HAPPY WORLD BOOK DAY!
"Reading makes a full man;confidence a ready man; writing an exact man" - Anonymous
…my musings on Mamo – Helon Habila’s introspective character
Today is World Book Day - 5th March 5, 2015 - a day set
aside by UNESCO to celebrate authors, books and reading every year. This celebration
is observed by over hundreds of nations across the world. How are you
celebrating? I hope you are not left out. For me, I didn't buy myself a new
book this week, and couldn't go for any book event or reading sessions
happening around town: just recuperating from a bout of malaria. However, I am
here doing it my little way.
So today, since I couldn't get myself a new book - and no one surprised
me with a book gift – I turned to my modest library. I wanted something
original, captivating and absorbing. I followed my fingers, carefully rummaging
through the shelf. It is Helon Habila’s Measuring Time that called me. I answered.
Recently, Helon Habila, Teju Cole and Vladislavic won the 2015 WindhamCampbell Prize alongside 7 other writers, a Prize I tagged as African affair,
with the 3 Africans scooping the 3 slots allocated for fiction. Helon is my man
any day, such a fecund writer.
Earlier today, on Sabi News, an online news and entertainment site, I read
from Toni Kan, reminiscing on a conversation with Helon on “What Helon Habila Told Me Before He Wrote Measuring Time”. And in
that piece, Kan did a near-perfect review of the book Measuring Time, and of
course what Helon, the author represents.
For me, the only word I have for the book is Adventure. I chose to write about this as my way of celebrating the
World Book Day. Mamo’s experience in the story reminds me of what I thought he
could find in his characterized solitude that he did not. “After the closure of
the school Mamo found himself with time on his hands and without much means of
using it apart from taking long walks in the afternoon.” But I expected Mamo to
find a book, papers, anything just to read. But he didn’t and his woes pressed
heavily on him. I didn’t like him for that. “He took long walks only to kill
time…” and I love the way Helon, this busy hand, weaved this woeful man called
Mamo. “He waited for something, anything to happen, and as he waited he
measured time in the shadows cast by trees and walls, in the silence between
one footfall and the next….” But Mamo! Why didn’t you find a book, just read
something? You would have, I believe, found something interesting, something exhilarating,
liberating, invigorating; something lifting you from this blistering, or is it
icy abyss of clinical solitude.
Ok, Mamo thinks am hash and critical of him. In some occasions his
books and radio was actually his only companion. But his world didn’t get
better; because he read wrong stuffs or perhaps with a bias mind. I understand
because the wait of loneliness had pressed heavily on his shoulders: “At
moments like this he could actually feel loneliness curled up like a ball
somewhere low in his abdomen. In his room he brought out from under the bed a
carton in which he and his brother had always kept their stuff since childhood.
It was full of tattered books…” But Mamo had no love for the books; he chose the
hankie, on which he touches and drowned in lustful reverie about a passing
woman.
That, as painted by Helon, was the early life of Mamo, the rather
introspective character in Measuring Time. You need to find out what happened to Mamo
later on and who he turned out to be. So you need to read Measuring Time, a
novel praised to be “courageous and poise”.
Reading books – right books – makes you better. But what you read is
as important as reading. And that’s why I read good books. Right?
As we celebrate World Book Day today, I hope your love for books and
literary materials grows and that you read always. Having you here is a testimony.
Please call again.
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