Review of Waiting for an Angel and Measuring Time by Helon Habila

First posted on my other blog and now on my "literary" blog.

If you’ve never read anything by the Caine and Commonwealth prize winning author Helon Habila, the first thing to know is that his use of language is exquisite. The second thing to know is that he makes generous use of irony. Although he is a clearly political writer, he questions over-easy assumptions and political binaries. In his latest novel, Measuring Time, Habila continues the project he began in his debut novel Waiting for an Angel—that is to tell history through the eyes of ordinary people.

Waiting for an Angel opens in a prison setting. The imprisoned journalist Lomba is engaged in a battle of wits with the prison superintendent who is extorting poetry from his prisoner in an attempt to impress a woman. If Lomba’s story were told in a straight line, the way it might appear in his prison file, it would be the story of a failure: a student who drops out of university, who loses friends to madness and military violence and the women he loves to other men, a writer who never finishes his novel and whose journalistic career is cut short by his arrest in the slums of Lagos. However, this is not the story that Habila tells. By breaking up and rearranging the linear story of Lomba’s life, he wrests control of the narrative away from an environment-determined fate. The novel starts at the end of the chronological sequence and then circles back to gather stories of other characters in Lomba’s Lagos: a young boy banished from his home in Jos for smoking Indian hemp, an abandoned out-of-wedlock mother, an intellectual in a tragic love affair with a former student turned prostitute, the daughter of a general whose mother is dying of cancer, a disillusioned woman who runs a neighborhood eatery, a man who defies the soldiers on the night of Abacha’s coup, an editor pursued by the police who refuses to go into exile, a legless tailor who dreams of bidding poverty goodbye.

While the form of Waiting for an Angel reflects the frenetic beat of life in Lagos, the small town setting of Habila’s second novel Measuring Time allows for a more meandering pace. Mamo and LaMamo are twins growing up in the middlebelt town of Keti, and they hate their father, a womanizing businessman with political ambitions. They hate him for breaking their mother’s heart before she died giving birth to them, and they hate him for his long absences and his neglect. The twins’ simultaneous desire for revenge and quest for fame ends in their separation. When LaMamo runs away in search of adventure as a mercenary soldier, Mamo’s sickle cell anemia forces him to stay at home, spending more and more time in his imagination. The narrative of Mamo’s day to day life in Keti is rhythmically punctuated by adventure-filled letters from LaMamo as he travels around West Africa. Mamo reimagines events in Nigerian history: the poet Christopher Okigbo did not die in Biafra but instead lay down his gun to travel around Africa with Mamo’s Uncle Haruna. LaMamo enacts Mamo’s imagined story, becoming a soldier-poet who reports from the Liberian war front, and his words capture the spiritual horror and the boredom of war as it is rarely recorded in international news. The twins long for the other: while Mamo imagines adventures beyond the borders of his small town, LaMamo constantly searches for reminders of home in foreign lands.

The narrative of Measuring Time is frequently interrupted by folktales told by Mamo’s Auntie Marina, letters from LaMamo and a professor in Uganda who becomes Mamo’s mentor, excerpts from the memoir of the first missionary in Keti, his wife’s diary, and colonial reports, and the oral histories told by other characters. One of the most remarkable aspects of Habila’s prose is this inclusion of multiple genres alongside a continuous pattern of tributes to preexisting literary works. In Waiting for an Angel, he borrows the character of the prison superintendent from Wole Soyinka’s The Man Died and gives him some of the associations of the folkloric dodo, a dim-witted monster who is often outwitted by the youth he kidnaps. Throughout the rest of Waiting for an Angel he references writers as varied as Ayi Kwei Armah, Ousmane Sembene, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Franz Kafka, John Donne, and Sappho. Similarly in Measuring Time, he bundles together Plutarch, Christopher Okigbo, William Shakespeare, Wole Soyinka, Alex La Guma, the Arabian Nights and Faust legends, as well as references to oral tales and Nigerian video films. The effect of these competing voices is to open up the boundaries between his fiction and other fictions and historical accounts that lie outside the novel. The illusion of a smooth, progressive, and abbreviated history, such as the Brief History of West Africa that is brought to Lomba in prison (as the Letters of Queen Victoria had been brought to Soyinka in prison) is a false one. Habila’s fictional histories play a function similar to the colonial history the Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in which the district commissioner writes only a paragraph on a man who has been the subject of Achebe’s entire novel. Habila parallels Achebe’s fictional colonial text in Measuring Time with the missionary text A Brief History of the People’s of Keti by Reverend Drinkwater.

