Eating With Helon Habila

How does one measure time? By the Gregorian? Or one’s own personal calendar? Month by month, day by day? Minute after second? How? Helon Habila’s 2007 novel Measuring Time does it through the eyes, ears and voices of members of the Lamang family. Families, in many ways, are timekeepers, archives of shared legacy, often including the family name and other shared histories that hold meaning. Their stories become clocks of sorts, parsing out events with each tick—birth and death, war and peace, routines of the day—and accompanying meals (breakfast, lunch and dinner).

Why do we mark time and its passage? Perhaps because it connects us to and across place, bridging distance, collapsing events, helping us remember even as we forge ahead. And importantly, it can—where we desire—allow us to tell our own stories, in our own voices, of what it means to be who we are, if and when we know how. The kicker? It might come at a cost which is hard to predict ahead of time. Time is aware of its cycles and how they ferry on the virtues, vices and vagaries of human beings.