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May. 9th, 2007 09:03 pmI finished Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel yesterday. The book describes the political awakening of Lomba, a young journalist in Lagos, Nigeria. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Waiting for an Angel is its chronology. Habila begins at the end of his story, opening the book with a depiction of Lomba in prison as a political detainee. This is by far the most powerful part of the book, depicting Lomba’s anger, his resignation, the grinding brutality of prison life, and the overwhelming desire for freedom that never stops burning in Lomba. (This opening chapter was first published in Nigeria as part of an anthology called Prison Stories, and it won the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2001.) After showing us how Lomba ends up, Habila then bounces backwards in time and relates various incidents that help us piece together how he got there. Each incident is told separately; it’s not always clear in what order they happened, and some of them are only peripherally related to Lomba. The thread that unites all of these incidents is the appalling nature of day-to-day life in Nigeria under Sani Abacha’s oppressive government.
I thought this was an excellent book, although it seemed a shame that Habila used his best bit of writing at the very start. No matter how good the rest of the book was it didn’t stand a chance of living up to the first chapter. Still, the rest of the book was quite good. The characterization verged on the simplistic at times, but Habila did a fantastic job of capturing the political climate in Nigeria: the random violence, the mounting tension in the slums, the complete breakdown of the social order. Habila’s prose style is detached through most of the book, but he’s not afraid of using strong rhetoric when the situation calls for it. I was particularly impressed by the scene in which Lomba’s editor takes him to visit a slavery museum and equates the plight of the slaves with that of present-day Nigerians. The scene ends with the editor delivering this exhortation to Lomba:
It was in the ships that the mouth-locks were used, so that the slaves couldn’t console each other and rally their spirits and thereby revolt. To further discourage communication, no two persons of the same language were kept together: Mandingo was chained to Yoruba, Wolof was chained to Ibo, Bini was chained to Hausa. You see, every oppressor knows that wherever one word is joined to another word to form a sentence, there’ll be revolt. That is our work: to refuse to be silenced, to encourage legitimate criticism wherever we find it. Do you now understand?
I thought this was an excellent book, although it seemed a shame that Habila used his best bit of writing at the very start. No matter how good the rest of the book was it didn’t stand a chance of living up to the first chapter. Still, the rest of the book was quite good. The characterization verged on the simplistic at times, but Habila did a fantastic job of capturing the political climate in Nigeria: the random violence, the mounting tension in the slums, the complete breakdown of the social order. Habila’s prose style is detached through most of the book, but he’s not afraid of using strong rhetoric when the situation calls for it. I was particularly impressed by the scene in which Lomba’s editor takes him to visit a slavery museum and equates the plight of the slaves with that of present-day Nigerians. The scene ends with the editor delivering this exhortation to Lomba:
It was in the ships that the mouth-locks were used, so that the slaves couldn’t console each other and rally their spirits and thereby revolt. To further discourage communication, no two persons of the same language were kept together: Mandingo was chained to Yoruba, Wolof was chained to Ibo, Bini was chained to Hausa. You see, every oppressor knows that wherever one word is joined to another word to form a sentence, there’ll be revolt. That is our work: to refuse to be silenced, to encourage legitimate criticism wherever we find it. Do you now understand?