It is with these “brief histories” that Habila’s project in both Waiting for an Angel and Measuring Time becomes clear. Mamo is determined to write a history that does not “cut details” as the colonial histories had—a history that tells the stories of “individuals, ordinary people who toil and dream and suffer” (MT 180). The traditional ruler’s story he has been hired to write, Mamo states, is “simply a part of the other biographies…. [that he would] eventually compile to form a biographical history of Keti. That’s what history really is, people and their lives, no matter how we try to manipulate it. It is the story of real people with real weaknesses and strengths and… not about some founding fathers and … even if we want to write about the founding fathers we shouldn’t privilege them, we should place them on par with other ordinary folks…” (225). In Mamo’s subsequent “biographical history,” he writes of his father the failed politician, and his aunt the divorced wife, placing their stories alongside the less than glorious history of the mai, the traditional ruler, of Keti. Every story has its own place alongside the others. When LaMamo returns with a revolutionary fervour reminiscent of Ngugi’s Matigari, the separate lives of the twins blend and become one—LaMamo’s panAfrican experience and his soon to be born child are given into Mamo’s safekeeping and for recording into Mamo’s history of Keti.

Such a history is not merely a radical rewrite of racist colonial histories but an empathetic window into the lives of even the unpleasant characters. The characterization of the prison superintendent in Waiting for an Angel follows Soyinka’s original caricature, but the man is given a more complex psychology. He is a man grieving for his dead wife, a father of a young son. As Lomba realizes when he meets the superintendent’s girlfriend, “The superintendent had a name, and a history, maybe even a soul” (WfA 37). While in Measuring Time, the sleepy-eyed traditional ruler of Keti and his evil vizier take on the typed characteristics of folktale or a video film, most of the characters in Measuring Time are treated with complexity and compassion. When LaMamo calls the old widows who had pursued their father all his life “shameless old women,” Mamo reminds him that “they weren’t so bad… People are just people” (MT 343). And although the missionary Reverend Drinkwater may have misrepresented the history of Keti, his family has become a part of the history of the town. The missionary’s daughters, now old women, live in Keti, tending their parents’ graves. Although they are not Nigerian, they belong in Keti. It is the only life they have ever known.

This concern with multiple perspectives on history is behind what at first glance might seem to be an editorial flaw in Habila’s two novels. When reconstructed in both novels, time doesn’t quite add up. According to the chronology given in “Mamo’s notes toward a biography of the Mai,” the number of years between the installation of the first mai by the British and the current mai should be about thirty two or three years, yet the time period is stretched from 1918 up to the 1980s (MT 238-240). The year-long planning period for the celebration of the mai’s tenth anniversary seems to turn into three. Similarly in Waiting for an Angel, the time between Lomba’s stay at the university and his imprisonment seem much longer than the actual historical tenure of Abacha’s regime. He supposedly meets and falls back in love with an old girlfriend some time after he becomes a journalist. Yet, two weeks before he is arrested (after he has worked at the Dial for two years), another girlfriend, with whom he has lived for a year, leaves him. The times between the two love affairs don’t quite seem to add up.

