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A multitude of angels

Waiting for an Angel
Helon Habila
Penguin, London
2003
228 pages

Reviewed by Richard Bartlett

‘Love Poems’ won the 2002 Caine Prize for African Writing and Helon Habila, a Nigerian, has turned this winning story in a novel, of sorts. Knowing the first chapter of the book gives an expectation of brilliance, of understated anguish and liberation that mark the time of Lomba, the central character of the story, in prison. In this we are not disappointed, yet all other expectations are confounded.

Habila has not turned one story into a novel, he has not made this story into the introduction of a novel, but what he has done is use ‘Love Poems’ as the opening scene of a multi-layered narrative in which characters make brief, almost circumstantial, cameo appearances in each other’s angelic waiting period. The opening story is the culmination, chronologically at least, of one Nigerian’s experience of injustice and the creation of hope and beauty in the midst of such injustice.

Lomba is a prisoner, a political detainee, who liberates himself through writing in prison until his poems and diary are discovered by the warders. Do we, as witnesses, oberservers, consumers of his incarceration need to know why he is in prison? Is it not enough to know that this is Nigeria under the leadership of General Sani Abacha, the same one who hanged Ken Saro Wiwa?

Lomba creates poems of love, he escapes the confines through his ability to manipulate words in the secrecy of an overcrowded jail cell, where his space is delimited by the edges of his mattress. But discovery, by the warders, of his stash of papers brings a further chance of escape as the prison superintendent seeks to harness the beauty of Lomba’s poetry and present it as his own, to impress a woman he is seeing.

This works until Lomba runs out of inspiration and starts plagiarising Sappho’s Ode and begins to leave cryptic messages in the poems which lead the woman to uncover the truth. It is easy to see the overt, the obvious message of this story as that of the pen being mightier than the sword, as the warrior seeks to turn the prisoner’s talent to the fostering of passion.

"Lomba escapes the confines through his ability to manipulate words in the secrecy of an overcrowded jail cell"

This metaphor, of pen versus sword, is one that reappears throughout the novel, as Lomba is not just incarcerated poet, he is also aspiring novelist and journalist in his previous life/subsequent chapters, but he is only ever briefly the central character. Other practitioners of the pen also make appearances, such as the eager student getting extra English classes from the radical young teacher, the gathering of poets who yearn to mingle with suffering writers to lend an air of credibility to their own pretensions – "You really must try and get arrested – that’s the quickest way to make it as a poet."

But to view this work simply as a novel whose message is a facile one of endurance of the pen over fickleness of the sword is to ignore the myriad other environments Habila introduces us to in contemporary Nigeria. The second chapter introduces us directly to the angel of the title, only it is the angel of death arriving in the guise of soldiers imposing a curfew. Angels, of death and otherwise, as with the symbolism of writing/pens, are scattered throughout the work. In the first instalment, one of the angels is tangible in the form of the warders’ love interest. Most often, and almost as perpetual background, the angels are not of the gentle, white-feathered type, they are more ominous, bearers of tear-gas canisters rather than good tidings.

Each instalment, that together comprise one narrative, takes us into the lives of different types of Nigerians. The university students whose lives are turned upside down by a cocktail of road accident, suppression of peaceful dissent and closure of the university. There is the poor boy from the north who comes to live in the big city to get some real schooling, the young teacher whose beloved has turned prostitute, and the idealist young novelist who has to turn to journalism when he realises novels are a waste of time. As his editor explains: "…let us assume you’ve finished [your novel]. Let us assume it is a good book, potentially great. Let us say you’ve found a publisher to publish it – we are talking theory now, because in reality you won’t find a publisher for it, not in this country."

But lest you think this is autobiographical, this same journalist, now facing the reality of dreams shattered and a malevolent state pursuing him, finds himself at a party filled with what its host describes as the ‘brotherhood of the pen’. He is in a dreamlike state sitting on the edges of a party while fearing for his life when one of the carefree party-goers makes an entrance: "Someone rushes out and leans over the rail and throws up.
‘Hi,’ he says to Lomba, wiping his mouth with his hand, ‘I am Helon Habila.’" Elsewhere Lomba makes the observation that "there is so much we can’t understand because we are only characters in a story and our horizon is so narrow and so dark."

This is but one of the many surprises Habila has in store for the reader as we try to make sense of the lives of the characters, just as they are trying to make sense of it for themselves.

One of the instalments is entitled Alice, who for a short while was Lomba’s girlfriend. It doesn’t last "because my friend went mad, because of the riots, because I dropped out of school, because of so many things….what was love but luxury?" And it is in this pain of encountering a lost love, that Lomba writes that "life’s paths are never straight, they wind and turn and convolute", and that is exactly what Habila has done in creating a novel that is made up of instalments, a work of cinematic clips without any of the visual distractions of film.

Comparisons with other works are inevitable and in our world of media bombardment, what came to mind on thinking of Habila’s technique of switching time and characters, was not another novel, but Quinton Tarantino’s film Pulp Fiction. This is not for the violence which many remember the film for, but for the constant switching from one scene to the next with little apparent link between the various facets until a climax and the survivors ride off into the sunset. Habila creates a similar cinematic effect in his novel, which ends, on the last page, with Lomba walking into the twilight to close a circle, that is only perceived as such when we rush in.

It is a rush because we must scale the plot, open new horizons with each instalment and have the privilege of savouring metaphors that linger with the surprise of perfume in a prison. And I could give you an example, but that would defeat the point, they would lose their context, the potency and their reason for existence. It is something you must savour for yourself.

Richard Bartlett is the co-editor of the African Review of Books.