HISTORY IN THE WORKS OF HELON HABILA WAITING FOR AN ANGEL MEASURING TIME AND OIL ON WATER

Abstract

Human reality has been one of the major concerns of literature. But human reality cannot  be  fully  explored  without  history.  However,  history  and  literature  have remained antithetical fields of study since we assume from the conventional notion of history as being all about the presentation of facts and literature, an untrue story. This  study  builds  from  the  existing  studies  which  have  recently  established  a relationship between history and literature; thereby finding the trappings of history in literature. This report seeks to unravel the representation of history in the works of Helon Habila (Waiting for an Angel, Measuring Time and Oil on Water). It adopts New Historicism, an extrinsic theory that allows a study of literature from societal, historical and cultural perspectives. Thus, the literary texts are read parallel to the non literary texts that stress similar historical issues and times as those captured in the literary texts. The result therefore is that Habila through his fiction has captured history as:  Collective Memory, Information, and Instruction.

CHAPTER ONE

General Introduction

1.1       Introduction

The art of representation is inherent in the literary artist. He brings into play concepts, thoughts and themes that naturally connect the mind and invoke meaning. The literary artist, by way of representation, teaches, and this teaching in turn produces liveliest pleasure in him, as Aristotle observes in his Art Poetica (1). Representation becomes however essential to a literary artist for the dual roles it plays. It brings to him delight on the one hand, and on the other hand, it educates him and those who have access to his work or oeuvre. By implication a literary artist, no doubt, has a broad spectrum of social reality, if he must be committed  to  his art and find satisfaction from it. The broad nature of his task may include the topical issues of his interest: representation of phenomenon   (both   social   and   natural)   –   abstract   concepts,   human   beings, culture/history,  etc. More  importantly,  a literary artist begins his duty by involving himself in the reality around him, more often drawing useful material from the social issues of his time. As such, he engages himself with his past, his (vicarious and direct) experiences; not as a historian but as a philosopher, as Aristotle says, “to engage into the  probable” (Art Poetica, 1). James Ngugi is of the opinion that “the novelist is haunted by the sense of the past. His work is often an attempt to come to terms with a thing that has been; has struggled, as it were, to sensitively register his encounter with history, and a novelist at best must feel himself heir to this continuous tradition” (4).

Helon Habila the writer whose works form the subject of analysis in this study is equally preoccupied with the past and he recreates history in Waiting for an Angel, Measuring  Time  and  Oil  on  Water.    He  evokes  what  Myers  calls  ‘ideological

operations’ of the time that are responsible for the social structure and changes at a certain period of time. These ideological operations in a given period (in the texts) are past  events,  which  are  represented  through  fiction;  thus,  they  operate  in  dual capacities:  first  as  history  and  second,  as  fiction.  This  marriage  of  fiction  and historical facts in the work of Habila is to some extent demonstrable of faction. Habila simply  recasts  the  society’s  (Nigerian/African)   experiences  through  imaginative power. It is as a result of this that he models his novel after the archetypal modern State   revealing   the   experiences   of   individuals,   families,   students,   politicians, professionals and their alienation and disillusionment.

In an interview with Ramonu Sanusi, Habila explains the source of Waiting for an Angel and Measuring Time thus:

It is a novel about a distinct period in our history: the 1990s, or as some people term it, the military years. It is a story about the lives and dreams and hopes that were wasted by those draconian days – but it is also about some people’s determination  to  survive  despite  all  that  darkness.  The  main  character  is Lomba, a journalist falsely arrested by the regime. He is one of the survivors and he proves in the book that though the body may be imprisoned, the mind can still remain free. I lived through those days and I wanted to write about it, to keep it as a record of that moment in our history….