Placing the novels side by side gives a hint to what Habila is doing here. In Waiting for an Angel, Habila gathers up historical events that happened along a spectrum of ten years and bundles them into the space of a week. Although Nigeria is kicked out of the Commonwealth in November 1995, in the novel, a week after this event, Dele Giwa, the editor of Newswatch Magazine, is assassinated by a parcel bomb on the same day that Kudirat Abiola is assassinated by gunmen. Of course, historically, the two activists were killed ten years apart: Dele Giwa during the Babangida regime in October 1986 and Kudirat Abiola during the Abacha regime in June 1996. The quickening rhythm of disaster in this chapter of Waiting for an Angel parallels the last quarter of the Measuring Time in which Mamo falls into the hard-partying lifestyle of corrupt politicians, religious riots break out, and the quiet town of Keti goes up in flames. Time here is not a mathematical iambic pentameter that can be measured with a clock, but a living fluctuating force that lags behind and loops around to find the stories of multiple characters. It reminds me of the way time acts in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude or in oral tales and epics. It cannot be diagramed into a dry progression of events such as those found in A Brief History of West Africa or A Brief History of the Peoples of Keti but instead can only be mediated through the memories of those who experienced it. In his afterward to Waiting for an Angel, Habila acknowledges the liberties he has taken with the chronological order of events, “[N]ot all of the above events are represented with strict regard to time and place—I did not feel obliged to do that; that would be mere historicity. My concern was for the story, that above everything else” (WfA 229).

Mamo’s story of Keti, like the story of Lomba in Waiting for an Angel, becomes in miniature the story of Nigeria—not that it can represent all the complex and multi-faceted stories of the nation, but that it offers an example of what can be written: the individual stories of ordinary people living in extraordinary times. Habila layers his work onto that of older writers such as Achebe and Ngugi who rewrote colonial history in their early works, and joins other contemporary Nigerian writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Teju Cole whose writing seems similarly concerned with providing entry points into historical events as lived by ordinary people. Measuring Time ends with the performance of a play by church women’s group, both celebrating and mocking the appearance of the missionary Reverend Drinkwater into Keti history. Mamo realizes that through their caricatured performance, they are telling the story on their own terms, invoking a way of life much older than the colonial encounter: “They were celebrating because they had had the good sense to take whatever was good from another culture and add it to whatever was good in theirs: they had done this before when they first met the Komda, and many times before that in their travels and migrations, in times earlier than even the oldest among them could remember. This was their wisdom, the secret of their survival. This was why they were still able to laugh… each generation would bring to this play its own interpretation” (MT 382). This at root is the power of Habila’s work—the ability of humanity to laugh in the face of tragedy—the ability to undermine stories that have been told for you by telling them yourself.

Lomba's Plaigerism

An excerpt from Chapter 3 of my MA thesis on Helon Habila's Waiting for an Angel.

[...] The privileging of the imagination is key here. It is the prison superintendent’s lack of imagination that makes him appropriate Lomba’s poetry, oblivious to the possibility that Janice might fall in love with the real poet rather than his gaoler. He cannot imagine that Lomba might use the love poems as a way to escape. This failure of imagination is the fatal weakness of the prison superintendent. From the moment that Muftau reveals his vulnerable side, Lomba takes full advantage of the superintendent’s desire to impress. Much like Lomba’s neighbor on Morgan Street, the illiterate thief Nkem, who had attempted to impress Lomba with his English, Muftau attempts to impress Lomba with his knowledge of poetry: “Perhaps because I work in prison. I wear uniform. You think I don’t know poetry, eh? Soyinka, Okigbo, Shakespeare” (26). Although Lomba cannot express the sarcasm that comes to his lips when he reads Muftau’s first poem, he expresses it in the poems he writes for the superintendent’s educated lady-love. Muftau does not know poetry, but the teacher he wants to marry does. The superintendent’s claim to literacy also unintentionally supplies Lomba with his form of resistance: the first letters of “Soyinka, Okigbo, and Shakespeare” form a perfect “SOS.” Lomba appropriates lines and whole poems from other poets to send to Janice. He slyly undermines the superintendent’s intentional plagiarism by supplying him with already “plagiarized” materials, to act as messages to the educated woman the prison superintendent loves. He appropriates lines from Edgar Allen Poe, John Donne, and the Greek poet Sappho, but their words of love become “scriptive Morse tucked innocently into the lines of the poems” (33). [i] Janice later tells him that she recognized the SOS in the repetition of the line, “Save my soul, a prisoner,” that ran through his poems. The love poetry is turned to a new political and practical purpose. The literary symbol becomes actualized—he is an actual prisoner, not merely a metaphoric one.

