Death by water haunts the stories of Africans in Europe that flow through this fourth novel by Helon Habila. From the drowning of Milton’s swain Lycidas (a sort of tidal refrain for the book) to the capsized boat in the closing pages that offers victims in their hundreds to the ‘enraged leviathan’ of the sea, the imperious waves help wash these personal histories in an aura of myth. Whether privileged or penniless, the migrants whose journeys fill this episodic fresco of a work all crave the stories ‘traded as a currency among homeless, rootless people’. They hunger for narratives because ‘the water they all crossed to come here has dissolved the past’.
Brought up in Nigeria and now (like so many African authors) a professor in the US, Habila spent a year in Berlin as a fellow of the famously munificent German exchange service for artists and academics, the DAAD. Fairly often, the DAAD’s guests will then write books or shoot films prompted by their stint in this weightless, state-funded wonderland. One character in Travellers calls bohemian Berlin a ‘crumbling ivory tower’. To outsiders, the ivory still looks in pretty enviable nick.
Indeed, at its outset Habila’s novel seems to embark on a course of elegantly deracinated narcissism. The nameless narrator — a US-based researcher of Nigerian origin, with an artist wife — mooches indulgently through the German capital. He tries to rescue their marriage during this ‘break from our breaking-apart life’. Writers such as Teju Cole have already mastered the role of quizzical, alienated African flâneur amid the bloodstained, history-encrusted stones of Old Europe.
Habila, though, refuses to linger in this dreamy expat limbo. He has shocks up his stylish sleeve. Gradually, we slide and then tumble down into the tougher strata of Afro-German life, among both settled residents and insecure new refugees — the Flüchtlinge.
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