Waiting for an Angel

Waiting for an Angel is a political coming-of-age story published in 2002 by first-time Nigerian novelist Helon Habila. Set five years earlier in a neighborhood of Lagos known as “Poverty Street,” Waiting for an Angel follows the desperate and dangerous days of a young man named Lomba who aspires to be a novelist despite General Sani Abacha’s brutal military dictatorship. Using Lomba’s story as an anchor, Habila zooms out through time and space to unfurl a kaleidoscopic tapestry of vivid supporting characters, whose experiences paint a detailed portrait of a city that turns intellectuals into political prisoners, student activists into prostitutes, and prison guards into poets.

Divided into seven sections, the novel begins in 1997 as this first section covers the most recent events of Lomba's life. The protagonist is being held in a detention center as a political prisoner, charged with an unknown crime. Writing in his prison diary, the would-be novelist describes how he ghostwrites love poems for the prison superintendent so the bureaucrat can give the poems to his paramour and pass them off as his own. In a small act of rebellion, Lomba hides various clues in the letters—including a famous line from the poet Sappho—hoping to give away the superintendent’s ruse and spoil his clumsy seduction attempts. While ostensibly serving comedic purposes, the love poem subplot is notable for introducing one of the novel’s most important themes: the subjugation of the artist under totalitarian regimes.

Moving backward through time, the narrative begins to pull other characters into its orbit, introducing the reader to Lomba’s friends, colleagues, and neighbors. Early on, the reader meets Bola, Lomba’s best friend and a fellow student and intellectual. If nothing else, Bola’s story demonstrates that no matter how bad things get for Lomba, they can always get worse: Grief-stricken after multiple family members suddenly die, Bola throws himself into the student protest movement until one day he’s arrested. The loss of his family, now coupled with the loss of his freedom, causes Bola to lose his mind and end up in a psych ward.



There’s also Alice, Lomba’s chief love interest. Perhaps under less desperate circumstances, Alice would return Lomba’s affections and marry him. But as her mother suffers from cancer, and the pile of unpaid medical bills grows bigger everyday, Alice decides to marry for money instead of love, wedding a very wealthy man.

And then there’s 15-year-old Kela. After he's caught using drugs, Kela's father sends him away to Lagos to live with his Auntie Rachel, a middle-aged widow whose full-blown alcohol addiction makes Kela's acts of benign rabblerousing look even more harmless. And yet of the two users, it's Rachel whose substance abuse issues are viewed by those around her as not just normal or understandable, but logical even, in light of her suffering.

Although today she works a good job as the owner of a small grocery store, Rachel experiences an astonishing amount of personal torment in her life, starting in the 1960s when her husband dies in the Nigerian Civil War at the hands of Biafran secessionists. After over twenty years of loneliness and grief, Rachel finally opens herself up to the possibility of remarrying... and again, history intervenes, laying ruin to her happiness as yet another of her partners is sacrificed on the altar of political violence—this time, murdered in the bloody aftermath of the 1993 elections.



Pausing for a moment from the narrative and its list of tragedies that seemingly never ends, Habila takes a moment to reveal the facetious nature of the book's deceptively inspirational title. Contrary to what readers may assume, the "Angel" in Waiting on an Angel isn't some sweet cherub who brings salvation to suffering Nigerians; it's not even some kind of avenging angel, raining destruction on Nigeria's oppressors. Rather, it's the "Angel of Death"—which, by the way, means that when Lomba and others beg the spirit world to end their misery using the invocation of the book's title, they’re really begging for their own demise.

The connective thematic tissue between each of these stories is how totalitarian regimes deprive citizens of even modest desires, let alone moonshot dreams like Lomba's. And so Lomba puts his dream aside indefinitely, joining Dial Magazine as an arts and culture reporter. When Lomba implies that arts reporters don’t run afoul of the government, his editor corrects him: “Everything is politics in this country.”

Disenchanted by how far the Abacha regime will go to control Nigerian writers, Lomba comes to a liberating realization: If being any kind of writer is going to make him an enemy of the state, then he might as well write about things that matter. That's when Lomba starts accepting assignments to cover student protests until one day, while reporting on such a demonstration, the scene descends into violence, chaos, and police action. Now on a collision course with destiny, Lomba is arrested for the dubious crime of "being a journalist" and sent to the detention facility introduced in the first chapter, ending Lomba's story where it began and evoking a powerful image of Poverty Street as a circle of despair from which no one escapes.



For all the darkness and misery Waiting for an Angel conjures, author Helon Habila is no cynic. When he buries audiences under the weight of so much raw human anguish, for instance, the reader experiences a kind of metaphysical oppression that mirrors the very real oppression of living in Nigeria under military strongmen. So while the despair at the heart of the novel can feel overwhelming at times, that's precisely the point, allowing Habila to do everything he can to convey a sense of total, unflinching hopelessness.

But no matter how impressive Habila is at constructing despair or how persuasive a pessimist he is, the novel’s potent emotional legacy is about so much more than merely despair and pessimism. In fact, it’s a paradox that the moments conveying the most profound and deeply-felt sadness—the ones that seal the novel’s reputation as a work of staggering emotional potency—are summoned through levity, humor, and beauty. It's like when Lomba loses himself in a chorus of wildlife sounds outside his window, a rare appearance by Mother Nature in a city that's all but banished her. It's a wonderful moment, but rather than inspiring hope or indicating that help is on the way, it's merely a tragic reminder of just how little of the world’s beauty is left; and it might not be long before it disappears altogether.