The SOS refrain is one of Lomba’s more obvious literary devices, but his use of intertextuality within the poems themselves works both as a way for Lomba to snatch at lines of poetry that lie, like the stars and the rain, beyond the reach of the prison and as a sly indication of Muftau’s inability to write such poetry. Muftau’s blindness to the obvious allusions in the poems that Lomba intentionally plagiarizes points to his stupid deceit. However, the “plagiarism” of classic poems works not just to mock the prison superintendent but to say the things Lomba cannot directly communicate without being discovered. In Lomba’s “bowdlerization of Sappho’s ‘Ode’” (31) the superintendent does not see beyond the conventions of love poetry. He does not imagine that Lomba is writing anything but what he asked him to write: “‘A peer of goddesses she seems to me.’ Yes. Excellent. She will be happy. Do you think I should ask her for. Marriage. Today?” (33). What the superintendent does not know is that in other translations of Sappho, the poet speaks of a rival who sits beside the beloved, hearing her laughter and her voice. The author of the poem stands at a distance from the couple, unable to reach the desired lady whose attention is turned to the rival, except through the poem. This reflects Lomba’s own position. Whereas J. Addington Symonds (as well as other translators) translates the poem so that the author addresses the beloved, indicating jealousy of the man who sits so close that he “…in silence hears thee/ Silverly speaking, /Laughing love's low laughter…” (Symonds 69), Lomba bowdlerizes the poem so that the seeming “author” of the poem is the man sitting “face to face” with her, who is entranced by “listening to the sweet tones of my voice, / And the loveliness of my laughing. /It is this that sets my heart fluttering / In my chest,” (Waiting 32). This beginning of the poem points ironically to the self absorption of the prison superintendent who imagines the tones of his choppy voice “sweet,” and his laughter “lovely,” just as he imagines his own poetry “great,” and that he is making Lomba “comfortable” in prison by giving him cigarettes (41). However, following this initial ironic hint, the poem transitions to another set of imagery, which points to the true author of the poem. As with the Sappho, the author of the poem is not the arrogant man who sits “face to face” with Janice, but the one who waits in agonies in the dark. The last nine lines of the poem, like the refrain of “Save my soul, a prisoner,” work to reflect Lomba’s true position as a prisoner:

I am no longer master of my voice,
And my tongue lies useless
And a delicate flame runs over my skin
No more do I see with my eyes;
The sweat pours down me
I am all seized with trembling
And I grow paler than the grass
My strength fails me
And I seem little short of dying. (32)

Here Lomba demonstrates the powerful potential of the love poetry Muftau thinks “harmless.” Using the conventions of love poetry in which the lover often seems helpless and in thrall to the beloved, Lomba reflects the literality of his own imprisonment. Read one way, the poem reflects the metaphoric imprisonment of the gaoler within the structures of his own conceit; in another way, the poem describes Lomba’s own experiences in prison. The two lines, “I am no longer master of my voice, /And my tongue lies useless” (32), reflect his observations in his diary that “[p]rison chains not so much your hands and feet as it does your voice” (14). The master of Lomba’s voice, indeed, is now the man who gives Janice the poem. “The delicate flame” (32) on his skin can also be read as the “acid, cancer” of anger “eating away your bowels in the dark” (15). And if the “lover” claims that “No more do I see with my eyes” (32) then no more can Lomba see in solitary confinement where after removing his blindfold, “the darkness remained the same” (24). As with any prisoner in a Lagos prison, “the sweat pours down me,” and if he is “seized with trembling” (32) it is like the inmate whose “hands shook, as if with a life of their own” (15) whose “strength fail[ed]” (32) him and who “collapsed into [Lomba’s] arms” (16) crying that “[i]f I go back there I’ll die” (15). The cry of the lover is the cry of the prisoner longing to be free.

