It will always ring a bell: “Every departure is a death, every return a rebirth.” Deep words from Travelers, a novel by our own Helon Habila, released on Tuesday in the United States. This line and others in Travelers and Patsy by Jamaica-born Nicole Dennis-Benn bring to mind the concept of home.
Yes, home; that four-letter word. It means so much that the Yoruba have a proverb which translates to “home is the place of rest after a hard work at the farm”. So, what happens when you have a home that you cannot return to? Then you are forced to adopt a new home and find succour in “home away from home”. These two books, though different, but at their core is the concept of home in the context of people who have homes they cannot return to.
Reading these novels set in Jamaica, America and Germany got me thinking about Nigerians who have homes they cannot return to. Go to Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) camps scattered all over the North and you will begin to understand my point.
Patsy, Dennis-Benn’s second novel, is the story of Patricia whose desire to leave Jamaica for New York, United States, towers above all desires, including being with her daughter. She eventually achieves her dream but within hours of being in New York, signs that things will not work out the way she expects start showing. First, her best friend, who encourages her to relocate, shows up at the airport with a husband Patsy is unaware of. More surprises, such as the fact that she has a son, soon jump at her. She confronts this friend whom she assumed she knew but has turned someone else in New York.
In the basement, where she is condemned to and advised on when to venture to the main apartment or not, she is forced to take a stock of her life. But a bigger shock soon comes in after her friend’s husband insists she leaves the house after catching the two of them in uncompromising condition.
From then on, she moves from apartment to apartment, petty jobs to petty jobs, and the more she lives in America, the more her dreams seem far away from being realised. Meanwhile, her visa has expired and she has become an ‘illegal’, unable to return home and making not much progress abroad. Her daughter battles the effects of life without her mother, turns to playing football with boys and rebels against her stepmother despite all the love she shows her.
On the surface, Patsy looks like the story of Patricia, her daughter, her friend and her mother, but on a larger scale, it is the story of Jamaica and how poor leadership and corruption have made its people see the America embassy as the gateway to heaven and will do anything to enter it!
Habila’s Travelers, on the other hand, is largely about people forced to be on the run by circumstances beyond their control. Set in Berlin, Germany, it follows the experiences of African refugees. Habila plunges the reader into a maze of lives in distress away from their homes and unable to find rest abroad. Painfully, they have homes they cannot return to.
The story is told by a nameless narrator, who is a Nigerian living in the United States with his American wife, Gina, a portrait artist. Their marriage is strained, but when Gina wins a fellowship that requires her to move to Berlin, the narrator joins her. It is seen as a last-minute effort to rescue the marriage. But Europe turns him into a stranger and his marriage provides no succour as Gina becomes “more oblivious of what was happening around her, her gaze focused only on her painting.”
“We used to be so happy,” she said. This was when the narrator declares that he has decided to stay back in Berlin after the end of Gina’s fellowship. The beginning of the end of their union, which started with Gina’s miscarriage, refuses the healing hand Gina assumed Berlin would provide.
Mark, a transgender Malawian film student, who escaped to Berlin to pursue his dream, becomes the narrator’s saving grace until the unexpected happens. The narrator’s loneliness assumes a new meaning when his new friend is detained for being in Germany on an expired visa. This ugly side of migration rattles the narrator, who thereafter moves around Berlin, where he comes into contact with African migrants experiencing the ugly sides of being away from home. Mark, who the narrator shockingly finds out was a girl named Mary before bidding his old life bye, later falls from a height and dies. His favourite line is ‘even in Berlin I miss Berlin’.
Another traveller we encounter is Manu, a Libyan who fled to Berlin with his daughter while they await his wife’s arrival. Manu, a medical doctor in Libya before the fall of Gaddafi, becomes a bouncer in a night club in Berlin, and every Sunday visits a tourist centre in Berlin, where he and his wife had agreed to meet in case they ever got separated. But she never shows up. And ne never recovers!
We also meet Portia, the daughter of a Zambian writer, chasing the ghosts of her father and brother in Switzerland and England. Using these characters, Habila (who has three other novels to his name) provides readers a guide to the African Diaspora.
Travelers captures our global political moment and the downside of living in exile. The politics of asylum, freedom and Diaspora are laid bare in this important work that can only be the product of one with the heart of an artist.
Patsy also scores high in laying bare the weirdness of migration. Its language is simple but not simplistic. Dennis-Benn’s use of the tricky present tense to narrate the bulk of the story is worthy of commendation because she does it so well that one can say no detail is lost.
Habila’s fourth novel, which was released in the United States on Tuesday, and Dennis-Benn’s released on June 4, are reminders that the developing world needs to develop fast. Reading Patsy (while away from home) reminds me so much of Lagos and Nigeria. Travelers also evokes similar memories. In the case of Travelers, conflict is the reason why Manu’s life is shattered. In Patsy, we see the effects of corruption on Jamaica. In both works, we see our failed states, our deepest fears and lives torn apart by crises caused by men whose greed and ego are beyond description.
My final take: Nigeria, Africa and the rest of the developing world must find a way to make their people feel at home and not seek emergency homes in better climes, which never truly accept them. We must tell our leaders the truth, and the truth is that they have failed us and are continuing to fail us and forcing us to seek refuge among people who, at best, see us as parasites or labourers without choice!
Leave a Reply