Of history and imaginative re-creations in Helon Habila’s Waiting for an angel

Abstract

Fiction has been the means through which the writer makes his/her experiences known. The writer is a lens through which the past is recovered or reconfigured and, as well, offers the means to its understanding. It represents an elucidation of social reality. It is also in this sense that literature is seen as a national biography, recounting the social conditions of certain periods in a nation’s history. It is within the above milieu that the research highlights the gap, nature, and extent to which the novelist Helon Habila through characters, styles, plots, settings, and events, portrays the interaction of fiction and history in Waiting for an Angel (2004). The research also provides the understanding and interpretation of the selected work in its use of historical facts and imaginative re-creations. The study also investigates the different scopes of history prevalent in the selected novel as regards its political, cultural, economic, religious, social, and aesthetic patterns. New Historicism is the theoretical framework majorly used as it advocates the reading of a literary text and having in view its era. The implication is that each text is said to assume proper function when set side-by-side with the history it textualizes, that is history codified. Methodologically, this study is Content Analysis based. Some critical works on the writings of the novelists by other critics were used as secondary sources. It was discovered that some critics disagree with the interplay of fiction and history, but this work reveals the various dimensions this interplay can be achieved and how the selected writer has re-creatively blended fiction with historical facts.