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. ( )

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/ ( )

A wonderful, sad, eloquent novel about displacement and home. About being lost and found and lost. About suffering and survival. About leaving and not always returning. About refugees of all stripes. About the friendship of strangers, and the strangeness of friends.

***HIGHLY RECOMMENDED*** ( )

One of the richest and most intellectually-driven stories of recent immigration I've read. The male protagonist is Nigerian, married to an American artist who is gently coded as African American but who has reached a level of privilege, when compared with others in the novel (including her husband) that she's disinterested in the sufferings of recently immigrated Africans unless they are subjects for her art projects. When the couple relocates to France for her art, the novel evolves organically to a story about the many layers of privilege and suppression that humans are relegated to, depending on their immigration status. Habila does such a good job of depicting both the resigned despair of those without legal status, and the narrow self-interest of those who don't need to worry about such things. ( )

I bought the book because I have read all of Habila's previous novels, and one small nonfiction book, and enjoyed them all. I'm writing this review four months after my reading of the book; and it is difficult because so many books have been read since that time. But I persevere because it deserves a broader readership.

Told in the 1st person by a young Nigerian grad student, whose name we do not learn, Travelers tells a story of one man’s story of both rootlessness and connection. Our narrator, when the story begins, is a grad student in the United States and is invited to Berlin by his wife, who has received a prestigious art fellowship that includes a year in Germany. He agrees to go, but soon finds himself a bit aimless in her shadow. When a migrant answers an ad to sit for a portrait for his wife, our narrator, “sensing something intriguing about him,” offers to walk the man to the bus stop. Mark, the migrant, will introduce our narrator to others, who will introduce him to still more migrants and it’s clear our narrator feels a deep connection with them. At one point in the story, when he is traveling between cities, he gets off the train accidentally leaving his bag behind, this rendering him, at least in the eyes of the authorities, just another undocumented migrant. He is taken into custody and too quickly deported to a camp in Italy. That’s not the end of his story or the book, but it seems a good place to leave you :-)

Quiet and absorbing, Travelers is a tale of one man’s inner journey in exploration of, as Lisa Ko notes on the back cover, “the meanings of freedom, diaspora, and home.” ( )