Chikodi Adeola Olasode | November 2021

Helon Habila

Helon Habila was born in Nigeria. He is a Professor of Creative Writing at George Mason University in Virginia. He studied at the University of Jos in Nigeria, and the University of East Anglia, UK. He is the author of four novels; the most recent is Travelers. He edited The Granta Book of The African Short Story, and the British Council anthology, NW14: The Anthology of New Writing. Habila’s work has won many awards including The Caine Prize for African Writing (2001), and the Windham-Campbell Prize (2015). In 2013–14, Habila was a DAAD Fellow in Berlin. He is a contributor to the London Guardian and the New York Times. He has been a contributing editor to the Virginia Quarterly Review since 2004.

Chikodi Adeola Olasode: Your flair for writing started somewhere. How did it all begin for you as a writer?

Helon Habila: It began like it begins for most writers, I guess, with reading and falling in love with storytelling. I was fortunate to have grown up in a house with a lot of books and a lot of readers. Reading became a habit very early on. From reading it was a logical step to move on to writing. Something in us always desires to replicate that which we find admirable and which makes sense and gives our world meaning. I was something of a lonely child, so creating my own universe in stories made the loneliness less intense.

Olasode: What and who were the major influences that shaped your writing career?

Habila: Too many to mention. I have always read widely and wildly, and I try to learn from every writer I read. Of course, I have my all-time favorites, writers I always come back to. In poetry that would be John Donne, Wole Soyinka, and Seamus Heaney. In fiction that would be Dambudzo Marechera and J.M Coetzee and Chinua Achebe and Toni Morrison and James Baldwin and so many more that I am probably not even aware of being influenced by. I have not even mentioned my contemporaries; there are so many of them. Writing is an incestuous business—reading inspires writing and writing inspires reading and on and on in an endless cycle.

Olasode: Every writer has their magic moments; those moments when they experience a surge of emotions that gets them writing about a sudden idea. Gauging by the stories you’ve written, tell us what nudges you into writing?

Habila: You are right. As a writer there is always that spark, that incident or experience that does it for you. For me it is more of a slow burn. It is often a combination of things, or a persistence of one thing that reaches a critical point where I can’t ignore it. Issues of social justice always get me going. I am very political by nature. Maybe because I grew up in a country where too many people get away with too many injustices, where you have to fight for your rights every single day. Maybe it is because I am a Black man in a world where race is so important, and discrimination is so prevalent. I find myself always rooting for the underdog, always championing lost causes. I like to write about overlooked characters who find their moment of heroism, who fight against the odds to achieve a moment, even just one moment, of heroism. I write of characters in the shadows who insist on being seen.

Olasode: One of the many fascinating techniques you employed dexterously in Waiting for an Angel is flashbacks, which knit the stories so well. Enlighten us on why you felt this device was apt in capturing the story you intended to tell than the usual chronological order.

Habila: It is the way I tell stories, forward and backward, side to side. Linearity sort of bores me. I see stories as something of a puzzle that needs to be unraveled—it is part of the thrill for me—uncovering the connection between events. Which is mostly how life works, in a stream of consciousness sort of way. Things always come to us in a crooked and slanted way, and it is up to us to find the link between the parts.

Olasode: You adopt different techniques in writing like a dexterous use of flashbacks in Waiting for an Angel and a journalistic-cum-oral approach in Travelers. Tell us why and how you achieve these creative variations that distinguish your writings.

Habila: I guess the story determines the style of the telling. Waiting for an Angel is a very psychological tale, about the transformation and growth of a young writer in a politically adverse society—most of the action will naturally take place in his head. With Travelers I wanted to give voice to marginalized personalities—to literally let them tell their stories, so you have a necessarily multivocal and multifocal approach, what you call orality. But, regardless of the particular style, all writing always go through the same process of sieving and selection and curation. The aim is to make it appear effortless, to hide the artifice if you like.

Olasode: There are feministic undertones in Waiting for An Angel and The Chibok Girls. Your novel shows women as a force struggling with the “subaltern status” as Gayatri Spivak describes. Tell us about your views on the underrepresented state or experience of women and why your novels explore these angles.

Habila: Well, I am always drawn to the underrepresented and the marginalized, whether they be male or female. Their gender is not important. But in my society women happen to be doubly oppressed and overlooked. In The Chibok Girls I tried to draw attention to the egregious attack on women—you can even call it a genocide, because the terrorists saw it as their religious duty to suppress women—how they bear the brunt of the Islamist onslaught in that region. Religion oppresses women, intentionally or not; war often affects women more than men. Men go off to kill and die, true, but women stay back to be raped and bring up the children and to survive, which is often harder than dying. In any society where there is inequality and injustice, women bear the brunt of it. Literature should talk about that, if the purpose of literature is to illustrate the human condition—there is human condition for you.

Olasode: I’ve been wondering whether you lived with women who were voiceless due to their social status after reading Waiting for an Angel. I’d like to know if there was a personal experience that influenced your novel into revealing the powerful minds of women by using male characters in that novel?

