Printable view of Everything Follows: An Interview With Helon Habila

Everything Follows: An Interview With Helon Habila [1]

Frank Bures

January/February 2003 [2]

1.1.03

As a boy in Nigeria during the 1970s, Helon Habila started reading to shelter himself from the world around him. He lived in the dusty town of Gombe, in the northern region of a country recovering from a long civil war. Although Nigeria had enough oil to make it the richest country on the continent, its government's shift from a military dictatorship to a corrupt democracy did little to rebuild what had been destroyed. The future held little promise for young people like Habila.

His father worked at the Nigerian Ministry of Works, and hoped his son would one day become an engineer. But when he started giving his son romance novels and translations of Arabic classics in Hausa, his native language, he unwittingly put an end to that dream. Rather than focus on Nigeria, Habila spent his time in other places: traveling across the desert with the Israelites of the Bible, swashbuckling with Ali Baba in The Thousand and One Nights, even riding with Hercule Poirot on the Orient Express. Habila read everything—from the giants of Nigerian literature like Chinua Achebe, Booker Prize winner Ben Okri, and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka to pulp novels by Nick Carter and James Hadley Chase.

At the same time he was falling in love with books, Habila was working to master the art of telling stories. In his fifth year of primary school, his teachers recognized his talent and took him to various classrooms to spin his tales for the other kids. In time, these two urges—the need to inhabit a fictional realm, and the need to create one—would come to dominate his life.

In the real world, however, things were not going nearly as well. Nigeria was shifting between military and civilian rule. In 1976, Lieutenant-General Olusegun Obasanjo seized power and implemented an American-style constitution before retiring to his pig farm. Elections followed, but in 1983 and again in 1985, coups saw the military regain control.

After high school, Habila enrolled in the engineering program at Nigeria's Bauchi University of Technology, but dropped out after one year. He then switched to Bauchi College of Arts and Science, but soon quit going to classes completely. By the mid-1980s, he had given up on his father's dream for him to become an engineer, and finally went home to face his failure—and his father. Habila remembers, "All he did was to stare at me and weep into his food."

Habila had no idea which direction his life should take until he found a copy of Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster. This was the signpost he'd been looking for. The book directed him back to the familiar world of literature, and offered him a map to a new life in which he was a writer. Habila holed up in his room, reading and writing, and soon his father began to worry that his son had no friends besides the characters in his books. Then, in 1989, just as Habila was emerging into this new life, his father and younger brother were killed in a car crash. His father never lived to see Habila enter the university for the third time.

This time he studied English and literature at the University of Jos. And this time he thrived.

Nigeria, however, was far from thriving when Habila finished his degree in 1995. Two years earlier, General Sani Abacha, a dictator accused of numerous human rights violations, had taken power and begun his reign during perhaps the worst period of corruption the country had seen. When Abacha ordered the execution of writer and activist Ken Saro Wiwa in 1995, nearly every country in the world imposed sanctions on Nigeria. As a result, the economy was dying at the same time it was being pillaged, and there were unemployed university graduates everywhere.

Habila was lucky, and got a job as an assistant lecturer in English at Federal Polytechnic in Bauchi, a job he held for two years. While there, he also wrote a biography of the chief of his hometown, which was published by Tafawa Balewa Press in 1997, and a draft of a novel, "Prison Stories," a collection of interwoven stories about a young journalist working in the darkest days of the Abacha years.

In 1998 General Abacha died of a heart attack, and democracy returned to Nigeria. By then Habila was ready to move on in his career. He went to the capital city of Lagos, where he found work, first writing stories of love and intrigue for a romance magazine called Hints, then as the arts editor at the Vanguard, Nigeria's fourth-largest daily paper. He continued to work on his poems and short stories, and in 2000 he won two of the country's biggest awards—the Musical Society of Nigeria (MuSon) Poetry Festival Prize for his poem "Another Age" and the Liberty Bank Prize for his short story "The Butterfly and the Artist." He also reworked "Prison Stories" and scrounged up enough money to self-publish it under the title Waiting for an Angel.

That same year, Habila saw a notice posted at the Association of Nigerian Authors for the Caine Prize for African Writing, which had been founded the previous year in honor of longtime Booker Prize chairman Sir Michael Caine. The award was being judged by a panel of African writers including J.M. Coetzee and Buchi Emecheta.

