By Michael Jimoh
The Book and Author
“Have you ever been on a refugee boat?” A rescued female character in Helon Habila’s new novel, Travelers, asks her benevolent hosts in whose large home she recuperates after a crumbling trawler she travels in as a refugee capsizes in the Mediterranean. Fleeing her war-torn native Libya and after paying $20, 000 to smugglers in a boat crossing, she, her doctor husband and two children end up in the belly of the Mediterranean Sea.
They survive but are separated and so lose contact in the ensuing confusion. Before leaving Libya, they agree to rendezvous at Check Point Charlie in Berlin. Kept afloat by lifejackets, Basma and her one-year-old son Omar wash up in the shores of a southern Italian village after the boat flips. She barely remembers what happened because of the trauma such accidents trigger. Daughter in tow, Manu, her husband, reaches Germany where the surgeon in Libya becomes a bouncer in a Berlin night club.
Every Sunday, from wherever Manu may be – at work in the club or in someone else’s arms – he goes to Check Point Charlie with Rachida hoping to reunite with his wife and son, a reunion that, after each visit, looks more like a mirage, an unmet expectation.
The anguish and anxiety that comes with such separation overwhelm both of them, Basma especially. And then, there is the sinking feeling the other person(s) may not have survived after all. Summarizing her ordeal to Matteo, a wannabe lover and potential husband, and Pietro, his retired fisherman father, Basma says: “Pray you never do. Pray your country never breaks up into civil strife and war, that you are never chased out of your home.”
By that time, many of her fellow crossers had died, left to their fate in the middle of the sea by double-dealing smugglers. Those who could not afford what the doctor paid for his family are below deck, cheek by jowl, sitting on one another. As Basma recalls of the accident, they were the first casualties. Some others languish in fetid and unhygienic refugee camps.
Many were clearly despairing and depressed, yielding to the despondent uncertainty such disasters bring about, living in limbo, a kind of suspended existence: a woman went mad, she simply cracked up, was restrained but stabbed herself to death soon after; one refugee hanged himself in a bathroom; another scaled the camp’s fence and leaped right into the sea and was promptly swallowed up by the waves.
This is one of the most harrowing chapters aptly titled “The Sea” in Travelers published by WW Norton & Company, New York. For one, there are more deaths recorded in this chapter than any other. It is in this chapter, too, the protagonist, an unnamed narrator, ends up, by default or twist of fate, in a refugee camp. Moreover, till date, the highest number of African migrants and asylum seekers in Europe often take to the sea, the Mediterranean that is, as records have shown. (Readers can just imagine how incomplete Travelers would have been without this chapter.)
Only last month, a boat load of 350 African migrants sank in a southern Italian town. Of that number, more than 300 were rescued while 15 drowned – mostly women and children. In early December, another boat crammed with migrants from The Gambia tipped its human cargo somewhere off the coast of Mauritania. Some drowned while those who could swam to shore and were rescued.
As a subject for his fourth novel after Waiting for an Angel 2001, Measuring Time 2007, Oil on Water 2010, Habila has done a great service to migrants we often see (only after disaster happens) but seldom hear their own stories. In Habila’s Travelers, readers get to know the motivating force(s) behind migrants leaving their respective countries, their hopes and aspirations and what they have to contend with along the way from their point of departure to their final destinations.
What’s more, through this novel, Habila has laid bare in his inimitable style of writing one of the most vexing problems in the relationship between Africa and Europe in the 21st century, and may be for some time to come.
In 2013, Habila, a professor of Creative Writing & Literature at George Mason University, Fairfax in Virginia, was in Germany. At about the same time or just before his arrival, a boat capsized off the coast of Lampedusa in southern Italy drowning 300 African migrants. An editor commissioned the visiting Nigerian teacher from America to do an article about it.
The idea for the book literally took off from there. As they say, sow a thought and you reap an idea. Sow an idea and you reap a word. Sow a word and you reap an action. By the time Habila was done conducting interviews with surviving African migrants in Berlin, the germ of an idea for a novel had formed in his mind.
“The book came about accidentally,” Habila told an interviewer recently. “When I started gathering these stories, I could feel how powerful they were, stranger than fiction. So you could call this a book of found stories. The stories basically dropped in my lap.”
And what does he do with the idea? Transform it into the action that is now the core of Travelers, a book of six chapters for different characters in perpetual motion and constant state of apprehension.
