Waiting for An Angel: Fiction

Rating:
Summary: Days as black as pitch
Review: Lomba is a political prisoner in Nigeria. He used to be a student in the capital city, Lagos, but then his roommate was attacked by soldiers and went mad. He used to be in love (perhaps he still is), but then his girl married a General with money. He used to be a journalist living on Poverty Street and writing for the Dial, but then the journalists were arrested and the Dial offices burned to the ground. And so he is in prison.

WAITING FOR AN ANGEL starts out quietly sad, with Lomba already in prison, writing love poems for a prison superintendent in an effort to improve his lot. Whether he succeeds or not is speculated on but never really known, for the rest of the book is a flashback, told in first- and third-person accounts by Lomba and several others, including a 15-year-old boy sent to live with his aunt in Lagos as punishment for smoking marijuana. At times the reader learns about students fleeing their college; at other times about a small foods store and its twisted inhabitants. The jumps between time and place unfortunately do irreparable damage to the narrative's flow, but the prose is clean, the details sordid but evocative, and the desperation very real. The political unrest deepens and the death count rises as the demonstrations turn violent.

When I started reading WAITING FOR AN ANGEL, I thought the angel in question would be one of freedom, one of hope, but I was wrong. It's the Angel of Death, who makes its appearance in the second chapter -- my favorite part of the book as I have often pondered what goes through people's minds as they are attacked by mobs and soldiers in toppling countries. Helon Habila does a skilled enough job in this debut novel of fear and frustration in 1990s despot-driven Nigeria that perhaps now I know.

At the end of the narrative is an afterward describing the real-life crisis in Nigeria that fueled this small novel. Habila states that his goal was to capture the mood of those years, and in WAITING FOR AN ANGEL he has definitely outdone himself.

Rating:
Summary: "It was a terrible time to be alive."
Review: Lomba is a young aspiring novelist who is struggling to jump-start his writing career in the midst of chaos and rebellion in Nigeria during the 1990's. The brutal and corrupt Nigerian military government and their battle against pro-democracy demonstrations and sympathizers while simultaneously distancing themselves from other nations form the backdrop of this wonderful and poignant novel. Although Lomba does not actively join his classmates and colleagues in their dangerous protests for human rights and government accountability he can't help but be immensely affected by the political events unfolding around him; he is a bystander who quickly becomes a victim of the circumstances.

Written in non-chronological order WAITING FOR AN ANGEL keeps the reader on edge even though the ending is revealed in the first chapter. This novel is a fresh and evocative first-person narrative into the political instability of Nigeria and its effects on the everyday individual. Combining a mixture of historical people in credible, albeit horrifying, circumstances Habila has created wonderful highly textured characters that are at once believable and evoke reader empathy and emotion. As written in a previous review it is recommended to read the Afterword first as it contains essential political context for this novel. There is little doubt that Habila possesses talent as a novelist and I am looking forward to reading more from him. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: "We are dying from a lack of hope."
Review: Nigeria in the 1990s was a police state with human rights abuses so staggering that the country was expelled from the Commonwealth of Nations and faced with world-wide sanctions. Setting his novel during this period, author Habila focuses on Lomba, a frustrated novelist and journalist who is now a starving political prisoner in a Lagos jail, where he has served two years without a trial. Lomba has been keeping his mind alive by writing love poems and a journal, and when the writing is discovered, the jailer persuades Lomba to write love poems for the woman he is courting.

In a series of short story-like episodes, the novel then flashes back to the years before Lomba's arrest, showing the effects of Sani Abacha's dictatorial government on the ordinary citizens of Poverty Street in Lagos, including Lomba himself, as they try to maintain some semblance of hope in an increasingly hopeless world. With no chance of getting his novel published, Lomba has taken a job writing for the Dial, for which he occasionally reports on political demonstrations. In one of these demonstrations, led by Lomba's friend Joshua, unarmed people peacefully protest the neglect of their neighborhood, only to be attacked by fifty armed riot police with tear gas and truncheons.

Horrifying depictions of everyday violence are presented with almost journalistic clarity, and Habila adds further realism by referring to well-known historical events of the time: the hanging of Ken Saro Wiwa; the death by letter bomb of Dele Giwa, the editor of Newswatch magazine; and the shooting of the wife of Moshood Abiola, Abacha's political opponent. The author's inclusion of a character named Helon Habila in the action adds further drama through the suggestion that much of the story may be autobiographical.

In this paean to the spirit of democracy, Habila celebrates the lives of those courageous speakers and writers who have refused to be silenced, even when faced with death. "Every oppressor knows," a character says, "that wherever one word is joined to another word to form a sentence, there'll be revolt." This moving study of idealistic young people refusing to give up, even when faced with threats to their lives, is an unforgettable story of the human spirit waiting for an angel--and sometimes meeting the Angel of Death. Mary Whipple