus, does not exist independently from the many political discourses that claim it. Petroleum poses precisely the question of alternative framings.

Petroleum shifts back and forth between the present moment, identified both as the end of a paradigm and an open space for the imagination of alternatives and a historical account of oil exploitation in Gabon. Myth, fiction, and historical facts are intertwined as Bessora unravels the history of Gabon through the history of Elf-Gabon. The latter, it turns out, has a very controversial history, including, among other episodes, the trial of its top managers. Until its privatization in 1994, the company belonged to Elf-Aquitaine, a French oil company, which, the prosecutors argued, “worked as an unofficial arm of France’s murkiest diplomacy.”Footnote ²² As it expanded into the African continent in the 1960s and 1970s, Elf paid bribes to African officials and funneled money into French politics. The secretive and illegal nature of Elf affairs seems to condone its portrayal in the form of detective fiction.

The focus on Elf is, however, significant beyond its historical accuracy. Departing from the established novelistic paradigms of national/regional history, Petroleum stages the history of a company. As opposed to fictions in which the economic dimension is mentioned only insofar as it affects the lives of characters within a national setting, here the political and social dimensions are mentioned only insofar as they affect the life of the company. The ship exists as a world onto itself. Even though on Gabonese territory, the company operates almost entirely independently from the Gabonese government and the Gabonese people. The oil is extracted, the profits repatriated, the stocks traded on an international market. The company is not embedded in local history or identity. Yet, it strongly shapes this history and identity. The novel further points to the inextricability of political and the economic dimensions and presents us with a world where all dimensions of life have been overshadowed by the economic sphere.

As the mystery of the Ocean Liberator is being investigated, the narrative takes us into the world of the “divinités maritimes” (“sea deities”). We learn that Jason was raised by Louise, a local woman initiated into the secrets of the spirit world. The novel further introduces a mythical substance named the “sémence du sorcier” (“sorcerer’s semen”) that Jason supposedly sprinkled on the ship, causing the explosion that cost Etienne his life. The novel then oscillates between the contemporary reality of Gabon and Elf-Gabon and of legends and stories that Louise used to recount to Jason, introducing him to various mythical creatures, including Mamiwata, the goddess of the maritime world. According to local memories and stories, the conflict between the local spirits and the Western “explorers” reaches far back into history, but now the spirits have finally risen up against the desecration of their habitat. In 1962, as Louise attempts to initiate Jason into the secrets of the “other world,” she wonders: “Maintenant, les casques orange fouillaient les eaux; les génies aquatiques, sujets de Mamiwata, demanderait-ils leur comptant?”Footnote ²³ On many levels, the novel thus represents a binary structure: the city is divided into two classes/two races, while it is simultaneously divided into two worlds, the world of the spirits and the world of the mortals.

Petroleum contrasts the exploitation of natural resources by multinational companies to a more local and anthropomorphic understanding of nature. The latter treats nature as a source of knowledge and power, the former, as a commodity. Thus, for instance, in 1926, Zéphyrin, Louise’s uncle, leads foreign explorers in their search for oil, even though he knows that this will anger the forest spirits. When the prospectors disregard his warning not to cut down a tree deemed sacred, they disappear in an abyss created by the tree. The local perspective in the novel, it could be argued, attempts “to envision individuals and groups as part of planetary ‘imagined communities’ of both human and nonhuman kinds,” which, according to Ursula Heise, is one of the main characteristics of “eco-cosmopolitanism.” Heise further distinguishes between an apocalyptic and a risk perspective: “In the apocalyptic perspective, utter destruction lies ahead but can be averted and replaced by an alternative future society; in the risk perspective, crises are already underway all around, and while their consequences can be mitigated, a future without their impact has become impossible to envision.”Footnote ²⁴ The notions of risk and crisis drive the plot of Petroleum. Yet the novel also connects this crisis to the global division of labor, pointing to the contradictions inherent in the term green capitalism.

The term green capitalism has been used to refer to the expansion of alternative energy markets and the proliferation of eco-friendly products. Although these eco-markets may address the depletion of natural resources, they are already highly transnationalized and operate along the same laws of global capital accumulation. For instance, in a State of the Union address, former president Barack Obama declared: “The nation that leads the clean-energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy, and America must be that nation.”Footnote ²⁵ Here, clean energies are simply presented as a new, unexplored market that the planet will soon depend on. Market ideology and its labor politics are never questioned. Unless we begin to relate the question of natural resources to the question of labor, it is highly unlikely that labor politics of the clean-energy industry will be equitable. Within this question, we also need to address the creation of the transnational workplace as a non-place. Dissociated from local history, the managerial expat class bears no responsibility for local natural resources or local workers.