Measuring Time was a novel I wanted to write even before I wrote Waiting for an Angel. I’ve always been fascinated by history, by culture, and how culture changes with time. The African culture in particular has gone through so much

change since the contact with the West in the 18th  and 19th  centuries. So  the

second book is a look into that, a look at the new Africa and the forces that

drive  it. I do this through  the changing  fortunes  of one family over a  few generations – but the main focus are the twins, Mamo and LaMamo, and their father. The story covers their lives from childhood to adulthood. Mamo is the one that becomes a historian and through his writing he interrogates the idea of history and culture. He is also a biographer and he attempts to write the story of his family and friends. It is also about the idea of power, and how sometimes culture is used as a screen by people in power in order to cling to that position (1-2).

Habila’s novels under study, as various as they are, express the experiences of a post- modern  African  society  with  its  attendant  issues  of  war,  alienation,   religion, exploitation, resistance, totalitarianism and corruption. We will find in the above texts the  experiences  of  the  individuals  and  masses  struggling  against  the  autocratic leadership to survive (Lomba Vs Abacha’s government) or alienation even in one’s home (Lamamo, Zara); falling back on religion in abdication of one’s duty (Mai) or corruption by officials (Waziri); political thuggery (Asaba) or endless war (Mamo, Okigbo  and  Haruna)  and  the  most  current  of  the  trends  are  the  environmental degradation and kidnapping (Professor) which occupy the whole of Oil On  Water as the phenomena themselves have occupied the Nigerian social discourse.

1.2      Statement of the Problem

Literary  works,   especially   the   novel   genre,   have   provided   rich   material   for scholarship. Their uses are inexhaustible; from entertainment to moral didactics and so  on.  Nevertheless,  more  attention  is  usually  given  to  such  things  as  themes, characterisation, language, and so on which are used to show the aesthetic, didactic,

social relevance. Such explorations as wide as they may be do not often exhaust the potentials contained in the fiction. Thus, African novels like Waiting for an  Angel, Measuring Time and Oil on Water still remain ‘virgin’ fields to be  explored since there remained some areas that are not exhaustively studied. One of such areas is the potential of such novels to yield historical information not only about the novelist’s experience but about his society.

Habila’s  novels: Waiting for an Angle, Measuring  Time and Oil on  Water, though written and published at different points in time have differently narrated a historical  experience  of  a  specific  people.  It  is  true,  others  have  written  on  the thematic concerns and history in one of these books but it is not enough, there has been no critical work (to my knowledge) that combines the three novels and study their representation of history. Hence, this research project is concerned with the way in which Habila uses these works – Waiting for an Angle, Measuring Time and Oil on Water to narrate history through fiction. The research seeks to survey and show how Habila plays with time and uses narrative devices to discuss history, breaking down the boundaries between reality and fiction.

1.3     Objective of the Study

This study is aimed at exploring the historical dimension  in the selected works  of Helon Habila – Waiting for an Angle, Measuring Time and Oil on Water. It seeks to find  out how faithful the  literary artist could be to his material;  how  an artist  is committed  to turning  his experience  into  imaginary thoughts  and  then to life-like stories, hence, the sense of verisimilitude. Finally, this work looks at how the texts have suppressed by themselves the ideologies that have been used to weave them.

1.4      Purpose of Study

The purpose of this study is to critically examine the relationship between the novel form and history. The study is committed to identifying the trappings of  history in fiction, and examining how the literary works are texualized as historical artefacts. This may help us to  accept the historical ‘facts’ as artefacts of fiction and on the other hand see Waiting for an Angel, Measuring Time and Oil on Water as literary artefacts purposely created to express the Nigerian experience. This may as well help bring to limelight the clearer picture of how Habila through this fictional narrative presents the fomenting  issues  in  Nigeria  in  particular  and  Africa  at  large,  via:  war,  religion, leadership, corruption, political struggle, and so on. It is of central importance to this study to show how the author carefully weaves into fiction historical details without necessarily deviating from literary to history writing.

