Helon Habila says that telling stories in a non-linear way is in some ways similar to the way the human brain works.

Habila with award winning Canadian novelist Madeleine Thien and the popular Jamaican writer Colin Channer will be mentoring a selection of promising writers in Nigeria at the next Fidelity Bank International Creative Writing Workshop coming up in Abuja from July 16-22, 2010.

The following is an excerpt from his latest short story and the synopsis of his latest novel. Enjoy.


Irekefe Island
~ By Helon Habila

Only subscribers of the Virginia Quarterly Review may read this in its entirety. What follows is a free preview, truncated midway through.

Boma was alone when I got home in the evening, and I could tell she had been crying. I had gone straight to the office to write my report for tomorrow’s paper, my legs still wobbly from standing all afternoon on the ferry. We had made so many stops on the way that I had begun to think we were never going to reach Port Harcourt; we had picked up women carrying chickens in baskets and crabs in buckets and leading squealing goats by ropes around the neck on their way to the market. The air in the ferry’s central lounge soon grew foul, forcing me to abandon my seat next to a fat, laughing, gesticulating woman and her two children to stand outside by the rail, my eyes focused on the receding coastline, my mind contemplating what awaited me in Port Harcourt.

Boma was seated in my wicker armchair, facing the TV, but in such a way that her profile showed the undamaged side of her face, and even when she looked up as I entered she still managed to keep the burnt, badly healed side hidden. She did it unconsciously, but the scar always dictated how she stood, how she sat. It made me sad when she did that. How could I tell her that she really needn’t do that with me? Only with John, her husband, was she ever able to sit without regard to where the light fell. But two months ago John had left her, and now she had taken to stopping by more often, even when I wasn’t around. She’d clean the dishes and cook and sweep the room, but sometimes she just sat and cried.

Today her bags and crockery and TV and other household things were heaped in a corner of my tiny living room.

—The landlord kicked me out.

She lived in a tenement house similar to mine, in a room-and-parlour, owned by the same hard-faced, unsmiling landlord. The landlord had started hanging around outside their door soon after John, who worked as a mail sorter till six months ago when the courier company closed down, had lost his job. Since Boma was only a trainee typist and didn’t receive a salary, I had shared my monthly pay with them, knowing that they had only me to turn to as I had only them. I went to the bathroom and when I came back she stood up and went to the stove and dished out some rice for me.

When the silence grew too heavy, even with the TV on, I told her of the kidnapping, and the devastated island. When I got to the dead bodies, she burst into tears.

—The poor people, they could be anyone, just anyone.

I knew she was thinking of John. He had become very political, hanging out in backstreet barrooms with other unemployed youths to play cards and drink all day, always complaining about the government. He had been full of anger before he left, the kind of anger that often pushed one to blaspheme, or to rob a bank, or to join the militants. I had seen that kind of anger in many of my friends before, people I went to school with; some of them were now in the forests with the fighters, some of them had made millions from ransom money, but a lot of them were dead.

—Boma, John has more sense than that.

Source: http://www.bookalleria.com/2010/06/helon-habila-in-present-tense.html