Abstract
Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel (2002) presents a portrayal of Nigeria under the military dictatorships of the 1990s. This chapter analyses the way this elaborately structured narrative, which can be described both as a novel and as a short story cycle, depicts Nigeria as a prison for its protagonist Lomba that can only be escaped by leaving the country. The novel also includes a strong metareferential component, examining the theme of journalistic and literary writing as modes of resistance and political activism.
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Notes
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Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2003), which covers roughly the same period, taps into the same mood of despair and a sense of captivity. Her novel, however, focuses mainly on the crises within the protagonist’s family. While these crises can be seen as allegorical for the national situation, the political events of the time mostly remain in the background.
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Sefi Atta’s novel Everything Good Will Come (2005), also set in Lagos in the 1990s, deals with the experience of prison as well. In Atta’s novel, it is not Enitan, the protagonist, who is imprisoned but her father. As a result, the novel presents the perspective of the people on the outside, who have a family member in detention and consequently only get second-hand accounts of life in prison, if at all. The account of Enitan’s father draws a gruesome picture of his prison experience: “They don’t interrogate prisoners in detention; they torture them. Nail pulling, ice baths. If you’re one of the lucky ones, they will throw you in a cell and leave you on your own. Mosquitoes? Plenty. Food? Unbearable. Grown men cry inside there. They cry like babies and run away from the country to avoid it” (Atta 2008, 234).
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On account of its narrative experimentation and fragmentation, as well as its implied worldview, which arguably includes the rejection of a “notion of historical totality, the emancipatory potential of revolution, and the traditional utopian impulse”, Erritouni (2010, 144–145) has referred to Waiting for an Angel as a postmodern novel.
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Several of the Nigerian-born novelists discussed in this study also left the country during the 1990s, including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chris Abani, and Helon Habila.
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Feldner, M. (2019). The Prison of 1990s Nigeria: Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel (2002). In: Narrating the New African Diaspora. African Histories and Modernities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05743-5_5
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