The accidents we call acceptable

I work as a safety officer for an oil company operating in the Niger Delta, and the word 'acceptable' appears in my professional vocabulary with a frequency that has come to bother me. Acceptable risk level. Acceptable deviation from standard practice. Acceptable environmental impact. I started writing in 2018. The essays came first, then fiction, and the fiction is where I can say what the essays can't fully contain. The literary fiction I write is set in Port Harcourt and the surrounding communities, in the present tense of what the oil industry has done to the Delta over sixty years. Not the corruption narratives that get attention abroad, though those are real. The quieter costs. The fishing communities that no longer fish. The farms on land that no longer grows what it should. I live in GRA Phase 1 and I write on Saturday mornings. I grew up in Eleme, which is inside the area I write about, and the specific knowledge that gives me is something I'm conscious of using carefully. The people I write about are not case studies. They are people I know, or know the families of, and the fiction I write tries to honour that without claiming authority I don't have. It is a careful line. I'm still learning where it is.