Helon Habila

This book looks at the very real events and problems experienced by refugees in contemporary times.
The story is narrated by a Nigerian born, American graduate who has traveled to Berlin at the behest of his wife. She is on an arts fellowship, their marriage had been floundering and she thought that a change of environment would be healthy for their relationship. She advertises for models who are refugees, however turns away some if they don't meet her image of what she wishes too depict. Her husband feels sorry for them and engages with them in conversation and is soon drawn to their community of squatters fighting for survival. In this way we learn of the individual histories of several different people. When his wife returns to the States our unnamed narrator stays on. He finds himself accidentally caught up in a refugee camp and quickly falls into his own personal despair.
I heard this writer speak in the Auckland Writers Festival Winter Series online and I am so pleased I purchased this book. It is wonderfully illuminating about a very contemporary issue.… (més)

Travellers is about privilege, and how sharing a skin colour doesn't necessarily generate empathy. That takes a willingness to listen, and the book records the physical and metaphysical journey of an unnamed Nigerian academic on a fellowship in Berlin, who learns that he has more in common with the refugees on the streets around him than he had thought. His wife, who is African American, is an artist who does not see what is in front of her...

The book is structured around a series of linked narratives, featuring a transgender film student of deliberately obscured national origin; a Libyan surgeon searching for his wife and son who were lost when their smuggler's boat capsized in the Mediterranean; and a young Zambian who is seeking answers to the murder of her brother in Berlin. Two catalysts trigger the academic's journey: the first is when his wife turns away a refugee responding to her callout for subjects for her portraits because his face remains unmarked by suffering; the second is when, having followed this refugee and joined a protest against a café owner discriminating against black immigrants, the academic stumbles on a Stolpersteine embedded in the pavements of Berlin to commemorate people wrenched from their homes and transported to oblivion. He realises that home and belonging is not something that anyone can take for granted.

One of the most powerful images in the book is the infamous symbol of the Berlin Wall, which divided a nation and families for generations. In this novel Checkpoint Charlie is a meeting place for the lost. Manu, unwilling to abandon patients who needed him, had left it very late to flee from Libya, and his plans for escape were flimsy.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/07/04/travellers-by-helon-habiba/… (més)