Measuring Time
By Helon Habila
Hamish Hamilton, 2007
The recent critical success of Nigerian writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chris Abani and Uzodinma Iweala is partly founded upon the social and political relevance of their fiction. The common factor unifying their work is their candid, scrupulous and sometimes uncomfortable analysis of their native country.
Helon Habila can be credited with encouraging this trend. His previous work, the Caine Prize-winning Waiting for an Angel, was a powerful politicised work, and his second book, Measuring Time, is equally ambitious. Its conceit is a simple yet powerful one: the idea that for history to be significant and meaningful, it must be an organic reflection of the concerns and experiences of individuals. Pity that ambition alone does not a good novel make.
Habila’s protagonist is Mamo, a sickly youth growing up in a small town in northern Nigeria. Trapped within its stifling provincial confines, he finds solace in books and writing, and with time becomes an author and local historian of repute. Taking his cue from Plutarch, he aspires to write the history of his community, but from the perspective of its citizens and inhabitants – in sharp contrast to the existing history penned by a missionary many years before. These lofty ideals are put to the test when he is co-opted to write the history of the local traditional ruler, and he understands, with the comfortable existence that he begins to enjoy, that there are alternatives to the simple asceticism of a writer’s life.
The story itself presents as formulaic and quotidian. Whilst this failing would not necessarily be fatal, it is compounded by a multitude of structural and aesthetic weaknesses that force the book to collapse under the weight of its own self-portentousness.
Characters wander in and out of the story, self-conscious and uncertain as to their role in the narrative. We meet LeMamo, Mamo’s twin. He is endowed with the qualities that Mamo lacks – strength, daring, bravery – and ultimately flees the town and country to become a mercenary. It does not take too much effort to understand that Habila wishes us to appreciate the Cartesian dichotomy
between the two: the soldier and the writer, the man of deeds and the man of words. But he fails, and fails grievously. LeMamo is an absent entity, devoid of passion, life and humanity. We cannot engage with him.
A love interest, Zara, is tossed in gratuitously. She serves no discernable purpose, other than as a participant in a toe-curlingly embarrassing love scene. In the background, Mamo’s father, the archetypal corrupt politician, lurks impotently. How stereotypical. How depressing.
The prose is often workmanlike and cliché-driven: Habila describes ‘Baobab trees like huge, mute giants’. Elsewhere, he informs us solemnly that ‘his arms were weighed down like concrete’. In fact, it is repeatedly inelegant metaphors like this one which weigh the book itself down.
Elsewhere, omissions grate glaringly. Whilst we are treated to a panoply of recent political history across Africa, the most significant political event of the last thirty years in Nigeria – the annulment of the elections of June 2003 – is completely overlooked.
Conversely, the regular invocation of Plutarch as our hero’s muse seems contrived and out of place. All this is a shame, though, because Habila’s book is well-intentioned, but ultimately falls short of its lofty aspirations.
