WRITING THE ANGEL: HELON HABILA’S WAITING FOR AN ANGEL by Carmen R. McCain A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (African Languages and Literature) at the UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON 2007 ii Table of Contents Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………..………….……iii Introduction……………………………………………………………………………...........1 Chapter One: The prison as metaphor for life under the military state…………..................13 Chapter Two: Lomba as Synecdoche for the Experience of the Nation: the movement from lethargy to defiance……………………………………………………..………...………....30 Chapter Three: The Imagination as Tool: Undermining the oppressor’s walls.………….....43 Chapter Four: Layering History: Intertextuality and Multivocality, the novel form as liberation………………………………………………………………..………………..….56 Chapter Five: Complicating the Symbolic and Re-orienting the role of the Writer……...…73 Chapter Six: Breaking into History: destabilizing the boundaries between fiction and reality through the social imagination………………………………………………………….…...88 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………111 Appendix 1: A Brief Biography of Helon Habila………………….………………………116 Appendix 2: Historical Background…………………………….…………………………120 Appendix 3: A Chronological Reconstruction of the Novel……………………………....124 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………….………128 iii Acknowledgements Godiya ta tabbata ga Allah mad’aukakin Sarki. Bayan haka…. Thank you to my advisor Tejumola Olaniyan, who forced me to be much more rigorous with my close reading. Thank you to the other members of my committee Linda Hunter, who was unfailingly encouraging, and Dean Makuluni, who offered so many useful suggestions when I turned in my first paper comparing Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters, Okey Ndibe’s Arrows of Rain and Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel for his Contemporary African Fiction class. Thank you to Harold Scheub, who gave me such amazing feedback when I wrote my second paper on Waiting for an Angel for his African Mythology Seminar, and to the other members of the seminar Nafeesa Nichols, Anna Lewandowski, Dixie Beadle, Monique McDougal, Melinda Bailey, and Sheila Holloway for their helpful suggestions. Thank you to those writers whose names I do not know who urged me to buy Prison Stories at the Association of Nigerian Authors Convention in 2001, and to Kanchana Ugbabe at the University of Jos, who taught Helon Habila when he was at the university and who first told me that Prison Stories was being published as Waiting for an Angel by Norton. I also thank the fourth year students in Professor Ugbabe’s Studies in Fiction class, who gave me fresh insights on the novel after my guest lecture in August 2006. Thank you also to Chielezona Eze and Christopher Okonkwo for sharing with me the papers they had written on the novel. Thank you to my family (Mom, Dad, Daniel, Laura, and Tassneem) and other relatives, who prayed for me when I was stuck (especially Uncle Phil who told me to just get iv the thing done—no matter how imperfect). Thank you to my best friend Ruth Gyuse, who read over drafts of the paper that I presented at the Towards an Africa Without Borders conference and listened to me brainstorm about my ideas and kvetch about the writing process. Thank you to my roommate Sara Phillips, who listened to me cry when I was terribly stuck and then put up with my insane whirlwind week of writing in May 2006 (and did the dishes and drove me to the airport) and my week of horrendous writers block in August 2006. Thank you to my Writing Center angels Annette Vee, who patiently walked me through my second proposal and outline and read long chapters outside of Writing Center hours, and Melissa Tedrowe, without whom I never would have been able to finish the revision and restructuring process. Thank you to other friends who listened to me talk incessantly about this thesis John Anderson, David Atherton, Natalie Belisle, Heather DuBois Bourenane, Matt Brown, Florence Ebila, Hala Ghoneim, Rebecca Lorins, Hilary Lum, Mukoma wa Ngugi, and to my online friends who gave me such helpful feedback: Texter, Teju Cole, and my sparring buddy Fred. And finally godiyar ga Helon Habila for writing a novel that had the power to captivate me for six years and will continue to captivate me for many more. I look forward to reading his next projects. 1 INTRODUCTION History has the cruel reality of a nightmare, and the grandeur of man consists in his making beautiful and lasting works out of the real substance of that nightmare. Or to put it another way, it consists in transforming the nightmare into vision, in freeing ourselves from the shapeless horror of reality—if only for an instant by means of creation. –Octavio Paz, Labyrith of Solitude, 104. In Christopher Okonkwo’s paper “Talking and Te(x)tifying: Ndibe, Habila, and Adichie’s ‘Dialogic’ Narrativizations of Nigeria’s Post War Nadir: 1984-1998” given at the 2005 African Studies Association conference, he suggests that three contemporary Nigerian novels Okey Ndibe’s Arrows of Rain, Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus can be “linked ‘dialogically’ …. [t]hat is, these are novels unconsciously in dialogue—they are talking about, conversing, and/or contributing discrete discursive voices or perspectives on that subject of Nigeria’s post-war bleak epoch” (par. 4). 