A different energy

This Sunday’s Bookshelf presents prize-winning Celeste Mohammed’s Non-Fiction Debut, “A Different Energy: Women in Caribbean Oil and Gas” (Publisher: Words Matter Communications, December 2023).

Using a series of interviews with women in a male-dominated oil industry, Celeste Mohammed has produced a brilliant and necessary book that deftly criss crosses academia, essay, storytelling, and journalism. The Trinidadian lawyer turned-writer debut novelin-stories, Pleasantview (Jacaranda, 2021), won the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. She says she wrote the book to record how women in oil have survived in a male-dominated industry.

Excerpt from A Different Energy: Women in Caribbean Oil and Gas” by Celeste Mohammed with full permission from the Publisher– (Words Matter Communications– December 2023)–exclusively for the Sunday Guardian:

“As a professional woman–a corporate lawyer–who has endured the scorching discomfort of being the only female trying to lean in at a boardroom table of males and who is also a writer and connoisseur of good narrative, I went seeking the undiluted stories of Caribbean oil women and the wisdom of how they survived having their feet held to the fire.”

Initially, Mohammed, whose writing career began with fiction, was unsure if she could tackle “long-form non-fiction.” “Fiction writers play the role of inventors, whereas non-fiction authors act as interpreters and conveyors of fact.” She wasn’t sure if she had the “right skill set.” But Mohammed said ‘the work flowed’ when she focused on storytelling, adding that the ‘tools’ of both genres are the same–” using compelling characters and effective pacing to captivate the reader” and train her gaze upon a truth.

Mohammed says with non-fiction, “sensitivity” is critical: “I’m handling the emotions and egos of real people. In this case, eight powerful women. I had to walk the line between conveying their perception of themselves and my perception of them. Calm reassurance was crucial.” Mohammed adds that she worked hard to ensure this book was taken seriously and escaped the label of navel-gazing.

“To avoid that, I tacked everything they said against the objective realities of the global energy industry. Through extensive research, I offered analysis and information that corroborate their stories.” In the process of writing, Mohammed is a “believer in the healing power” of storytelling. “As James Baldwin once said, ‘You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.’ Narratives provide a platform for expressing and processing complex emotions, enabling individuals to make sense of their experiences and find solace in shared human struggles. I hope this book was cathartic for the women involved and encouraging for every woman who reads it.” 

Chapter 1 Her-story of Oil & Gas in Trinidad

Oil is to the island of Trinidad what blood is to the body of a man–or a woman. The first oil well in the Western Hemisphere was drilled in Trinidad in 1857, by the Merrimac Company. Although that well is often regarded as the start of the Caribbean oil industry in the modern age, one might say Trinidad’s petrochemical exports began centuries earlier, in 1595 when the English pirate-explorer Sir Walter Raleigh came looking for El Dorado–the fabled city of gold–and was shown instead, by the Amerindians, the “black gold” of bitumen or piche at Tierra de Brea (now La Brea Village); he used the stuff for caulking his ships. He found our oily deposits to be “most excellent good and melteth not with the sunne as the pitch of Norway, and therefore, for ships trading the south partes very profitable.”

Very profitable indeed. But for whom? Everywhere oil is discovered, that’s always the question. Who should profit? To whose benefit should this windfall redound? The foreign multinational oil companies, the government? The expatriates, the locals? Not many of us, though, question whether the benefits should flow more to men or to women because we assume that oil should and does bestow wealth equally, regardless of gender. But that’s not true.

Oil and gas is one of the largest, most lucrative, and most politically powerful industries in the world. Yet, it employs very few women, tends to lose the women it does hire, and in developing countries, it disproportionately burdens women. Ask anybody working in the petrochemical industry, and they will tell you, “It’s a man’s world”.

Academics have used more nuanced phraseology, referring to the “profoundly gendered nature of oil work.” I saw this with my own eyes while growing up in San Fernando, “the industrial capital” of Trinidad and Tobago, during the 1980s–1990s. Throughout my secondary school years, I had many friends who lived “on camp”, one or other of the oil company residential camps along the southern oil belt of Trinidad. Then there were other friends who had a parent “working in the oil” but didn’t live on camp–although their family still got to drive past security and go up to the club and play at the pool. But, in either case, the parent whose employment allowed access to oil’s privileges was always a man. Nobody’s “Mummy” was ever the one “working in the oil” or on senior staff. It was always the father.

Male hegemony in the oil and gas industry was accepted as normal back then when I was growing up–and I’m not that old–and we didn’t even wonder, Where are the women? We just accepted that it had to be so. And here’s another interesting irony: we–my contemporaries and I–constitute The Notorious OBG, the “oil boom generation” who was born during Trinidad’s oil boom of the 1970s, but grew up in the 1980s during the deepest economic recession in Trinidadian history, and as teenagers, experienced the resulting attempted coup of 1990. Trauma, upon trauma, upon trauma. The message we received was that oil is a kind of liquid Zeus: a fickle god who gives generously to male providers and then “raffs” away capriciously, leaving their women scrambling to make ends meet at home, or exiled in America cleaning toilets and babysitting other people’s pickney.

Now, as the mother of a daughter living through this crucial Decade of Action, where the UN has set a 2030 deadline for the achievement of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls, I do wonder how many OBG girl-children, like myself, might have aspired differently and made different life choices if we had known that all this time, there were indeed women succeeding in the oil and gas industry. “

–End of Excerpt

Mohammed holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Mohammed won the 2018 PEN/Robert J Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. In 2022, she won the CLMP Firecracker Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the UK Society of Authors McKitterick Prize.