Posing as his own publisher—which he was—Habila submitted a chapter from Angel called "Love Poems." When the Caine Prize committee wrote back to tell Habila's publisher that he'd been shortlisted, he replied anonymously. "Thanks for your mail. We'll let the author know of the good news immediately. We hope that God will guide the judges in their choice." Habila won the $15,000 award, and Norton will publish Waiting for an Angel this month.

Habila recently arrived at the School of English and American Studies at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, England, where he received a two-year writer's fellowship. I spoke to him at his home.

You were a journalist, like the main character, Lomba, in Waiting for an Angel. Was he based on your own experiences?
Partly. It's my first novel, and I think most first novels tend to draw a lot from the writer's experiences; you have not learned to distance yourself yet. So I created this character who is a journalist like me, and an aspiring writer like me—young like me, because it would be easy for me to understand his psyche. The novel is set during the Abacha years, but I wasn't a journalist during the Abacha years. So all those things he went through I imagined.

Like the arrests and bombings?
Exactly. But that is the way I would have behaved if I had been there, I think. Any young person with that character or with that state of mind, that is the way he would have behaved in that situation. I tried to bring an ordinary person into extraordinary circumstances.

Did you know people, journalists, who lived through the Abacha years?
Oh yeah. Lots of my friends—poets and writers.

What did they tell you about it?
Oh, fantastic stories. A friend of mine came to England for a writers conference, and when he was going back he couldn't go through the airports in Nigeria. He had to go through Ghana, because the security at the airports was very, very tight. And anybody who happened to be a kind of intellectual was suspected, and you could be detained. So this guy went through Ghana, and then took a car to the border. And when he was searched by the army officers, they saw a picture of him with Wole Soyinka. And Wole Soyinka was a very vocal critic of the government and he was in exile at that time.

Of the Abacha government?
Yeah, this was in 1997, and Abacha died in 1998. So when they saw that picture they arrested him…just because he had a picture of Wole Soyinka. That shows you how paranoid they were. There was a poet that was killed in Lagos. The story at that time was that he had started turning against other poets, informing against other intellectuals, people in the prodemocracy struggles. And I think when the military got tired of using him, they just killed him. But there were a lot of people like that, who became turncoats just to survive, or for material benefits.

How long was your friend in jail?
Two years, or just under two years.

For having a picture of Wole Soyinka?
Yeah, they just kept you in jail without trial.

Was he released then, when Abacha died?
Yeah.

How is it now? Is there freedom of press, or freedom of speech?
Yeah, that is the good thing that has happened with the coming of democracy. People can actually write now what they want to write. They can actually criticize the government, they can say what is wrong with the government. They can express themselves. This was something that we didn't have during the military years. If you did that at that time, you would get arrested. But now, whether it's effective or not, you can say what you think.

In America, to be a writer, all you effectively have to do is have a computer and write a lot. How is Nigeria different?
Nigeria is very, very different. You don't have a computer in the first place. I mean, I'm talking about an average young writer in Nigeria. You have no computer—longhand. And you do it at your leisure time, because you have to work to make ends meet. So you write when you have time. You just create time. Then after that you find money to type it. Then you try to find a publisher. It's not easy. The publishers are just not there.

They're going out of business?
Yeah, because there is no market for books. Times are so hard. Things are so hard that people just can't afford to buy books for pleasure. You have the publishers who would consider publishing textbooks for universities, for schools, for exams. These are the kinds of books that people mostly buy. But it's very hard to find people buying novels just to read for pleasure, or poetry books for that matter.

Is it getting worse?
Yeah. It is very bad. But I think gradually, with the coming of democracy, there is a bit more activity in the economy. I think things are just picking up gradually.

I know there's a book drought in a lot of places in Africa. I lived in Tanzania for a while, and there were no books, no publishers. It's really hard for writers.
You just have to accept that, even before you start writing. You have to accept that you are not going to make any living from that. So writing becomes something you do just for you, just for the sake of your ego, or because you want to be a writer, or for whatever reason. But it is not an economic activity. Unless you happen to be lucky and win a prize.