1 This “unconscious” dialogue between the novels is inherently linked to the state of Nigeria that all three novelists describe in their novels. As such the actual historical condition of Nigeria and the events that took place during the period of dictatorship from 1984-1998 are used as a type of text that is alluded to symbolically in each of the novels, creating an unconscious form of intertextuality. Moreover, Okonkwo argues, all three texts “‘te(x)stify’ to the horrors of the nadir, thereby performing, recuperating and affirming the power and resiliency of that human and civil right of ‘voice’ which the army sought desperately to stifle and invalidate” (par. 4). These texts themselves “perform” and together “chart a liberation imperative and trajectory.” That is by retelling the history of 2 Nigeria, the three novels are able to reinterpret and symbolically re-imagine in their texts the movement from “nihilism to hope, absence to presence, and from apathy to action” (par. 8). In my thesis, I will focus specifically on how Helon Habila’s novel Waiting for an Angel shows how the imagination can provide liberation from this historical “nadir,” what Octavio Paz calls the “nightmare” of history. While my main focus is on Waiting for an Angel published by Norton in 2002, I will also use the “collection of organically related short stories,” Prison Stories, that Habila self-published in 2000 to inform my analysis.2 Argument In brief, I argue that although the writer does not have the power to physically change the oppressive conditions of the military state, the writer can undermine the psychological oppression of the military state through the defiant use of the imagination. By rejecting the illusion of monolithic power that the state projects and by connecting with and listening to the stories of a larger community, the writer can simultaneously help shape a social imagination and rewrite history from the perspective of the community. This social imagination, while not immediately dominant, can eventually lead to physical change. While many African novels engage with these ideas, I will focus specifically on how they manifest in Helon Habila’s novel Waiting for an Angel. By first looking at the metaphor of the military state as a prison or a puppet-text, I will show how Habila uses his writer character, Lomba, as a synecdoche for the inhabitants of the prison-state and demonstrates the agency available to them.3 Lomba’s move from lethargy to imaginative defiance is echoed in the actions of many other characters throughout the novel. The revolutionary potential of the 3 imagination is evident in the form of the novel itself, as Habila uses the multi-vocal, intertextual, and fragmented text to demonstrate how fiction can affect history. Chapter Breakdown In Chapter One, I explore Habila’s metaphoric presentation of historical oppression, as a prison or predetermined text in which the inhabitants are trapped. I will look at how the novel reflects historical forms of oppression that were found in Nigeria under the military rule of the 1980s and 90s: both through the decay of a stripped national infrastructure and through the repression of those who speak out against the government. Out of these two types of physical oppression come fear and lethargy as the populace attempts to live in an environment in which their dreams are continuously crushed. In Chapter Two, I will examine how Habila presents the character Lomba as a synecdoche for the nation and how his move from lethargy to action is reflected in the larger populace. In Chapter Three, I will look specifically at how Lomba demonstrates the power of the imagination to undermine the prison walls, blurring the boundaries between his imagination and his reality. Through the conscious use of the form of the “harmless love poem” and by using the tool of intertextuality, he not only tricks his jailor into delivering secret messages for him but he also imagines an audience that eventually arrives to give him hope. In Chapter Four, I will look at how Lomba’s use of the imagination is reflected in the outer form of Habila’s novel. I will specifically focus on Habila’s use of intertextuality to indicate the permeable boundaries between multiple stories. By layering onto settings from 4 other stories and by appropriating characters from multiple sources, he demonstrates the permeable boundaries of the novel. The existence of multiple texts and multiple voices within the text undermines the illusion of psychological power that the oppressor tries to maintain.