Petroleum challenges the concept of green capitalism precisely because it combines a representation of nature with the analysis of a non-place workplace. The exploitation of natural resources in the novel is related to different modes of worker control and exploitation. The question of sustainability is thus concomitant to the question of labor politics. The narrator, for instance, ironically states: “Or, l’écologie est le premir souci d’Elf. Comme les droits de l’homme.”Footnote ²⁶ A clear link is made here between human rights (and by extension worker rights) and the rights of nature. The same logic of commodification that is extended to people is extended to natural resources. Furthermore, the question of lack pushes anti-capitalist critique further than a mere incrimination of companies. The fact that petrol reserves may be reaching their limit points to the end of an entire paradigm. The logic of development, growth, and consumption has come to a halt, confronted by the mere finiteness of the planet. As already mentioned, according to Mitchell, it was precisely the nature of oil and its availability that enabled and sustained the politics of growth. The depletion of oil could thus be an opportunity to challenge this model of unlimited growth and the economic discourse that favors prices and markets instead of questions of resource distribution and social equality. In this vein, the novel aligns with postcolonial eco-criticism. Graham Huggan, in his work Postcolonial Eco-criticism: Literature, Animals, Environment, describes “postcolonial writers as both ‘underground’ critics of mainstream development processes and unacknowledged legislators for alternative, often community-oriented, styles and modes of development that are uncoupled from neoliberal principles of market expansion and economic growth.”Footnote ²⁷ Bessora’s originality lies in the fact that she does this within the context of a non-place workplace and the detective novel.

Bessora, furthermore, does not simply valorize the world of the spirits as opposed to the corporate world. Rather, she places the capitalist belief in progress through oil on the same level as the local belief in Mamiwata. Both have the status of myths. Susan Ireland argues that “as reflexive texts, Bessora’s novels can perhaps most accurately be described as a type of historiographic metafiction, a term coined by Linda Hutcheon to characterize works that re-introduce historical context into metafiction in order to rethink ‘the forms and contents of the past.’ ”Footnote ²⁸ In fact, in Petroleum, Bessora returns to colonial history and the history of resource extraction in order to question the role of colonial discourse in sustaining a (neo)colonial reality. The narrator explicitly states that everything began with the “adhésion collective à la légende pétrolière” and the “adhésion collective à la légende colonial.”Footnote ²⁹ The myth of Western superiority is thus related to the myth that oil companies will bring prosperity. A third myth is introduced: the myth of the Golden Fleece. Bessora’s Médée is named after the character from the Greek myth who helps Jason on the Golden Fleece quest. She tells us: “Le pétrole est la toison d’or et Elf est son gardien.”Footnote ³⁰ From the colonial to the neoliberal age, the struggle for resources continues, and oil is the substance that assures power. By reducing the capitalist logic of progress supported by oil to the status of a myth, Bessora underlines what Gayatri Spivak calls the “worlding” of the world, where the violent cultural and economic domination of the West is obfuscated under the civilizing mission paradigm.Footnote ³¹ In contemporary times, the civilizing mission has also become the development mission. The worlding of the world is obfuscated under the contractual and utilitarian purpose of the Ocean Liberator: the need for oil. In other words, it is precisely the representation of the corporate workplace as a non-place that propagates these myths. The discourses of corporate multiculturalism, technology, history, and myth are intertwined and reversed in the novel. Mythical language is often mobilized when describing the work of the geologists. As already mentioned, the geologists’ prediction that new oil will be found is likened to the prediction of an oracle. Médée’s skills are also often described in supernatural terms: if Louise is Mamiwata’s priestess, Médée is the priestess of oil. Concomitantly, local memories and stories are enriched with specific historical details, including exact years and geographical locations. In others words, the economic and scientific discourse of the geologists and managers is endowed with mythical characteristics, whereas the local oral tradition grounds the reader in concrete historical reality. The opposition between myth and history, science and the supernatural is thus narratively deconstructed.

Globalization and the Detective Novel: Solving the Neoliberal Crime?

