Book Report: Travelers

 26. Halon Habila, Travelers (2019) (10/7/2020)

This novel of six linked "books" is a moving exploration of the refugee crisis in Africa and Europe. It kaleidoscopically introduces us to individuals from Nigeria, Malawi, Libya, Zambia, and Somalia, as well as Berlin, Switzerland, Italy, and England, all of whom become tied up in the crisis in one way or another: as refugees themselves, as those who befriend and try to help refugees; in one case, through a tragic mix-up, a Nigerian man is mistakenly placed in a settlement camp, where he experiences firsthand the despair that so many feel. Kaleidoscopic and also reflected as if through a hall of mirrors as characters appear briefly in one story, and then become the main storytellers or subjects of a third person's narrative in another. The ultimate effect is a contradictory one: hope mixed with anguish and desperation. It is also, however, a novel of the indominability of the human spirit. Hope prevails, despite all odds.

In an essay in 2019, Habila—originally from Nigeria himself, but since 2005 settled in Virginia, a professor at George Mason University—described how he came to write the book.

I was [in Berlin on a fellowship in 2013] to work on a novel; it was six months already and I still hadn’t figured out what my novel was going to be about. I couldn’t seem to settle down, my writing kept getting interrupted by political events that I just couldn’t ignore.
 My country was roiling under Boko Haram Islamic militancy, and I kept following the news trying to make sense of it all. Could this be the country I knew, the peaceful, sleepy region where I grew up? How could things have changed so drastically in just 15 years? At night I dreamt of my family back home being attacked by fundamentalist hordes. Two hundred and seventy-six school girls had been kidnapped by the militants. How could I intervene as a writer, what could I write to console the families of those girls who might never know freedom again? At times like this, one realizes how puny the pen is compared to the sword. I was drawn to the migrants I started encountering in the streets of Berlin because of the violence in my home country which had already displaced over a million people, some of them already here in Berlin, some in Italy, and some drowned in the cold waters of the Mediterranean while trying to reach Europe.

At the same time, he met two migrants seeking asylum in Germany, one Somali, one Pakistani, both from vastly different backgrounds. They asked him to tell their stories. And the final ingredient:

A German newspaper had approached me to write something about a recent tragedy—on October 3, 2013, a boat carrying over 300 migrants from Libya had sunk in the Mediterranean off the coast of Lampedusa, killing all on board, mostly women and children. What could one write in the face of such a staggering cataclysm? How do you get to the heart of it, how do you express your sorrow at the loss, your rage at the politicians back home who let this happen under their watch, and the right-wing politicians in Europe who seek to demonize these helpless but determined voyagers for political gain?  

And so Travelers came to be.  

I wasn't impressed by the technical quality of the writing (I found it somewhat clumsy, the characters a bit flat) so much as by the stories told and the vehicles used for the telling: the various narrators, the use of letters or second-hand accounts in addition to first-person narratives. Also the many details, of refugee camps in Berlin, Bulgaria, Italy, France; of years-long flights through foreign lands; of these people's reception when they finally find a possible home. Habila makes the unfamiliar familiar, and at the same time throws the familiar into question. This book, about such an important issue, has great heart and soul.

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It's only been four days since my last accounting of Covid-19 in Monterey County, when numbers stood at 10,312 (total infections), 610 (hospitalizations), and 75 (deaths). Today the numbers are 10,475, 623, and 78: up 163, 13, and 3, respectively; since yesterday, up 42, 4, and 3. I keep waiting for the rise to cease. But it does seem to be slowing down at least.