Reading Precarity, Disability and Narrative Agency in Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel and Measuring Time

Abstract

Scholars are beginning to research the presence of disability in African literature, focusing on the way such portrayals either challenge or confirm various views about disability. In this article, the aim is to examine how Helon Habila deliberately links disability, precarity and narrative agency through the presentation of several disabled characters who are also incidentally presented as story-tellers in two novels, Waiting for an Angel (2003) and Measuring Time (2007). However, they do more than just tell stories – they also use the feature of disability as an anchor around which to construct their narratives. The article, therefore, advances the argument that, in the selected texts, Habila challenges the association of the disabled body with precarity, mainly through illustrating the agency accorded to that body through the narrativisation. Further, the setting of civil war in the two texts is highlighted as a particularly disabling environment, which Habila criticises through these characters.