1.5      Significance of the Study

This  study has  both practical  and  theoretical  significance  to  scholars  in the  arts, particularly the literary artist and historians as it opens a wider view on fiction and its importance to society. This expanded view will help artists and historians as well as the general public (if they care) to assess literary texts –  the  novel, as a means to studying  our  society;  and  recognise  fiction  beyond  mere  aesthetic  but  also  of  a utilitarian value since it could be used as one of the ways of peering into and studying the past (historiography).

1.6       Delimitation

The author whose works are under study has written a variety of works: short stories, poems, novels and essays. However, this study focuses on his novels.  It is from this genre that three of his novels are deliberately chosen in order to study the historical

narrative  there  embedded.  The  selected  novels  include:  Waiting  for  an   Angel, Measuring Time and Oil on Water. The choice of these novels is  informed by the relevance  and  relationship  in  their  thematic  concerns  and  techniques.  It  is  these relationships which are relevant to the research. On the other hand, the time limit for this  research   cannot  be  enough  to  study  all   the  relevant   literary  works  on contemporary history nor would it be possible within the given time to study all of Helon Habila’s works.

1.7      The Concept of History

To define history is not a simple task, because the concept in general is rigorous, not even less in the context to which it is used in this research. The problematic nature of the concept of history is asserted by Arthur Marwick that “one very real problem is that the only history with which most people are familiar is the history taught to them at a very elementary level; and the history taught at an elementary level is often not very  good  history.  Dates  and  boring  facts  of  course…”  (11).  One  could  take  a panoramic definition of history here as a process and also as a study of the process. History as a process takes  cognisance of the interaction between man and nature. Irrespective of conscious recognition of the outcome of the interaction between man and nature, it is not all of such facts (activities) that become history because such facts exist first of all as social facts. It is hence an exclusive duty of a historian to select among the social facts, what E.H. Carr calls ‘the fact of history’ (4). Carr illustrates this by saying that Caesar crossed the Rubicon and many a thousand have crossed the Rubicon;  these two acts are facts but it is only the historian that decides that  the crossing of Rubicon by Caesar is the fact of history and that of million others before and after him is not history ( 3-4).

It therefore suggests that history is human past activities put to record. At any rate,  not  all  human  activities  are  considered  as history,  except  those  a  historian deemed fit to be history. R.G. Collingwood rates history as an inquiry that belongs to the sciences. It tries to fasten upon what we do not know and try to discover it. And “it is at best only the means. It is scientifically valuable  only  in so far as the new arrangement gives us the answer to a question we have already decided to ask”( 9). He  identifies  in  relation  to  the  nature  of  history  that  it  is  scientific  and  its philosophical underpinnings include: its object – human; method – interpretation of evidence  and; aim or value –  furtherance  of human self knowledge  (7-10).   Carr defines history as “a  continuous process of interaction between a historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past” (24).

Carr is of the opinion that what we may consider as historical facts would have undergone some “…process of attrition that minute selection of facts, out of all the myriad facts that must once have been known to somebody, had survived to become the facts of history”(7). If this is so then, history can be  accepted not just as what happened but some events that others deem worthy of historical record and projection. Thus history could be seen as power because it is not really about what happened, but what the ‘existing power’ thought had happened, or what the ‘existing power’ wants others to think, or perhaps what it wanted itself to think, had happened. This choice of historical facts becomes not only the job of a historian alone – neither the one who is a firsthand  witness nor  those who glean from other historical records, but the key actor  himself  or  other  influential  agencies,  who  started  the  process  of  selection. Historians only accept what they feel is history and impress on others to neglect the other (sides of the) events to focus on those the actor or the agencies feel have better represented their course. It is this deliberate neglect of some facts that I think Lytton

Strachey said in his mischievous way, ‘ignorance is the first requisite of the historian, ignorance which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits’ (Carr 8). This may also account for the long controversy by Eurocentric views before now that Africa did not have history or culture prior to the coming of the white. This perception of history as power could be appreciated through Carr’s assertion that:

Of course, facts and documents are essential to the historian. But do not  make  a  fetish  of  them.  They  do  not  by themselves  constitute history;  they  provide  in  themselves  no  ready-made  answer  to  this tiresome question ‘What is history?’ (9)

