Helon Habila’s “Love Poems” Prison Stories
Prison Stories contains short stories about life in a brutal Nigerian state. It won Helon Habila the Caines’ Prize - the African Booker. Helon Habila, who the second Caine prize for African writing, was 22 when his father and one of his brothers died in a road accident in Nigeria. Habila was living at home at the time, having returned there after dropping out from college. He was directionless and despondent. "I had no idea what I would do or what would become of me," he says. "I used to quarrel so much with my father." It was then, after the accident, that he began reading literature for the first time - Shakespeare, John Donne, and J.M. Coetzee - and the dream of becoming a writer took inchoate form.
“Love Poems” is a remarkable work of prison literature. It is the account of a young journalist, Lomba, who is incarcerated without trial during the years of General Sani Abacha's oppressive military rule. Lomba is arrested at the scene of a peaceful demonstration where he is performing his journalistic duty of recording the events. While in prison, he is able to use pen and paper to write poems as a means of psychological purgation in his unfortunate disposition. He is later caught as no prisoner is allowed to keep any object, let alone pen and paper. They took all the papers and his pen and put him in solitary confinement. The Prison Superintendent read the poems he wrote on the papers and fell in love with the poems.
One day, the Prison Superintendent, a brutal near-illiterate, visits the journalist and asks him if he would write some love poems which he then claims as his own, sending them to his "educated" girlfriend. He gives Lomba cigarette and soap in place of the poems. The Prison Superintendent’s girlfriend knew that her friend was not the originator of the love poems. She demands knowing the original writer which he provided grudgingly. On meeting Lomba, she feels something deeply about him and requests her boyfriend to ensure he leaves the prison. Soon, Lomba is struggling for inspiration, though he wants nothing more than the freedom to write, and so from memory begins adapting great works of poetry, while all the time sending covert messages to his female reader: "Save my soul, a prisoner." The Prison Superintendent explains sheepishly that he refused including Lomba’s name among those to be released by Amnesty International when they came to release political prisoners because of the love poems he is writing for him. His girlfriend then demands that Lomba be released if their relationship is to continue. At the end of the story, it is Abacha’s death that gives Lomba the hope for freedom which he had wished all the while in prison.
It is a remarkably subtle, agile story, at once brutal and tender, melancholic and funny. It has the authenticity of deep conviction - many of Habila's friends and one of his cousins were imprisoned for many years without trial, disappearing into the lower depths of Nigeria's prison system, with its violence and warring prisoners, its ritualized brutality. "Under Abacha, Nigeria was like a vast prison, both real and metaphorical," Helon says. "You felt continually under pressure, watched. And a kind of military system operates inside the prisons, too, where the prisoners are in cahoots with the wardens. It is all based on physical strength: the strongest prisoner becomes the president of the prison, and then you have generals and subordinates. And then sometimes there are coups, when rival groups attempt to take over the prison. It is terrifying." Thus, the prison symbolizes the Nigerian and/or African nations.
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