Between the devil and the deep blue sea

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.