No one ever wishes to trade places with illegal migrants from Africa looking for better opportunities in Europe. Hoofing it across or riding through the Sahara – an unforgiving wasteland – comes with its perils: wayfarers are often at the mercy of money-driven, hostile desert dwellers. Some die along the way. Packed breath to breath, nose to nose and knee to knee in usually unsafe inflatable dinghies across the Mediterranean, many of them drown. Some survive.
Rescued and shuttled from one squalid camp to another in harsh weather conditions under sadistic guards, survivors look very much the shipwreck victims that dredge up now and then as human flotsam in European port towns: dehydrated, seasick, often starving and just barely hanging on to life. For those who make it to their final destinations in Europe, their ordeal seems to have only just begun.
Starting with “One Year in Berlin,” “Checkpoint Charlie,” “Basel,” “Interpreters,” “The Sea” and “Hunger,” they are all connected organically because the main character who might be the author himself appears in all sort of situations linking the stories, stringing them together, as Habila once wrote in a poem, “like termites in the mating season.”
The narrator is a Nigerian PhD student in an American university. Bored with the routine that has become their life in America along with his painter wife Gina on an art fellowship, the narrator removes to Germany for a much expected thaw in their frosty relationship. Along with trying to make the best of that, Gina paints portraits of African migrants, migrants in various stages of distress or deprivation.
In one such session our narrator meets and befriends Mark, an androgynous Malawian model-to-be, badly in need of the Fifty Euro to be paid. He is turned down by Gina because he does not look woebegone enough or, as the narrator later reflects, he lacked “the character only time and experience brings.”
On that failed attempt to pose and be paid, Mark’s world as a formerly registered student with soon-to-expired documents unravel bit by bit: a rundown residency in an abandoned church; a pointless protest which the narrator questions, referring to people like Mark as “purveyors of an alternative way of life, often not agreeing what exactly that alternative should be, just an alternative to the status quo.”
On Mark’s trail, the narrator visits a ghetto for illegal migrants where “a rancid smell hung over the room, rising from the cooking and the shoes and the unwashed bodies;” comes to know Mark’s immediate existence, a life spent on the run, harassed and chased from house to house by the authorities, hidden by sympathetic friends and depressed most of the time. In the end, Mark leaps to his death from a roof during a protest for and against migrants like him.
“I miss Berlin, even in Berlin,” Mark confides to the narrator in one of their encounters, meaning he never always felt like a citizen or at home in Berlin.
Much of the action in this chapter takes place in that city, a city the narrator tries to connect with but was never quite able to do. In one early encounter, a female post office clerk turns down his request to buy stamps if he can’t speak German. Outdoors in a park, the same narrator anticipates a decent conversation with a Berliner. She looks the other way, prompting him to reflect on his status: “I felt the already unbridgeable gap between me and this city widen. Even if I spoke her language, the language the city spoke, would she understand me?”
“It is much easier to be on the verge of something,” Markus Zusac wrote in The Book Thief, “than to be actually it.”
Such is the lot of many of the characters in Travelers. Take, for instance, Karim the Somali shopkeeper who dominates “Interpreters.” He never could be what he wanted for himself and family even after settling in Germany. His ordeal began long before his country descended into war. It arrives right at his shop in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, by way of an avaricious son of a local warlord who wants, by force, to marry Karim’s underage daughter Aisha – only ten! His refusal sets in motion what would become “Karim’s personal nightmare.”
Though he regains freedom from a refugee camp, thanks to his sons’ fluency in languages (a theme explored in Habila’s first novel, Waiting for an Angel, wherein Lomba the protagonist is freed after writing or fibbing poems for his jailor) Karim’s ordeal begins anew after his Muslim-born senior son becomes a born-again Christian with Jehovah’s Witnesses.
David or Mousa’s story in “Basel” has a nightmarish ending after a promising beginning. The son of an internationally renowned academic superstar from Uganda, David undergoes many transitions before morphing into Mousa, a Malian Muslim with a preacher father. Integrating into his new environment presents its difficulties. Just about when it seemed everything was going swimmingly in a last attempt at reconciliation, he is pushed under a moving train out of preemptive strike by his former wife, Katharina.
The most colourful character in Travelers is none other than Mousa’s (David’s) father, Professor James Kariku a privileged and peripatetic African intellectual superstar in European capitals, dazzling academic audiences and feted like royalty by them. It is not for nothing he is called a “professional exile,” almost always at his best in good company in Europe but never so in Uganda Zambia where he is hounded and hunted for his anti-government activities.
“I shouldn’t have pressed him to return,” his wife rues to their daughter, Portia in one intimate mother-to-daughter talk. “Exile was his life. The return killed him.”