The historian is as important as the process of selection of the facts. In most cases, especially where there is no influence from the participants, the historian will choose what is of interest to him and deliberately ignore the rest. Carr further observes on the subject of history that the past act is dead, meaningless to the historian, but that what matters is the thought that is behind it. ‘Hence ‘all history is the history of thought’, and ‘history is the re-enactment in the historian’s mind of the thought whose history he is studying’.   Of course,  history as re-enactment,  would not replay all of the past events, but the thought that is re-enacted is that which is of impact to the historian and the concerned agencies.

This may account for why Carr says if we take up a work of history, our first concern should not be with the facts which it contains ‘but with the  historian who wrote it’ (16-17). He further says:

But, in order to appreciate it at its’ full value, you have to understand what the historian is doing. For if, as Collingwood says, the historian must re-enact in thought what has gone on in the mind of his dramatis personae, so the reader in his turn must re-enact what goes on in the

mind of the historian. Study the historian before you begin to study the facts (17).

If this  is the work and  nature of history then,  we could  also  interpret  history  as narrative – a knowing that a historian records and tells. “Narrative” Russell Kirkscey considers it in his work as “a strings of symbols used to create meaning” (Kirkscey,

2). It is usually the story and the discourse (Prince 59). The Story involves content outlining of the standard form of a narrative, which includes characters, plot, setting, and temporal issues. While discourse involves “the ‘how’ of a narrative”: its medium, tone, point of view, context, and other signals of meaning (Kirkscey, 2; Prince, 2003, p. 21).

From the above discussion on history, one can deduce that history is  not a mere chronicle of facts but a recreation of human activities; the emphasis is not on the facts themselves but how such facts are recreated to express human reality from the past and its relationship with the present.  It is this recreation that allows a historian to decide on what to include in his history and what not to as  it is evident in several histories  today. This reality is most immanent  in the  history that is told from the perspective of the stronger ones in which the opinions, efforts and perspectives of the weak are obliterated. Such is typical of the relationship between the colonial masters and the colonized.  Thus, it is only  fiction,  as it is now, that has the potentials  of documenting the entire view of  the history from both angles, whether in favour or against the powers that exist, since it is concealed in its nature as imaginary work.

1.8      The Relationship between History and Fiction

Dealing with history in literary works is “not a territorial claim: Literature claiming to be history or history claiming to be literature” as Korhenen has observed in the Tropes for  the  Past  (10).  But  it  is  to  look  at  the  opportunity  fiction  has  provided  in understanding our past. Consequently, through this study, the “controversial” subject of ‘objective fact’ – either in history or fiction – is re-examined. It is by questioning what is often taken as “objective  reality”  that  the concept of history will be fully appreciated. In other words, we have to be cautious of how we may classify history as

‘objective fact’, (which in a traditional sense is a work of historian), while fiction is often (cruelly) used to mean lies.

One of the conspicuous heirlooms that postmodernism has left with us is the boundless relationship that exists between disciplines (that were once seen to be apart) without clear boundaries that could serve as limits to disciplinary boundaries; such boundaries are removed, not in disorderliness but with a sense of flexibility. Chung- Hsiung Lai captures this development thus:

Since  the  1970s,  …historical  and  literary  studies  have  no  longer existed as the opposite sides of a pendulum, but more in a  web-like crisscrossing network as contemporary theory has gradually obliterated the  boundaries  between  text  and  con-text  and  between  history  and fiction.  That  is  to  say,  history,  in  the  postmodern  era,  has  been regarded  as a discourse constructed  by  a “literary imagination”  and “power relations,” and in this  sense it is ideological  and subjective, always open to multiple inquiries and re-interpretation (2).