Habila: As an artist you don’t have to have experienced a thing to empathize. It is what you do, it is your superpower, your blessing and your curse at the same time. You cannot avert your gaze from suffering or from injustice. It reminds me of the character, Olana, in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, who has a genetic condition that makes her suffer when others are in pain—the artist experiences the pain and the suffering of others by proxy. That is what makes you an artist.

Olasode: Why do you write?

Habila: Because I cannot stop writing. I was about to say writing makes me happy, but actually it doesn’t. It is not about being happy, it is about fulfilment and purpose. I write because it is what I do very well, and it is how I am able to contribute to the ongoing cosmic conversation to which we all must contribute in our own unique way. Mine is through writing.

Olasode: And do you still write for those same reasons?

Habila: Always.

Olasode: As a political writer during the military regime, were you attacked for your writings?

Habila: No, not personally. But an attack on one is an attack on all of us. I have witnessed friends and members of the writing community attacked, arrested, chased into exile, or killed. And when that happens to your neighbor, know you will be next. So, it is almost as if you have been attacked personally because everything you believe in, like justice and human rights, is being attacked.

Olasode: Let’s hear your views on employing literature as arts for art’s sake or for reeducating the society.

Habila: I guess there is no definitive answer to that question. We all write from a certain tradition, mine is the instrumentalist tradition, if you like. Art as an instrument for change, art as platform, the writer as a spokesperson. And to be honest, whether we admit it or not, we all advocate for certain values in our art. As George Orwell said, all art is propaganda, and even those who say art should be apolitical are being political in making that comment.

Olasode: You’ve been able to distinguish your writing in a unique way. Tell us about your style.

Habila: Style is something that grows with time, something like voice. You discover it as you continue to practice your craft, and you may not even notice it happening till one day some critic or reader tells you, “That is the Habila style.” You have to last, you have to have a body of work, you have to be consistent. It is part and parcel of your education, your proclivities, your taste, your personality.

Olasode: Every writer has an audience in mind despite their readership diversification. An ideal reader. Tell us who your intended message is aimed at.

Habila: Corny and bourgeoisie as this may sound, my ideal reader is myself. I believe in writing the kind of stories I’d like to read, the stories I wish somebody would write, and that somebody often ends up being myself.

Olasode: As a teacher, do you find time to write often?

Habila: Not as much as I’d like to. I used to fret and think that is a bad thing, but it really isn’t. It is good to do other things apart from writing, so that when you come to the writing you value it more, you come to it with renewed hunger and perception. I think teaching is the best thing that has ever happened to me as a writer, the best teachers are eternal students, you learn from your students even as you teach them. There is nothing as beautiful as exchanging ideas with and listening to the young, their ambitions and aspirations and idealism always make me see the world in a new way, a more hopeful way.

Olasode: Using the interview method, you relived the lives of different migrants by retelling their experiences in Travelers. As a migrant and diasporic writer, how has the element of place impacted your writings?

Habila: I guess all writing is about place—situating your character in place, about how we all try to find a place for ourselves, a place where we can thrive. That is why we travel. Some of us are just not easily satisfied with the place we were born, or where we find ourselves, we are always trying to see what is on the other side. It is true for me, and it is true for my characters in Travelers. They refuse to sit still and accept injustice or second class citizenhood or to just curl up and die without protest. I admire that spirit; it is a pioneering kind of spirit. It is what makes humans thrive as species, that curiosity, that willingness to endure the inconveniences of being an outsider, of being the other, of being rejected, always keeping an eye on the ultimate goal of finding that perfect place where we can be who we were meant to be. Oh, we may never ultimately find that perfect place, maybe because there isn’t a perfect place, but the search is also its own thing, it is part of the joy.

Olasode: You chronicle and relive history in your novels. As a post-independent novelist, enlighten us about the role of history in your historiographic metafiction, Measuring Time.

Habila: In that book I try to say that the past is not really past, it shapes the present. As Faulkner says, “The past is not really dead. It is not even past.” So, those who will tell you to move on, to forget the injustices of colonialism and dictatorships, don’t understand how history works. The past always determines the present—it takes a decisive, sometimes catastrophic action to sever us from the past, and such events rarely happen on their own, often we have to intentionally bring them to pass, and we can only do that with a good understanding of history and how history works. I always reference Chinua Achebe where he says that to know where we are going, we first have to find out where the rain began to beat us. To understand who we are, we have to recognize all the injustices that were done to us, and to learn to forgive ourselves for our shortcomings, we are all products of history. My character in Measuring Time is trying to understand history, and to rewrite history from the perspective of the victims of history, those who were often overlooked or forgotten by history. History shouldn’t just be the story of the conquerors or the privileged, a total and true history should be the stories and voices of all peoples.

Olasode: Your writings fall under the category of socially conscious works. It was accurately reflected in Oil on Water. Tell us how the novel recaptures the social experience of the Niger Delta region.