Travelers is a novel of interwoven stories and themes within a theme: the title of Gina’s paintings is “Travelers,” same with the title of the book; the longing for home, for the past is not peculiar to African migrants alone – sort of internationalizing the subject of home and exile. A notable example is one of Germany’s most famous artist and rebel, George Grosz. He it was who fled Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s to America and having taught in ivy league schools there, returned to Germany where, after a night of drinking, he fell down a staircase and died.
Even cities hold on to the past, as well. Keen on knowing more about Gina’s travels in Europe, she tells the narrator the story of Dresden, the most bombarded city in Germany during World War 2 but that in rebuilding it, the city planners “had a choice to do something new, make a clean break from the past. But they decided to rebuild the city like it was.”
Ever since its publication, Travelers has received rave reviews from writers and critics. Yu Tran, author of Dragonfish, gushed about it thus: “A moving and eye-opening novel that captures our global political moment and plumbs the many layers of life in exile, of people who are forever bereft in their traveling…Habila writes with the eye of a journalists, the tools of an artist, and the heart of a sober and compassionate witness.”
Another writer, Leila Aboulela, The Kindness of Enemies, and winner of the maiden edition of the Caine Prize in 2000, has written of Travelers: “It’s an unsettling book that faces the urgent questions of our time and doesn’t settle for easy answers. Yet the resilience of the characters, the mature decision to avoid melodrama, gives us a novel full of hope and wonder, tied to fully realized characters that, as readers, we come to care about.”
It is hard for your heart not to go to Juma the Nigerian asylum seeker who finds his way to London through the desert after religious extremists raid and sack his community. The story in which he appears is appropriately called “Hunger.”
Facing deportation orders, the Nigerian goes on hunger strike. Attempts to force feed him wins him more sympathy, first from the nurse tending him, and other unlikely friends. Overnight, Juma becomes a celeb, taking up yards and yards of space in the front pages, getting talked about in parliament, and polarizing the masses opinion on questions of forceful deportation and having protests staged for and against him in London.
In the last days of his hunger strike, the narrator imagines Juma in his cell, “thirsting for mother’s milk, unable to eat anything else, he shrinks…curled up in a corner fetus-like, his flesh withers, his bones become frail as twigs,” twigs that after his demise, “the cleaner comes and sweeps up…and bags them and throws them into a dumpster.”
Though he expires in London, Juma recalls his experience to the narrator about being pursued, evading and hiding from the authorities and local skinheads in Greece. It is worth quoting at length to understand his predicament in a foreign land and the nostalgia it aroused in him:
“My friend Hassan almost gave up. I told him to hold on, he was crying and begging me to allow him to surrender, then miraculously we found a can of preserved apples in a closet in the kitchen. We opened it and drank the juice, then we ate. We were able to last a day longer on that can, and that day the skinheads gave up, they just left, and we were able to get out. When we opened that can and I took out a piece of apple, the smell of it brought tears to my eyes. I remembered all the fruits I ever ate growing up, the mangoes, the bananas, the melons, the pineapples. I wanted to go home. The longing for home was so strong I could feel it in my stomach. It was a moment of weakness I never allow myself to indulge in anymore. Hunger is a tool. It is power. By refusing to eat, you are telling your enemy, there is nothing you can do to me anymore. If I am willing to starve myself to death to prove a point, what else is there to fear.”
It is perhaps for such determination, such doggedness in some of his characters the author doffs his hat for their courage in braving the odds to forge a new life for themselves. In a recent interview about his book, Habila himself said: “I think most of the characters would look at themselves as heroes, they refused to lay down and die in their own countries, they refused to give in to tyranny and hopelessness, instead they took the risk to seek a new beginning in a new land…for most of them they do it because they love their families, they want their children to have a better future and they are willing to face humiliation and even death to achieve that.”
Gloomy though the book might seem to readers on account of what the exiles endure – psychological and physical – the suspicious one overs by white ladies clutching their bags when black people approach them in the street, the baleful glares by police officers and the unconcealed hatred of those who shout “go back you fucking foreigners,” – Habila’s novel is also a story of love, unrequited love in the case of Matteo and Basma and one, that as a reader, you will heave a sigh of relief in the case of the narrator and Portia.
There is also hope that attitudes may change, as witnessed by the sheer generosity of locals to migrants in their midst. Again, the exuberance of the school kids shouting “Schocolade” to Gina and the narrator shows they are yet unsullied, untainted with adult prejudices against non-indigenes, especially black people.
In all, Travelers is an ambitious book by one of Nigeria’s most accomplished writers whose consistency – despite a demanding engagement as a university teacher – has impressed readers and critics alike.
