Habilis by Alyssa Quinn (2022) is a truly brilliant book.

The book is written through alternating chapters of museum labels and the main character’s journey through the museum. The labels cover the growth of language in humans, the ability to recognize the other, and the ability to recognize themselves. At the same time, the protagonist Lucy slowly loses the ability to speak, to recognize herself, to recognize others, as the museum melts and warps around her.

I really do think Quinn achieved the perfect synthesis of form and narrative with this novel. In many ways, there is a supreme pleasure to be had with this book in discovering the particularities of how Quinn achieves this on your own, so I almost want to recommend you stop reading here, and cycle back to this blog entry after reading the book, if you are so inclined. However, if you need more convincing to pick up Habilis, or want to read some discussion of the book right now, below the dividing line is a deeper dive. For anyone stopping here, please know that I love a good label, and I love a good novel, and Habilis does both with aplomb.

While I haven’t done it in quite a while, I used to write museum labels for a living. So, for your tl:dr pleasure, a little (rusty) label from me:

Habilis

Alyssa Quinn, United States, 2022, Ink on paper

Lucy goes to a disco at the museum, and begins to forget who she is. She wants to know what makes us human. The museum labels suggest it might be skull shape, language ability, an upright gait, recognition of the self, or the ability to hold a child’s hand. In Habilis, Lucy makes a catalogue of other Lucys. She is trying to build a roadmap of her past. In the museum, the labels try to make a catalogue of human experience. What makes a good label? What did you think of the book?

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I really enjoyed the way Quinn plays with the specifics of the museum label format, expertly toeing the line between the reality of a museum label and the needs of the story. The series of repeated/revisited Antelope Metapodial Bone labels would make me go wild if a real-world museum was bold enough to put in a gallery, and I did go wild over the revised and expanded label in Quinn’s novel, once I realized what was happening. A museum label is quite often an authoritative voice, fixed in time, and unable to support amendment, counter-narrative, or expansion, without, in most cases, an intervention as drastic as a gallery closure, or a future exhibition. (Unless we’re getting really cutting edge with community curation or multiplicity of labeling). To have a label with the same title and topic revisited and repeated really gets to the crux of the story’s themes – language, and what we can say with it are ever-changing and can be unstable; authority and subjectivity can erode over time.

In the same vein, Quinn plays with real-world museum attempts to make a museum label less authoritative, more inviting towards discussion. Several of the labels in the story end with a question to the museum audience (and, perhaps, the reader). When these questions appeared, it always got a chuckle out of me for their familiarity. In writing museum labels, these sorts of end questions are often written with complete sincerity, an invitation to the reader to answer the question to themself, or the group they came with. They are an attempt to disrupt the museum-as-complete-authority model and to honor the responses and thoughts of the visitor. Just as often, (in my experience) the questions are hastily added on at the end of the ideation process, in an “oh shit, we forgot about the visitor engagement! Quick, put a question at the end!” panic. I was never quite sure which of the two methods Quinn was deploying in the labels of Habilis, and that question was a fun one to sit with. Are the questions at the end of the labels lightly teasing the Museum, Lucy, or me? Or is nobody being teased, and the labels are engaging with the reader with the same level of earnestness as the first kind of museum label writer?

The theme of authority and subjectivity is also present in the sudden shift near the end of the book. Habilis leaves Lucy and the museum labels behind for a time, as one label gives way to a long timeline section detailing paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey’s thoughts and discoveries. While this is a significant format change late in the book, it is a thematic continuation of Quinn’s engagement with the institution of the Museum. The Museum can be a disco space after hours, or a building that encourages learning and question asking. It can also be a violence, built on colonial legacies, often filled by colonial looting (see the British Museum, but also, more likely than not, almost any museum with any sort of anthropological collections in Europe, Canada, or the United States). It can be a place where one singular voice is authoritative, and a multiplicity of others are erased, purposefully or accidentally. The Leakeys had access to Olduvai Gorge owing to British colonial rule of Tanganyika, with the type specimen for Homo habilis being found a just over a year before Tanganyika (now part of Tanzania) gained independence, after all.

In the timeline section, Quinn also explores the gaps in a museum (or the archive, which is a similar seat of institutional power), through the inclusion of entries about Sukhjinder Saleem. I’m a little torn on how I felt about the inclusion of Sukhjinder Saleem. The narrator indicates that they tried to pair Leakey’s voice with that of one of the Indian indentured laborers who built railroads across colonial Kenya when it was the East Africa Protectorate, who were mistreated, and often worked to death. To this end, we get Saleem, who the narrator later confesses is largely an invention in specifics, built out of what broad general information was available, so sparse and bare were the archive records about these workers. This is a true and historical fact, that colonialism made invisible the labor, lives, and names of so many of the colonized.

I suppose ultimately what I’m wrestling with is less the text itself, and the tension inherent to historical reality and the reparative power of imagining backwards. Is the invention of a man — even if the narrator lets us know an invention has taken place — worthwhile if it is meant to fill a gap, to indicate that the gap is even there, or is this a sort of trick, a further erasure of men who we cannot ever know? Does the fiction of Sukhjinder Saleem push away the reality of a nameless man working under colonial rule, even while trying to illuminate it? Ultimately, I think the book asks the reader to ponder these questions, I’m just not quite sure if it’s wholly successful in the asking, for me at least. Maybe I would feel more so that it was if the whole book had been the timeline, split between Leakey and Saleem, rather than the last third of the book. And maybe I wouldn’t. That’s conjecture about a book that doesn’t exist.

Regardless, I think thematically Habilis is overall very poignant and very successful in the myriad of themes it is trying to cover, and that the different formats of the book are a joy to read, and lent a lot of power to Lucy’s story of trying to make sense of her life and herself.