Roots, Routes, and African Diasporic Precarity in Helon Habila’s Travellers

• Author(s): Dr Steve Ushie Omagu ; Uchenna S. Eze ; Paul Akika Okun
• Paper ID: 1705186
• Page: 685-695
• Published Date: 04-11-2024
• Published In: Iconic Research And Engineering Journals
• Publisher: IRE Journals
• e-ISSN: 2456-8880
• Volume/Issue: Volume 8 Issue 3 September-2024

Abstract

Discourses of Africa diaspora continue to experience incontrovertible fecundity. It is made the more pivotal by literature through relentless reflections of the expansion of global interconnectedness in textual narratives. An instance is seen in social realism and existentialist ideals leading the ideological landscape of diasporic thematic signposts interrogated in Helon Habila’s Travellers (2019). Habila, like several other African authors, portrays the unique inclinations of many African migrants– legal or otherwise– who leave the homeland for numerous (un)justified reasons. Their traversals of precarious passages enroute diverse Euro-American spaces seeking the “American dream”, birth the migrant experiences that constitute diasporic narratives of the 21st Century. This paper charts and addresses first, the precarity of migrants’ situations deconstructed under the rubrics of roots and routes. It equally harps on the excessive cultural baggage with which African migrants’ identities are constructed in textual spaces; as well as how they maneuver their lived experiences. Ultimately, migrants’ disillusionment is interrogated here using Post-colonial theory as an interrogative tool to show contemporary manifestations of deflated diasporic dreams. The research finds that the massive exodus of Africans to Euro-American spaces does not have the answers to Africa’s socio-political and economic conundrum. The paper further interrogates the price of African diasporic uprooting, drawing from the primary text and co-texts. It finally determines that, in spite of the socio-economic advantages seemingly abounding in the West as a host land, African migrants could contend with the crisis of unplanned, and poorly charted diaspora capable of damaging them psychologically while rendering them unfulfilled, alienated, disillusive, traumatized and possibly increased diasporic fatality.

Keywords

African Diaspora, Helon Habila, Travellers, Spatial Poetics, Border Poetics, Disillusionment, Routes

Citations

IRE Journals:
Dr Steve Ushie Omagu , Uchenna S. Eze , Paul Akika Okun "Roots, Routes, and African Diasporic Precarity in Helon Habila’s Travellers" Iconic Research And Engineering Journals Volume 8 Issue 3 2024 Page 685-695

IEEE:
Dr Steve Ushie Omagu , Uchenna S. Eze , Paul Akika Okun "Roots, Routes, and African Diasporic Precarity in Helon Habila’s Travellers" Iconic Research And Engineering Journals, 8(3)