Bessora’s Petroleum is a contemporary take on the long literary tradition of crime fiction. In Petroleum, an explosion devastates the Ocean Liberator. The crime is an Atlantic one, taking place on (and perhaps against) the ocean. The attempt to solve it drives the plot: Was it a terrorist attack? Was it orchestrated by the enemies of Elf-Gabon? Or was it a deed of aquatic spirits, angered by the continuous desecration of their residence? I want to suggest that there is a link between Bessora’s choice of detective fiction and a non-place as the primary setting for the novel. The crime is ultimately not resolved, responsibility cannot be assigned to a single person. If, as I suggest, the non-places are constructed to evade accountability, then they also become the perfect place for crime. A crime that ultimately no one (and everyone) is responsible for.

Detective fiction has a long tradition, beginning, in most literary histories, with Edgar Allan Poe’s three Dupin mysteries (The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Rogêt, and The Purloined Letter) published in 1841–1844. In Mayhem at the Crossroads: Francophone African Fiction and the Rise of the Crime Novel, Pim Higginson analyzes several contemporary African detective novels in relation to both the literary history of the genre and the contemporary socio-economic conditions of the continent. Higginson identifies five characteristics of crime fiction: “an urban setting and a threatening alterity, the ambiguity of the law, a vexed literary status, trans-Atlantically mobile evolution, the vernacular.” The popular status of crime fiction, he contends, allows African authors to distance themselves from the French aesthetic models taught in colonial schools. He further characterizes African crime fiction as “a novel literary-ideological enterprise-one that refuses existing socio-political conditions while steering clear of intrusive didacticism and/or excessive idealism.”Footnote ³²

Although I find Higginson’s analysis apt—and he is one of the few critics who have focused on contemporary African crime fiction—I believe that the relation between the current global neoliberal power constellations and the genre of crime fiction can be explored on other terms. In fact, contemporary authors from across the Atlantic have chosen the detective novel as their preferred literary form. In Contemporary Hispanic Crime Fiction: A Transatlantic Discourse on Urban Violence, Glen Close traces the development of the genre through transatlantic literary and publishing connections among the United States, Spain, and Latin America. He mentions that in The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature (1996) Gustavo Pellón identifies the “novela negra” as one of the three most distinct narrative tendencies of the postboom era. Close further argues that the focus on the criminal in Latin American fiction is related to the “uncontrolled growth of cities” on the continent and the “new urban violence of the neoliberal era.”Footnote ³³ Thus, it seems that from multiple sides of the Atlantic, crime fiction has been a prevalent form in dealing with the effects of neoliberalism.

In Petroleum, the target of the crime is no longer a person, but an entity: the Elf-Gabon company. Etienne, the sole human victim of the crime, is also one of the primary suspects. I concur with Close’s assessment that detective fiction arises as an appropriate form to address the rise in violence in the age of neoliberalism, the new political emphasis on terrorism, and an increasing insistence on the importance of national and personal security. I would add that in conjunction to reflecting the rising social inequalities in the world metropolises, detective fiction stages the dialectic between the known and the unknown that is reflective of the contemporary modes of power and marginalization.

Our current political and economic system, which could be characterized as hegemonic, relies on a form of fragmentation, which renders it difficult to identify exact centers of power. In The Agony of Power, Jean Baudrillard argues that although domination relies on a binary distinction between dominators and dominated, hegemony is the domination of networks:

Baudrillard moreover insists on the dialectic between the invisibility and visibility of the current power networks. On the one hand, “the face of capital [is] unveiled by capitalists, even”Footnote ³⁵ as, for instance, banks publicly state that they are interested only in money. On the other hand, due to the simultaneous dilution and pervasiveness of modes of domination, it is difficult to clearly locate the centers of power. This, however, doesn’t necessarily mean that power has been entirely decentralized. For instance, in The Global City, Saskia Sassen contends that new forms of capital dispersal associated with advances in technology and the predominance of off-shore production have been accompanied by new forms of centralization of financial power in large metropolises, such as New York, London, and Tokyo. Similar power relations are reproduced at every point of the network, rendering it difficult to single out a specific node.

