Displacement, Dispossession, Trauma, Refugee Crises: The New Middle Passage in Helon Habila’s Travellers

Abstract

This paper analyses Helon Habila’s Travellers (2019), focusing on its depiction of African migrants experience as the new middle passage. The novel as a diasporic narrative reveals the experiences of immigrants especially of war torn Africa, and the Middle East in Europe. The setting in Europe, revolves around cities like Berlin, Basel, London and Lampedusa lsland, where the unnamed narrator, meets various immigrants who narrate their stories of life in Europe, and their experiences as they travel to Europe. The study conceptualizes the middle passage as a movement symbolic of the forced voyage of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe. The concept will be examined in the six titled divisions of the book, to discuss the experiences of displacement, trauma and refugee crises. The study concludes that African migrants yet again encounter challenges, because they are forced to leave their homes and communities due to political and social upheavals and in the course of movement, are traumatized and dispossessed of their homes, families, and identities, leading to profound psychological and emotional suffering. The author argues that the middle passage experience situates African refugees as people who have been robbed of their past and their future, forced to live in a perpetual state of limbo and uncertainty, as a result of power. The narrative discourse thus examines the complex power dynamics that emerge in the context of migration, which are the exploitation of migrants by smugglers and the tensions that arise between different groups of refugees.