Of course,  if the Formalists  for instance  have argued in the past that art is of  no utilitarian value, such submission may not hold sway, given extrinsic literary theories,

which found (literary) art as a means of preserving and or expressing human culture and historical antecedents. Korhenen in Trope for the Past argues that:

The subversive otherness of the past was hidden by the  automatized linguistic  structures.  At  the  same  time,  modernist   literature  was developing new ways of revealing formerly unknown realms of human experience, developing more revealing and, in some ways, also more realistic images of our relation to the past than more professionalized historiography ever could (14).

Andrew Brusell in his essay, ‘Narratives of the Fake: The Collected Object, Personal Histories  and  Constructed  Memory’  published  in  Trope  for  the  Past,  takes  on Umberto Eco’s novel, Baudolino  and argues that therein is a  marriage of fictional narrative and the ‘real’ and at large the work serves the purpose of history.

We find historic figures and purely fictional characters placed side by side in such a way that it might be difficult to argue his narrative was any less ‘real’ than that of a traditional history on the subject. These characters, be they historic figures or fictional creations, are presented as ghostwriters, as characters, as observers, as narrators, as novelists, as historians and ultimately as liars, albeit well intentioned liars, who at  the  same  time  have  been  given  the  responsibility  of  recording history for posterity (the  very history being critiqued throughout the novel) (104).

Hyden White’s arguments, which begin from Aristotelian’s  view on  history and  poetry,  step  further  to  correspond  with  the  modern  trends  that  permeate  the relationship between history and literature. In one of such arguments he says:

…though  both  history and  imaginative  writing  were rhetorical  arts, they dealt with different things: historical writing was about the real world while “poetry” was about the possible… however, the concept of history was reformulated, historical consciousness was for the first time theorized, and the modern scientific method of historical inquiry was inaugurated. History was no longer simply the past or accounts of the  past,  but  now  became  identified  as  a  process,  a  dimension  of human existence, and a force to be controlled or succumbed to. During the same time,  what  had  formerly been called  discourse  and belles lettres  underwent   reconceptualization.   Now  literary  writing  –  as practiced by Balzac and Flaubert, Dickens and Scott, Manzoni, etc., was  detached  form  of  summoning  up  the  unconscious  or  latent dimensions of human reality. Now, literature became history’s other in a double sense: it pretended to have discovered a dimension of reality that historians would never recognize and it developed  techniques of writing that undermined the authority of history’s favored realistic or plain style of writing ( 25).

Although  the  disagreement  still  stands  that  history  is  occupied  with  fact  while literature deals with fiction and rhetoric ‘…which seduces meaning where  it cannot convince  by evidence  and  argument  and  fiction  because…  it  presents  imaginary things  as  if  they  were  real  and  substitutes  illusion  for   truth’  (Korhenen  26). Nevertheless, there is a feeling of harmony as White asserts that contemporary writers are occupied with social reality in their texts. On this account:

…literature – in the modern period – has regarded history not so much as its other as, rather, its complement in the work of identifying and

mapping a shared object of interest, a real world which presents itself to reflection under so many different aspects that all of the resources of language – rhetorical, poetical, and symbolic – must be utilized to do it justice. So history’s antipathy to literature is  misplaced…  The great modernists  (from  Flaubert,  Baudelaire,  Dickens  and  Shelley  down through Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Pound, Eliot, Stein, and so on) were as interested in representing a real  instead of a fictional world quite as much as any modern historian. But unlike their historian counterparts they realized that language itself is a part of the real world and must be included  among the elements  of that world rather than treated  as a transparent   instrument   for  representing   it.  With  this   realization, modernism created a new conception of realistic  representation itself and beyond that a new notion of reading which permits a creative re- reading even of the formerly transparent historical document (25-6).

These prevalent testimonies from different scholars have in other words declared the marriage of history and literary art, (the novel to be precise) in the production of a coherent  human past – history.  Hypothetically,  Habila  in a  similar  way as earlier mentioned has recreated history in fiction; hence this research work is saddled with the responsibility of exploring what seems to be a coalescence of contrarieties: history

– ‘reality’; and arts (novel) – fiction.

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