 What We’re Up To This Month:In my first semester of graduate school, nearly a decade ago now, I signed up for Helon Habila’s Writers in Non-Native Places literature class. Though I didn’t know it at the time, Helon had just returned from a year in Berlin on a prestigious DAAD fellowship and was at work on what would become the novel Travelers. The book, which was published in 2019 to enormous acclaim, focuses on a Nigerian scholar who moves to Berlin with his American wife, an artist, in the hopes of saving his marriage. Through his encounters with the African immigrants his wife paints, and later through his own precarious, multi-continent journey, he becomes increasingly alienated—from his marriage, from his sense of home and identity, from humanity writ large. Travelers is beautiful, disorienting, hopeful.
Like many writers who also teach for a living, Helon designs his courses around the ideas he’s currently grappling with in his own work. In our lit class back in 2014, we read eight books, all of them wrestling with themes of exile and nostalgia, all of them excellent. The popular “global lit” novels I had read up until then—Rushdie, Roy, Hosseini, etc.—were essentially epic morality tales, but Helon taught our class to consider a subtler perspective. Migration is more bewildering than epic for his characters, who, like rag dolls, are pushed and pulled by enormous, invisible forces into uncanny futures. |
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