In Petroleum, the question of power is explored in relation to the concept of invisible realities. For instance, as Médée is driving to the company’s headquarters, she passes an intersection between the boulevard Président- Bongo, the avenue Charles-de-Gaulle, and the boulevard Elf-Gabon: “Bongo, de Gaulle, Elf-Gabon. Aucune pancarte n’indique les noms de ces avenues. On peut comprendre que ces réalités cadastrales soient cachées car il n’y a pas de quoi pavoiser. Oui, ces réalités sont invisibles.”Footnote ³⁶ These realities are invisible because they are unacknowledged. But they are also invisible because the flows of capital that connect them are not always tangible; there are missing links that explain the relation among the Gabonese authorities, foreign governments, and the multinational. In a similar manner, although the reality of oil extraction and the politics of Wall Street are inevitably linked, the power networks that connect the two are not immediately visible to workers on board the Ocean Liberator. The international division of labor has divided the process of production and distribution into various fragments that seem autonomous yet are utterly dependent. As Franco Berardi explains: “The digital transformation started two different but integrated processes. The first is the capture of work inside the network, that is to say the coordination of different labor fragments in a unique flow of information and production made possible by digital infrastructures. The second is the dissemination of the labor process into a multitude of productive islands formally autonomous, but actually coordinated and ultimately dependent.”Footnote ³⁷ Detective fiction encapsulates this fragmentary understanding of reality, which results from a fragmentary nature of work. In crime novels, characters are searching for missing causal links and explanations, in an attempt to recover a fuller understanding of the chain of events.

The intersection of the three boulevards gestures toward this complex imbrication of causes. Who is to be held responsible for the current situation: the local government, the colonial past, or the unregulated markets? In the literary imagination, multiple crimes whose perpetrator and cause cannot be found operate as a way to gauge the power of networks, the inability to clearly identify the sources of power and the causes of marginalization. What distinguishes Petroleum, however, is the fact that local forest and ocean spirits are among the suspects. The concept of crime is thus closely linked to the question of natural resources.

Bessora’s novel represents a different way of thinking about detective fiction. This is not quite the urban violence of expanding cities that Higginson and Close are talking about. The transnational non-place in this novel is not the equivalent of the neoliberal urban sprawl. Petroleum could be described as an “anti-detective” novel that Stefano Tani discusses in The Doomed Detective. According to Tani, the anti-detective novel “frustrates the expectations of the reader, transforms a mass-media genre into a sophisticated expression of avant-garde sensibility, and substitutes for the detective as central and ordering character the decentering and chaotic admission of mystery, of nonsolution.”Footnote ³⁸ Similarly, for Bennett Kravitz, the primary characteristic of an anti-detective novel is the “impossibility of discovering ‘whodunit.’ ”Footnote ³⁹ In Petroleum, Bessora takes anti-detective fiction into the realm of colonial history and the neocolonial present. The narrator underlines the fact that Georges Montandon, the French investigator, knows nothing about Gabonese history or society. He is brought because of his scientific knowledge, specifically his ability to use DNA testing. Yet, his supposedly logical reasoning leads him to identify almost all the characters as potential political terrorists. At the very beginning of Montandon’s search, Médée attempts to offer a clue: “La clé est dans le temps, dit-elle. Ce qui s’est passé sur le navire, c’est . . . C’est la mémoire que vous devez questioner.”Footnote ⁴⁰ It is precisely because he refuses to consider local memories as valid evidence and to understand the crime as systemic and historical that he will not be able to solve it. His investigation is entirely undermined when he ends up in prison, accused of statutory rape. Montandon’s science, logic, and reasoning cannot even save himself.

At the end of the novel, Médée’s and Jason’s love story finally begins, yet there is no return to the social order like in traditional detective fiction. In fact, there can be no return to the social order because the social order is responsible for the crime, and everyone is guilty due to their participation in the social order. In fact, at the very end, the earth crumbles very close to where Jason and Médée are standing, representing, possibly, another one of Mamiwata’s punishments. This is an indication that the water and forest spirits have still not been appeased and that the social order may not ever be restored.

In this article, I have tried to outline the role of non-places in Bessora’s novel. Thinking about the Ocean Liberator as a non-place workplace allows Bessora to approach the topic of the global flows of people and capital from new vantage points. Non-places, frequently under neither national nor international supervision nor accountability, have facilitated the creation of a precarious labor force, one that no one is accountable for. Furthermore, this non-place workplace appears within the context of a detective novel, a literary form that allows Bessora to address precisely the network organization of contemporary power configuration and the difficulty of identifying contemporary power structures. In the context of fragmented global power, neoliberal crimes remain unresolved.