Helon Habila's Waiting for an Angel: A Review

Lomba is a university dropout-turned-journalist living in the slums of Lagos in the 1990s. He’s writing a novel. He’s falling in love. But the military-ruled country is tough. Anti-military students are being shot at. Protesters are being chased off. Activists are being hung. Journalists are being killed with letter bombs, their news houses torched. Lomba himself is in the end captured and jailed. And this is where we start from. We start at the end and drift towards the beginning, each chapter a progress in reverse.

This is an impressive piece of plotting. It's stylish structure. It's what is most remarkable about Waiting for an Angel, a 35-year-old Helon Habila’s 2002 debut novel. Actually the book is a novel-in-stories. A novel made up of short stories. Some of the stories in fact appeared in altered forms in his 2000 self-published 150-something-page story collection Prison Stories (Epik Books, Lagos). So the short stories are standalone but they together become a single long story, each small story a chapter unto itself and a part of the whole, each its own story but also a section of the overall plot. Still the gaps in the plotline fill up naturally without confusing the reader. This structure here is complex without being difficult, simple without being simplistic. It neither frustrates nor belabors the reader. This is a testament to the gift of a young, talented writer.

Expectedly this novel-in-stories template necessitates big cohesiveness, which the novel achieves. But then it also displays cohesiveness achieved through easy-to-miss detailing. Take the fact that some small facts of a story or a character are scattered across other stories. This is one way the characterization acquires nuances and depth. Sometimes, to catch a sense of the main characters outside of conflicts, you need to read them in a story where they’re not a central figure. Of Bola, read “Alice.” There, outside of the wrecks life deposits on his lap, he lectures and preps Lomba for a date (with Alice). He is giddy, generous, supportive. Removed from under the pressures of life, the humanity of this book's characters, like Bola’s, shines through – like the tip of a patent leather shoe. They become in the calm and quiet of life fuller persons, uninflated and undefined by the big, ugly moments of life.

But you notice the mood of the book before its structure. In “The Angel,” the only story not named after a character, the shortest of them all, an anonymous young man wakes up one morning knowing he’s going to die that day. He’s been told by a marabout that he’d know when his day comes. And so he spends his day awaiting the angel of death to come take him. This is a literal depiction of the overall mood of the book. The mood is tense, dark, deathly. Death hangs in the air like camphor. It swells in the air like balloons. The angel of death hovers throughout the book above the surface of the prose like a lost parachute. Everyone – characters and readers alike – is always awaiting a sure death, which could take many forms. Death abounds. Death of the body, of the spirit, of a relationship, of a democracy, of a country, of a love, of a mother, of a family, etc. Waiting is a manual on the act of dying. It’s One Thousand Ways to Die in book format.

Helon describes the state of the country under military rule in the afterword. But he doesn’t need to. The first story captures that deathly atmosphere from the first sentence and all the other stories sustain it. This is a success that could have easily been a limitation in a different writer’s hands. But Habila finds soulful notes amidst a dour atmosphere. He punctuates gloom with sensuous language and serious humor, viable succors in this context, so that what we have is not pulp tragedy but a dark, difficult reality. Plus the humor flows naturally from the context of the story and the nature of the characters. It's humor that feels so fated that it doesn't feel at all like the orchestration of a writer.

Beside the novel-in-stories template, the stories are linked to each other subtly. And this further strengthens the arc of the stories, holding them together like veins – hidden until teased out. One secret technique is to tie the stories together with symbols, which Habila has a flair for. Take for one the avian imageries. For a book that has an “angel” in its title, it’s not strange for Habila to keep some wings flapping. So he keeps the birds flying, flitting from stories to stories, perching on and taking off from sentences like clotheslines.

At a bar still echoing the coup announced on the TV a while ago, a soldier turns into an angel – in the mind of the narrator – and claps its big wings. Just a moment later the same person makes out “a huge bird shape flying out of the bar and ascending with the sound of a thousand wings.” At a bereaved home brightly-coloured birds flit about in the frangipani bush behind the neighboring house, chirping and picking straw. “They looked so vital, so frenzied, as if to burn out their short, avian lives, as if trying to get it all over with before the evil shape lurking in the darkness emerged fully.” At a hospital the spirit of someone’s cancer-sick mother flies around, “beating its wings against the ceiling, drawing closer and closer to the window every day.” A few paragraphs later we’re told “incense burned furiously as if to ward off “the death that hovers determinedly in the air.” On a day someone is walked out on by his lover, no “birds of augury cross the sky, shrieking, casting long significant shadows on the ground.”

See how the wings stink of death and gloom? Surely death – or its angel Israfael – has crept into the chests of birds, flying about and spreading its dark message from the sky like airdrops. The people of this book are caught in the web of a brutal “khakistocrazy.” They are trapped. They are helpless. They are destitute. Much like the birds chirping in the frangipani bush. But they’ve also got a stubborn will. Thanks to Habila’s accurate characterization of these people – of this place. So they’re not trying to get it over with before the evil shape lurking in the darkness fully emerges. They’re waiting to face and dare the evil shape when it emerges.

This is why a newspaper editor, whose news house has just been torched, who’s wanted by the state, who’s been pursued by soldiers, rejects a goodwill offer to leave the country. This is why a young journalist, who despite being wanted by state security has just rejected a free offer to leave the country, turns down an invitation to follow a potential lover home and instead goes to cover an attack-prone demonstration. This is why a young, brilliant university graduate agreed to lead a protest he knows to likely erupt into violence. This is why a university student joins the student anti-military, pro-democracy struggle that will surely attract the anger of the military juntas.

A lesser recurring motif that serves the same purpose is the upturned drum, a makeshift podium at protest grounds. An unserious parody of real-life civil martyrs like Martin Luther King and Ken Saro Wiwa, a figure who embodies resistance will mount a drum and stir the people up. Joshua, who leads Poverty Street residents in a demonstration, is one. Sankara, the University of Lagos Student Union president, is another. Even an insane Bola mounts a bin on a Lagos street and like a preacher sings a song of devotion before chiding the military. This is a symbol of will – itself a source of hope.

Waiting was first published 22 years ago and is about the military junta Abacha-ruled Nigeria of the 1990s. Scary it is that it still reads like the story of the Nigeria of today, of now. The long petrol queues at filling stations, the fatal demonstrations, the arrests of protesters, the suppression of free speech, etc., are still happening at the moment. The book lives on while the country keeps dying. It’s a scary, deathly success of a book. But we have to divorce this book from gloom and death lest we'll be dishonest. This book is a worthy introduction to a major voice in Nigerian literature. This here is the very foundation – forget Prison Notes – for a career committed to the real nobodies and the dregs of democracy. From Waiting to Oil on Water – personal favorites – to Measuring Time to Travelers, Habila's fiction fetches us news about the lives of the ordinary people and induces in us – or at least demands of us – empathy. In 2015, Helon Habila won the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize. Beyond the award price of about USD150,000 and the prestige, I think the citation is the biggest win for the writer. Such understanding of his practice. Here: “Helon Habila is that rare combination of storyteller and stylist who challenges expectations while deepening our empathy for ordinary people confronting extraordinary times.” These are words said by the judges. But you can say them, too.