Was the freedom of Western writers something Nigerian writers talked about in the Abacha years?
Of course. There was a lot of support from foreign writers for Nigerian intellectuals then. From PEN International, this writers' body. There were a lot of conferences, invitations for Nigerian writers to come and give talks in London, America, and Germany. So there was constant communication between Western writers and Nigerian writers. And I think it did a lot to encourage Nigerian writers. They could vent their frustrations. They could speak their minds. And they knew that they were not alone. That there was somebody somewhere who knew exactly what they were going through. Take, for instance, Ken Saro Wiwa. When he died, when he was hanged by Abacha in 1995, there was an international uproar.

How did that affect the writing community in Nigeria?
A lot of people expected him to die. We knew he was going to be hanged. It didn't come as a shock. But it showed us that this person has reached a point where he cannot go back again. The dictator, Sani Abacha, had reached a point where, in earnest, there was no joking with him. There were a lot of shootings, assassinations across the country, especially in the western part of the country where you had the center of the antimilitary movement. So things really, really became desperate for writers.

What kind of debt do you have to Nigerian writers—Chinua Achebe and Ben Okri?
So much. So much. They were the pioneers, and they showed us that we could do it. They made the way for us, for the younger generation to follow. But it doesn't necessarily mean that we have to continue writing in the same tradition that they wrote in. If you have read my book, you will see that it's totally different from [Achebe's] Things Fall Apart. I try to avoid that…I don't know what to call it—that exotic stuff. I want to write about the reality that is happening now. The use of myth and legend and history was very traditional. Times have changed. We didn't grow up in the villages, like they grew up. We didn't listen to the same stories they listened to by moonlight. But we owe them a lot. They started everything. They gained respect for us. They proved to the world that Africans could do this thing. And they reinterpreted history in a creative way.

A lot of postcolonial African fiction is caught up in anticolonial themes. But Waiting for an Angel isn't. Is there a new generation of writers ready to move on to other things?
Yeah. What I think is, most of this categorization—postcolonial, postmodern, colonial—is the work of the critics. Writers just tell stories. Then the critic will take it and say, "This is a post-colonial story," because of the theme, or a theme that keeps reappearing. But the writer reacts to his times. My only argument with postcolonial literature is its use of new, exotic kind of stuff. Have you read this guy Zakes Mda? He's a South African writer. He won the Commonwealth Prize last year. He was writing about the coming of the white man to South Africa and the traditional way people used to live and how it was destroyed by the white man, and all that.

And he won the Commonwealth Prize for that?
It's well written, and it's well researched; maybe that's why he won. But I'm against that kind of writing. It's just bullshit. That is the kind of stuff that Achebe wrote in Things Fall Apart. Fifty years ago. There are things to write about that are not just Africans going about naked and all that shit. Where everybody is speaking in proverbs. It doesn't happen. It's just not there anymore. So we just have to write about what's happening now. I'm not saying that people shouldn't write about history, or historical fiction. But it should be in a way that's relevant to what's happening now. I prefer people like J.M. Coetzee. He's quite good. Ben Okri is good. But unfortunately, he's also not writing about immediate things. He keeps going to the 1960s. Imagine somebody writing all of his novels—not one, not two, not three—all of them set in the 1960s in Nigeria. I mean, this guy is just about forty years old, so why does he keep doing that? It's terrible.

page_5:

In Waiting for an Angel, one of your characters says, "In this country, the very air we breathe is politics."
Exactly. Because the African societies—almost all African societies—are in a formative stage now. Our rulers are not what they should be. Our economy is not what it should be. So we cannot afford to write escapist kinds of literature, going back seventy years, eighty years. We have to put all our resources into shaping our future. There is no one to do it for us. You have journalists; you have columnists. But what will last is the novel. It's going to be there for hundreds of years. It's going to be a document that will reach our children.

If I were a kid from the Nigerian country-side and I wanted to go to Lagos to be a writer, what would I want to do? What path would I want to take?
The easiest way, if you want to do that, is to become a journalist. Because most of the writers in Lagos are journalists. So you will get to meet them. You have to join the writers' body called the Association of Nigerian Authors. They have meetings, and that's where you see all the foreign writers who come to the country. They give talks. And whenever there is a competition, that is where you get to hear about it. And they publish anthologies of writing from new writers almost every year, so you are lucky to get your work published in it. That's also where you are likely to hear opinions about your writing, because you show it to people there who are aspiring writers like you. The competitions are very, very important. Once you win a competition, it sets you slightly above other people there. You tend to get interviewed by these journalists in the literary columns, and people take you more seriously. And maybe your work will be published in an anthology. Then you are a published writer, and you start going from there.