If the love poem is powerful as a disguise for a more political reality, it is also powerful because it is a form that allows the imprisoned poet to reach out beyond his solitude to an audience that is both real and imagined. His imagination allows him not just to sneak his poems through the prison walls, but also to imagine liberation for himself. Lomba’s metaphoric “message[s] in a bottle, thrown without much hope into the sea” (39), recall the words of the marabout who had once predicted Lomba’s future in prison: “The water … takes away from us what we don’t need, and drops it at another shore where it is needed. Sometimes it returns to us what it took away, refined and augmented with brine and other sea minerals” (47). If read alongside the story in which Lomba’s poems are taken away from him by the prison superintendent and returned to him by Janice, the passage implies not just destiny but also agency. It is not that the superintendent merely “took” Lomba’s love poems from him, but that Lomba intended them as “messages.” His intended audience was not necessarily Janice but “myself, perhaps, written by me to my own soul, to every other soul, the collective soul of the universe” (38). Lomba’s use of the imagination is a defiant act of will: writing alone in prison, he imagines an audience for himself. The task of writing for the superintendent’s intended eventually gives him a corporeal presence to connect to his imagined audience. When the prison superintendent first tells Lomba that he gave Janice one of Lomba’s poems, Lomba imagines the superintendent’s rendezvous with her at a Chinese Restaurant. In his imagination Janice is reluctant to become involved with the man. He imagines that “[s]ometimes she is at loss what to make of his attentions. She sighs. She turns her plump face to the deep, blue lagoon. A white boat with dark stripes on its sides speeds past; a figure is crouched inside, almost invisible” (29). The poem “Three Words” that the superintendent later pulls out to give her is a poem Lomba had initially written before the raid that landed him in solitary confinement. The nearly invisible person crouched inside the boat that Janice saw earlier seems to become significant—the fleeting presence of the author of the poem, like that hidden almost invisible poet in the Sappho. That a seemingly futile poem meant only for himself had actually reached an audience indicates the power of Lomba’s imagination. When Lomba meets Janice, he finds that “my mental image of her was almost accurate. She was plump. Her face was warm and homely” (36). It is as if his imagination has brought her to life, his SOS poems that he sent out into the world through the unlikely courier of the prison superintendent “written by me to my own soul, to every other soul, the collective soul of the universe” had been found and brought back. He had dreamed his way out of the prison bars, and had reeled in one of the text’s many angels, who pulls his poems out of her purse and gives them back to him.



Endnotes:


[i] The first line of Edgar Allen Poe’s “To Helen” reads “Helen, thy beauty is to me” (Ferguson, Salter, and Stallworthy 879); Lomba writes “Janice, your beauty is to me” (Waiting 31). The first line and a half of Donne’s “The Good-Morrow” reads “I wonder by my troth, what thou and I /Did, till we loved?...” (Ferguson, Salter and Stallworthy 263); Lomba writes “I wonder, my heart, what you and I / Did till we loved” (Waiting 31). The Sappho is reimagined from any one of many translations. The one I am using for comparative purposes here is J. Addington Symonds’ 1833 translation from Henry Thornton Wharton’s collection Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings, and a literal translation (69).

Works Cited in Excerpt:

Habila, Helon. Waiting for an Angel. New York: Norton, 2003.

Ferguson, Mary, Mary Jo Salter, Jon Stallworthy eds. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. 4th Ed. New York: Norton, 1996.

Symonds, J. Addington. “Blest as the immortal gods is he,” in Sappho: Memoir Text, Selected Renderings, and a Literal Translation by Henry Thornton Wharton. London: John Lane, 1908.