Since starting this research project, I’ve been thinking about the ways in which we’ve become bound to oil.
The most glaring to me is certainly the car culture. As a 2020 news article puts it, there’s an “insatiable appetite for cars” in Brunei that is symptomatic of our attachment to these carbon-intensive machines. We have the highest rate of car ownership in Southeast Asia and almost every household is guaranteed to have at least one car. Indeed, it’s probably a rarity that a family has only one.
But while it’s easy to blame consumers for their materialism and “greed” – traits that are themselves, many would argue, by-products of fossil capitalism and extractivism – we need to take a step back to see the bigger picture.
The lack of a comprehensive public transportation system, for one, forces everyone to own a car. Not to mention the urban infrastructure that caters to cars rather than people, pedestrians and cyclists. Just think about the highways, the roads that disrupt the natural land patterns, the use of land for parking spaces, to name a few features. Multiple job adverts, too, state that they require candidates to have drivers licences or “no transport issues”. Coupled with subsidized petrol and attractive car loan packages, we’ve become pretty much locked-in to a car culture.
The more I explore this attachment to oil, the more I start thinking about the role it plays in strengthening our national identity.
Cars have allowed us greater mobility, to move from one end of the country to the other with relative ease, thus forming a continuous and unified perception of the land in the national imaginary. They’ve allowed us to form and maintain connections with other Bruneians in different parts of the country. Commuting to work has become a viable option, meaning jobs in farther areas have become very real possibilities for many of us, thus opening up more opportunities to contribute to the local economy.
In other words, oil fuels our sense of belonging to Brunei (just as it does for other citizens in other nations).
This entwining of oil and national identity becomes more evident the more we look.
Earlier this year, during the national day celebrations, Gallop Air organized a drone light show in Bandar Seri Begawan. They formed images of iconic Bruneian symbols and landmarks including the red crest in the middle of the Bruneian flag. One notable image is that of the “nodding donkey” or pump jack, which many will recognize as being a landmark of the oil town of Seria. The inclusion of this image, especially in a show celebrating the national day, is telling of not only the role that oil plays in the making of modern Brunei, but also the deep attachment that people have to it.
Oil has become a source of pride for Bruneians not least because it made the nation’s financial self-sufficiency and independence possible. It quite literally turned the country from an “economic backwater”, as one scholar puts it, into one that was “so rich as to be indecent.” It is common, I think, for Bruneians to hear “you guys are rich, right?” whenever they travel abroad, and this seems to fuel national pride further. Additionally, academic papers on Brunei more often than not mention its oil wealth as a prominent national characteristic. This again reinforces the narrative that binds national identity to oil.
Indeed, oil wealth has led to the nation’s political stability, economic growth and social security, particularly due to the comprehensive welfare system – Bruneians receive free education, free medical care, subsidized housing, and many more benefits that often lead to the pejorative labeling of the country as a “Shellfare state”. Running counter to the oft-cited link between fossil fuel extraction and environmental degradation, Brunei’s oil industry has also allowed for the protection and preservation of its expansive rainforests (for now).
Compounding these various ties to oil are the cultural institutions and platforms that fortify them. The Seria Energy Lab and the recently-opened Brunei Energy Hub, for example, both emphasize how “[oil] has contributed immensely to the country.” Subliminally, the message that they seem to suggest is that we owe oil and to abandon it at a time of energy transition and decarbonization is to be ungrateful and, perhaps, disobedient.
This particular image of oil – as the foundation of modernization, the mark of a smart and technologically-advanced nation – seems to be ingrained from an early age. School children are often brought to the Seria Energy Lab, a “science center” that offers students “interactive videos, games and simulators such as the smart drilling challenge, swing transfer simulator and a helicopter simulator.”
So begins what we can perhaps label “energy literacy” – how we come to know of and learn about oil. It’s perhaps useful to note here how oil corporations, capitalism and imperialism have shaped our contemporary notions of oil and energy to associate them with technological advancement and unlimited economic growth. (Cara New Daggett gives a fascinating account of how we’ve come to define energy in The Birth of Energy [2019]). Given these associations, it is no wonder that our attachment to oil runs deep.
Unpacking this connection between oil and national identity then is crucial if (or, rather, when) we are to one day live without this natural resource.
How else can we define what it means to be Bruneian? How do we decouple oil and Brunei? How do we make non-oil narratives feature more prominently both within and beyond the national borders?
I’m attempting to answer these questions in a book chapter on translating oil. I point to the potential that literature, and speculative fiction in particular, holds as a way to re-imagine and envision identities unconstrained by our current energy infrastructure. With the recent uptick in speculative fiction being published by Bruneians, I have reason to assume that the current generation is already working hard at redefining what it means to be Bruneian beyond the inherited social and cultural assumptions cultivated by the oil and gas industry.
Petro-Ambiguity: Environment, Energy, Culture 
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