travelers (helon habila)

I want to say: read this book.

I want to say, read this book so that you can go through the door and see the other side of the stories on the news you look at and think, how terrible, and then move on from.

At least give those souls, those African souls, the space to breathe before the world swallows them up, the space that Habila permits them in his novel.

I want to say that there is one moment, which is a contrived literary twist, which is a writer’s trick, that is so powerful that it kicked me in the belly like a child trying to get out.

I want to say: burn the borders.

I want to take my hat off to a writer whose portmanteau novel manipulates narrative and character with the dexterity of a magician.

I want to remember how this took me back to the once upon a time of Peter and Supergirl, the Nigerians who came to London and didn’t want to leave, who a naive Anthony didn’t drive to the airport, who were the Royal Court play that the Royal Court would never stage, because history is banal and cruel and our stages don’t know how to represent that.

Although Habila´s novel does.

I want to think of Peter, the actor with the hat pulled over the brim of his eyes, an actor of sheer charisma, the one the female director said could have been her Benedict or her Woyzeck, but who threw in all that so that he could clean floors in office buildings in West London, forever looking over his shoulder, because that was better than waiting for something which Nigeria was never going to offer him. Whilst his friend told me on the drive to the airport: “They will ask me - why did you come back? And they will look at me with disrespect because no answer will be sufficient."

Habila’s novel makes you want to talk about so many things, because it talks about so many things. Three continents, two cities, one sea, a myriad of stories.

Read this book.