And you won two competitions at the same time?
Two in one year, and one the following year.

You came across this book Aspects of the Novel, which you say became your bible. What did you get out of that book?
Everything. Everything. After reading that book, I really decided I wanted to be a writer. I just loved everything. And the examples—so many books mentioned. I was impressed by the amount of books cited there, and that this guy must have read all these books. And then I started thinking, "Let me try to get these books." Because the books he used are the best from English literature.

Do you remember which ones?
Henry James, Dickens, even some French writers and Russian writers. So I said to myself, "Let me just get these books and read them." So I started gathering some of them, the ones I could get in Nigeria, and reading them. That was before I went to university. But what that book taught me was just about the whole craft of fiction—from characterization to point of view to everything. And when I went to university, on the first day of our fiction class, I was just looking at the lecturer, because the text for the course was Aspects of the Novel. And I had read it cover to cover. And at one point I was quoting from the book and she said, "Wow." She was amazed.

You said that literature opened you up to the idea that life could be different from what you saw around you.
Yeah. Life could be more meaningful. You see, literature is ordered. You have your beginning. You have your middle. You have your ending. You have your story. You have your plot. Everything follows. Everything falls into place. If we could actually make our lives like that, life would have more meaning. I know life doesn't follow a plot. But imagine if you try thinking like that, following the example of literature, dispensing with whatever is not necessary in our lives, knowing that if we go outside this line we should follow then the story is going to be destroyed. Our lives are going to be destroyed. We could just go, doing what is necessary, what we have to do, dispensing with whatever is not necessary, like a good story. Then we live a happy life. We have a good moment at the end.

In England, is it different to be in a place where the power of the written word is not so much that it can endanger your life? Where it's just…
Just "literary activity." Yeah. It's very different. And it shows in the literature here. Their books are mostly about domestic affairs. This husband divorces his wife. This person leaves home and doesn't come back and the children grow up without a father. Whereas in Africa, you can define our literature as mainly political. So the writers here are more relaxed. There's more freedom here. There's more latitude to do what you want to do, say what you want to say. And I think there's a danger here of forgetting one's origins, one's roots, if one stays here too long. So one needs to keep in touch with one's roots all the time, to keep going back. It confirms to you that what you are doing is right.… But the good thing is that there are a lot of African writers here, from all parts of Africa.

What do you think the Caine Prize could do for literature in Africa?
You know, there has been a lot of debate in Nigeria, among my friends, among poets and writers there, about whether this prize is really good for Africans or not, or whether it's a kind of patronizing prize given to Africans by the colonial masters, based on their idea of what African literature should be. But I see that as bullshit. We have to be realistic. The situation back home is very dire, very difficult. Writers need any break they can get now. Nobody is giving us any chances. The writers who made it, like Wole Soyinka and Achebe, they're not helping anybody; they're not introducing us to the publishers. Nobody is making any headway. The Commonwealth Prize is different. The NOMA Prize is different. They are for published works. But with the Caine Prize, you can enter with a story in a journal. It's going to the grass roots. It's going to the young writer who has nothing going for him. If you look at the winners over the past few years, they have been writers who are unpublished. Writers like me. Before me it was Leila Aboulela, a Sudanese housewife. We need that kind of thing now, because the publishers are not there. If I was in Nigeria now, if I hadn't won the Caine Prize, I don't even want to think of where I would be.

One of your characters says, "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." Is the way so dark now?
No, I think it's better now. All over, especially in Nigeria. We are real people now. We are not just characters in a story now. We don't live by the whim of the author. We can actually turn our lives now. We can actually think for ourselves culturally. We can hope now. There is hope.

Frank Bures is a freelance writer in Portland, Oregon. He writes for Tin House, the Christian Science Monitor, and other publications. His profile of Elizabeth Gilbert appeared in the May/June 2002 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.