Habila: Like most Nigerian writers of my generation, I was greatly influenced by the writings and the activism of Ken Saro-Wiwa. Oil on Water owes a lot to his story, to his courage in standing up to the behemoth of the Nigerian government and the multinationals. The multinationals essentially took over where colonialism stopped. They don’t care about the ordinary person or the environment in which the ordinary person lives. They are willing to pollute the rivers and the lakes and cut down the trees if they will make a profit from it. They will never stop as long as there is profit to be made. That is the nature of the beast of capitalism. Oil on Water tries to show what is happening in that remote region of the Niger Delta because of government complicity and multinational greed. I tried to do it in a way only fiction can do: as a metaphor, as entertainment, with relatable characters and unforgettable images, without being strident. I wrote the book rather reluctantly, because I felt at the time that it was too topical, too political, but surprisingly it has turned out to be my most successful novel, I get more letters from readers and from students and activists about it than about all my other books combined. It just shows you how urgent the concern for our environment is.

Olasode: Despite how planned your works are, are there parts that surprise you when read?

Habila: I hardly reread my own writing. Other writers have told me the same thing. Maybe it is too painful reliving the process of the writing, the memories of the struggle with language and plot and characters. Best to just read somebody else’s work. I am so bad at remembering my own stories that I often have to ask interviewers to remind me who a particular character is and what he does in the book they are talking about. It can be embarrassing at times. I can see them thinking, are you sure you wrote the book? My only book that I can reread without pain is Measuring Time. Don’t ask me why.

Olasode: Are you working on any novel now?

Habila: Yes. I am always working on a novel. I will always be working on a novel till the day I die.

Olasode: Tell us about three great novels you read, that set the ball rolling for you in writing and the significant styles of these authors that called out the writer in you.

Habila: Only three? Well, here we go: Things Fall Apart, for its understanding and engagement with our history. Waiting for the Barbarians, for style and empathy. House of Hunger, for its courage and daring. If you have read these books, you will understand what I am saying. I guess the best writing tries to answer the important questions about living and dying, about the meaning of life and what it means to be human, about love and suffering and freedom. These three books do that in their different ways.

Olasode: Since African Writers Trust has a positive trajectory in boosting the lives of African writers, tell us about your work with them as a writer and how this is intended to influence the literary scene positively.

Habila: My work with AWT, as a board member, is mostly in an advisory role. What AWT does is to mentor younger writers through organizing workshops, conferences, competitions, and the like. AWT just finished a workshop in Uganda, in partnership with the IWP and others, where participants had a chance to work with established writers who guided them through short story and novel writing classes. I am glad to say that there are more and more of such organizations springing up in different parts of Africa. You have AKE and ALS in Nigeria, you have Abantu in South Africa, you have Kwani in Kenya, Story Moja in Zimbabwe and so on, and of course they differ in the particular ways they go about their work, but the aim is to create a support network for writers, especially younger writers starting out. To give them advise on how to edit their manuscripts once they are ready, where to attend workshops, and also festivals to where they can network and generally find a supportive community without which success will be that little bit harder.

Olasode: Your sojourn from Nigeria to England, Germany, and the US must have influenced your writings. Care to share your thoughts on these movements/migrations first as a Nigerian, as a writer, and as a chronicler of the human experience?

Habila: Travel always influences writing. It forces us to step into the experiences of others who are different from us, to see how they live and work and create culture. Travel gives us comparative tools with which we can compare our world view with that of others, and inevitably it widens our understanding of the world. It saves us from being provincial. I believe it is Henry James who said that the worst thing is for a writer to be is provincial. I guess you could say that I started out as a Nigerian writer, and as I moved out of Nigeria I became less and less a Nigerian writer. I became a storyteller, period. Of course, I may always use Nigeria as a setting for my stories, or as a departure point, but I think progressively, my stories will be less and less about Nigeria and more and more about people, period.

Olasode: Any advice to writers and Writers Chronicle readers on how to be better at the writing craft?

Habila: Always try to push yourself as a writer. Be patient, it takes time to become the kind of writer you want to be. And finally, never compare yourself to other writers; we all have our different paths, some get there quicker than others, but the main thing is to get there.

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Chikodi Adeola Olasode , who also goes by the pen name “Clairenova,” is a professional writer, content creator, editor, emerging poet, and doctoral student of Literature at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. She has been writing for close to two decades as a freelancer in diverse capacities. She can be reached on her poetry blog.

Excerpt

from Travelers: A Novel

LIGHTER

She took out a lipstick and a mirror. When she returned the lipstick and mirror to her bag she looked up and our eyes met, she smiled, and then she was gone, walking at that surprisingly fast clip people here have. I could have started a conversation, I could have said, “Hi,” and we might have sat, and talked, elegant like Parisians... But as I watched her go, I felt the already unbridgeable gap between me and this city widen. Even if I spoke her language, the language the city spoke, would she understand me?

Excerpted from Travelers: A Novel. Copyright © 2019 by Helon Habila. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.