When writing Americanah, Chimamanda Adichie self-consciously “wanted to use a love story to talk about other things,” but love stories are always about other things. In Nigerian love stories—whether mainstream romance novels from the South or the “love literature” of the Islamic North—one of those other things is oil. When Peter Hitchcock refers to “oil’s generative law,” he means that it is “everywhere and obvious[;] it must be opaque or otherwise fantastic.” To expand, oil not only generates but regenerates and is gendered. Here, I read Nigerian romance fiction for what it says about gendered relations to oil, showing that oil is indeed everywhere and making that ubiquity obvious. In the course of writing about how Nigerian short stories sabotage Big Oil’s narrative, I discovered that romance is the most widely read genre in Nigeria and that 91 percent of romance book buyers are female. My hypothesis for this study was that, given the total saturation of everyday Nigerian life with oil politics, its tensions and debates must inevitably arise in the country’s fiction. As it turns out, while the short stories explicitly call out the dangerous, exploitative nature of the oil industry, in the romance fiction by and for women the intersections between gender, oil, and the text appear to be far more taken for granted. Romance as a genre deliberately showcases the pleasures of the text, including the private female pleasure of reading alone, the promise of love and marriage, and the staging of erotic fantasies. Time and again, these fantasies feature elements of petromodernity, from sex scenes in the back seats of cars to flirtations on the side of the road. In what follows, as I move through a series of romantic motifs that emphasize the pleasures of and in the texts, those points of intersection become visible when the text puts them on display or when we’re attentive to them in ways the text might not anticipate. This approach, in revealing the petroculture that intimately structures our daily lives and loves, lets us see romance as one refinement of our petro-imaginary and see petrofeminism as a necessary development in theories of petrofiction that drastically underrepresent women as consumers, producers, and reproducers of oil and petroculture. (59-60)
---
Petrofeminism highlights the constructive potentials of writing, love, and care in the service of various kinds of liberation ranging from the individual (pertaining to selfhood and sexual identity) to the epochal (pertaining to anthropocenic concerns like mobility and energy independence). (61)
---
in this essay I read a spectrum of Nigerian romances, from the self-published A Heart to Mend (2009) by Myne Whitman to Americanah (2013) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie—a book that, through acclaim, has risen above the stigma of romance novel into the stratum of literature—to Sin Is a Puppy That Follows You Home (1990) by Balaraba Ramat Yakubu, the first Hausa novel of any sort translated into English. (62)
---
Adichie herself has both claimed and rejected that label, saying, “This is in the grand tradition of Mills & Boon but also it’s the anti–Mills & Boon.” When Ifemelu and Obinze meet at a dance party, Adichie makes a similar linguistic move, putting the idea of romance under erasure by writing, “Ifemelu thought Mills and Boon romances were silly, she and her friends sometimes enacted their stories.” Despite Ifemelu and her friends thinking romance novels are silly, they reenact them anyway. The run-on sentence in the preceding quotation strikes me as purposeful; these things coexist in the same breath without contradicting each other. By making direct, if ironic, reference to the genre, the author flirts with it. (62)
---
A hero straight out of the Victorian mold, his name says it all—Edward Bestman is the best man for Gladys. He shares a first name with Jane Eyre’s Edward Rochester and a history as an orphaned child who makes good in the world with Wuthering Heights’ Heathcliff. He holds out the promise of elevating Gladys’s position through marriage in that same tradition—something the novel winks at in a moment of metanarrative: “Dreamer, her inner voice mocked, you’ve read too many romance novels. This guy drives the latest car models and lives in the posh part of town. He’s not going to notice you.” (67)
---
in A Heart to Mend, Gladys works hard to qualify for a position with Zenon Oil, a choice reflecting the country’s total immersion in the oil industry, a bigger profile for women in it, and the romance novel’s increasing interest in women’s work. (71)
---
the romance novel as genre will never entirely spill over from readerly pleasure to writerly jouissance. The single constant is not the attraction, the barrier, or the declaration but the highly conventional pursuit of financial bliss. Everything else—the launching of a career, the happy ending, the heterosexual marriage, the promise of offspring—sublimates itself when an economic reading is foregrounded. (74)
---
---
---
---
---
---