This chapter
concentrates on the textual analysis of Helon Habila’s Measuring Time. It aims
at projecting the forms of lexico- syntactic creativity employed by the author.
Basically, it reveals how the author
has foregrounded grammar, syntax and oral African forms to create beauty.
MEASURING TIME
5.1. SYNOPSIS OF THE NOVEL
Measuring
Time tells the story of twin brothers, Mamo and LaMamo
whose mother dies as they are born. They grow up with their father, Lamang in a
small village in Northern Nigeria called Keti. They hate their father because
of his nonchalant behaviour towards them and stories they heard from gossips,
and from their Aunty Marina. These make them take a decision to run to the army
and become soldiers in order to find a place in a world that kills their
dream. Unfortunately, Mamo, who is a
sickler, falls sick on the way and is forced to stay behind while his brother
LaMamo goes ahead and becomes a soldier. Mamo decides to go to school in order
to fight the sickness and he becomes a teacher in History, in the village
school. While he teaches, his brother, LaMang is fighting in the wars in
Guinea, Congo, Liberia, Mali, Botswana, Kenya, and so on and sends him sketch
letters often, about the events of the war. In the village, Mamo reviews the
local history by a white man, Reverend Drinkwater and is employed by the
traditional ruler, the Mia, as a personal secretary and to write a true history
of his people, due to the fame given to him by the reply of one of his articles
from a British Journal. Mamo falls in love with Zara, while his twin brother La
Mamo risks his life for a girl, Bintou who would have been raped. Lamang, their
father on the other hand fights for political office and is betrayed by one of
his party members. Lamang dies of stroke; LaMamo comes home after twelve years
and dies in a riot.
5.2 BIOGRAPHY OF HELON HABILA
Helon Habila was born to a Christian
family in Kaltungo, Gombe State, in the northern middle belt region of Nigeria
in 1967. His father, Habila Ngalabak, was a preacher with white missionaries,
and a civil servant with the Ministry of Works. Habila’s mother was a tailor.
Habila completed his primary and secondary education in Gombe. His teachers
noticed his skill in “weaving” stories early. Consequently, “In his fifth year
in primary school, his teachers took him to various classrooms to spin his
tales for the other children. In the introduction to his short story, Habila
notes that his first encounter with fiction was oral, not textual. “I grew up
in a tenement house with about six other families, and in the nights our
mothers would gather all the children, more than a dozen of us, and tell us
stories… I can now see the influence of those stories in my fiction—“I like
compelling story lines that grip you and force you to listen like the
ancient mariner.” The third of seven children, Habila describes himself
growing up as “the outsider, watching, unable to fully participate. “I grew up reading anything I could lay my
hands on…. I was going to be a writer, and that was it.” His influences
according to him were the Bible in Hausa and English, Western classics such as
Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Henry James, Dickens, and so on while his literary idols
range from Shakespeare to Soyinka, Stephen Crane, Achebe and Ngugi. Habila maintains that he is open to
impressions and ideas and that the beauty of the novel is that it can absorb as
many styles and philosophies as one cares to throw into it, and it gets the
better for it. Although he was in love
with stories and literature at an early age, he initially attempted to follow
his father’s dream for him to become an engineer. He enrolled at the Bauchi
University of Technology and then the Bauchi College of Arts and Sciences.
However, he lost interest in his studies and he returned home purposeless and
dejected. In 1989, while still at home “holed up in his room, reading and
writing,” Habila’s father and one of his younger brothers were killed in an
auto crash. This incident seems to inform the tragic story of Bola in Waiting
for an Angel. After the deaths of his father and brother, Habila enrolled
in the English BA programme of the University of Jos. There again, he excelled
and met his friend, Toni Kan, from Delta State who had a similar interest in
literature and writing. The two young men entered into a friendly rivalry that
pushed them further in their literary pursuits. Professor Kanchana Ugbabe confirmed
that the two students came to her office after class to talk and borrow books.
Helon Habila was the quieter one while Toni Kan was more open, but the two
friends spurred each other on. Each of them wanted to be the first to achieve
literary glory. Shortly after Kan won an essay contest, which earned him a
six-week trip to England, in 1992. Habila published his first short story
Embrace of the Snake in an anthology of Nigerian writing, Through
Laughter and Tears edited by Chidi Nganga. However, after the two graduated
from the university in 1995, Kan moved to Lagos to work for a magazine and soon
became a literary “star.” Habila found a job at the Federal Polytechnic Bauchi,
where he lectured in English and Literature from 1997 to 1999 and published the
biography of Mai Kaltungo. This might have informed the character of
Mamo in the Measuring Time.
In 1999, at Kan’s
invitation, Habila moved to Lagos and became a magazine columnist and editor in
Kan’s romance magazine Hints.
Further up, he became the arts editor of the Vanguard and got
involved with the Lagos chapter of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA).
In 2000 in Lagos, his poem “Another Age” won first place in the MUSON (Musical
Society of Nigeria) Festival Poetry Competition and his short story “The
Butterfly and the Artist” won the Liberty Bank Prize. His poems “Birds in the
Graveyard” and “After the Obsession” were published in the collection of poetry
25 New Nigerian Poets, edited by Toyin Adewale and published by Ishmael
Reed. In 2000, Habila self published his collection of short stories, Prison
Stories. He received a book contract
with Norton to publish the collection of short stories as the novel Waiting
for an Angel. The novel, which came out in 2002, won the 2003 Commonwealth
Literature prize for the best first novel by an African writer. Since the
publication of Waiting for an Angel, Habila has been at the University
of East Anglia in Norwich England. He
has also been a fellow at the University of Iowa International Writing Programme
and a Chinua Achebe fellow at Bard College in 2005-2006. His second novel Measuring
Time was published by Norton in January, 2007.
He has written the following Books:
(1)
Waiting for an Angel, (2004)
(2)
New Writing (14) (2006)
(3)
Measuring Time, (2007)
(4)
Oil on Water, (2010)
Helon Habila has received the following Awards and
Honours:
1)
2001, Cain Prize for Love Poems.
2)
2003, Commonwealth writers Prize, African Category, waiting for an
Angel.
3)
2005-2006, Chinua Achebe Fellow in Global Africana Studies, Bard
College, USA
4)
2007, Emily Clark Balch Price.
5)
2008, Virginia Library Foundation Fiction Award, Measuring Time.
6)
2008, Hourston/Wright Legacy Award, Measuring Time
7)
2011, Commonwealth Writers Prize for Oil and Water.
8)
2012, Orion Book Award, Oil on Water.
9)
2012, PEN Open Book Award, Oil on Water.
10)
2013-2014, Daad Fellowship Award, Berlin and others.
5.3 REGISTERS
IN MEASURING TIME
Habila
assimilates a lot of historical events, people and monuments in Nigeria, Africa
and the world at large in his novel, MeasuringTime. This particularly
highlights Habila’s versatility.
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