African strangers, spaces of belonging and the “democracy to come” in Helon Habila’s Travellers

Abstract

This article analyses Helon Habila’s Travellers (2019), focusing on its depiction of African migrants in Europe as strangers, as defined by Sara Ahmed in Strange Encounters (2000): those who, in spite of their proximity, are recognized as not belonging or out of place. Following Ahmed, this essay deals with the relation between space and migrant experience in Habila’s novel, in which the configuration of cities such as Berlin and London and of Europe as a whole is presented as characterized by the enforcement of boundaries and spaces of belonging (Ahmed, 2000), so that the African stranger emerges as an undesirable, threatening, foreign element to be feared and expelled. On the other hand, such a logic of defensiveness, homogeneity, and exclusion is partly challenged and undermined in Travellers by acts of resistance carried out by both African and European characters and by acts of domestic hospitality. These acts suggest the disruption of frontiers and borders, and their corresponding sealed and homogeneous spaces (Ahmed, 2000), together with the necessity of exercising hospitality at a collective and political level. As opposed to the configuration of Europe as Fortress Europe, in which identity and community are defined in terms of affiliation to roots, homeland, or race, in Travellers we find thus an appeal to what Jacques Derrida has called the “democracy to come”, a political, always deferred space of unconditional hospitality that opens up to the foreigner and the stranger.