San Francisco, California - February 7, 2008

Time for an oil change.

At the petrol station with its attractive, beckoning red and yellow icon, a diverse group gathers to witness.
We recite the narrative of the Niger Delta.
Like supplicants before a mystical altar, we chant one by one—giving evidence of what we have learned.
Like a mantra, like a prayer committed to memory and spoken for generations.
We chant lest we allow ourselves to forget.

In 1956 oil was discovered in the Niger Delta,
an area rich with oil and natural gas,
so rich that Nigeria is now the fifth largest supplier of oil to the
United States.

In 1995, the Ogoni 9, including writer/activist Ken Saro-Wiwa,
were hung for their protest,
hung at dawn by men in red robes,
hung for challenging the corruption of governments and oil companies.

Shell, Chevron, and British Petroleum…
make billions from the area,
billions… while polluting the waters,
billions… while ravaging the land.

The fishermen have nothing,
the farmers have nothing,
the people have nothing…
but sickness and poverty.

Thanks to Linda Kunik and Jon Beau Aeon for edits.

vector sketch for oil buttons.

Only the dead have seen the end of war. ~ Plato

The dead may have lost their bodies, but they have not lost their minds.
Their spirits and souls are still intact.
In winds, they whisper.
In blades of grass, they tell stories to anyone willing to acknowledge their existence.
The Ogoni Nine may be dead – hung by the greed of war mongering oil men in red robes.

They may be dead, but they still tell the story of the hangings at dawn.
And today, they haunt dangling nozzles…
Dripping poisoned spoils on earth, on feathers, on gari, on bones, on melon seeds, on water, on grains of rice, on yams, on all of us.
They whisper about the fundamentals of food – the fuel of existence.

The dead may have lost their bodies, but they have not lost their minds.

...

Poem Without A Title
by Charles Simic
I say to the lead
Why did you let yourself
Be cast into a bullet?
Have you forgotten the alchemists?
Have you given up hope
In turning into gold?

Nobody answers.
Lead. Bullet. With names
Such as these
The sleep is deep and long.

In a recurring dream, we implore the menacing men in red tunics to lay down their arms.
At first, they resist and then slowly, they begin to set down the gas nozzles with which they had tethered the land, holding it hostage.

The pile grew into a precipitous mountain and when like Icarus, it reached the sun, melted into a lake of liquid metal.

In silence, the community came out as one and fashioned melodious gongs and other musical instruments from the molten metal.

The sound was magical and the men in red robes, who had witnessed such incredible alchemy, knew they had done the right thing.

Everything that was not suffered to the end and finally concluded, recurred and the same sorrows were undergone. ~ Siddhartha by Herman Hesse.

In recurring - often mystical - dreams, all my presumptions are encapsulated. What, after all, is more presumptuous than a dream?

OMID – HOPE (PERSIAN)

I sent my Soul through the Invisible,
Some letter of that After-life to spell:
And by and by my Soul return’d to me,
And answer’d “I Myself am Heav’n and Hell:” - The Rubaiyat by Omar Khayyam

This dream of hope projects my desires.

I am a witness.

I am amongst men, women and children dressed in long white tunics. We stand barefoot on fertile ground.

At first, there are no words just thousands of smiles that flash like stars. Tears flow, but they are tears of joy.

This is my axis mundi. This is the center of the world – neither heaven nor hell (or both) – where all god heads are worshiped as one (or not). Our feet are planted in the ground like seeds then slowly, tears run together like a river irrigating the land that once bled black blood then almost suffocated itself.

Instead, our tears made more fertile what was once fallow, allowing us to begin to ripen and grow toward a sun that was obscured by smoke, cynicism and hopelessness. All we could do was smile because the oil had changed and we thrived once again in the land of the rising sun. The atrocities are now distant memories and children can dream once more of being queens and kings.

In a recurring dream all my presumptions and hopes are nurtured. It is a dream of possibilities. As a young boy did, once upon a time, I had the audacity to hope that it would come to pass… that it would not disappear when my eyes were unveiled to the light of dawn.

Shell Hell - Test for a large scale digital print

The pump jack breathes life into the oil industry and powers the ambulance that rushes grandma to hospital while simultaneously sucking breath out of communities that supply oil. In what has been termed, “the resource curse,” the paradox of oil is that it fuels economies, wealth, exploitation, environmental degradation, poverty and conflict.

There is no choice in the Niger Delta.

Fear is not the natural state of civilized people. - Aung San Suu Kyi

- forgive us our trespasses…