Precarity in Transit: Travellers by Helon Habila

Abstract

This article offers a reading of Helon Habila’s latest novel Travellers, which was inspired by the onset of the so-called European refugee crisis in 2013. The essay pays special attention to the embodied act of narration and its exploitation by Habila as a mode of cultivating a compassionate understanding of forcibly displaced persons and their often precarious lives in prolonged transit. The analysis follows Butler’s idea of narrative as a mode, on the one hand, of humanising lives violently erased, as they all too often are in the event of involuntary migration, and, on the other, of restoring to “the ethically conscious” world their “capacity to mourn”, where it has been undermined by the systematic denial of human suffering by the nation state and dominant asylum discourse. Theoretical as this approach may appear at first glance, the essay’s goal is to demonstrate that, for Habila’s protagonist, learning to listen to other people’s stories properly and compassionately means to distance himself from the abstract projections of refugee subjecthood he himself endorses as the cosmopolitan intellectual he represents at the outset.