Border Mimesis in Helon Habila's Travellers

ABSTRACT: Representations of borders are central to the narrative in Helon Habila's Travellers . In the novel, Habila gives voice to the governmentalization of mobility and the biopolitics of inclusion and exclusion within borders. However, existing studies on Travellers have largely overlooked this crucial thematic concern. I addressed this gap by examining Habila's metaphorization of borders as instruments of global inequality, technologies of surveillance and control, liminal and gothic spaces evoking fear and dread, and as inscribed onto the human body—where the body itself becomes a site of border enforcement and power negotiation. My analysis is grounded in the framework of Critical Border Studies (CBS) alongside the principle of mimesis and reveals that the various portrayals of borders in Travellers are inherently polysemic. Rather than existing solely as fixed, physical demarcations or cartographic boundaries, Habila fictionalized these borders as also fluid, intangible, and dynamic constructs. This semantic complexity shapes how readers make sense of the border encounters of characters such as Manu, Basma, Kairiku, Stan, Uta, and Mark. Their border experiences ultimately problematize the notion of access while exposing the evolving mechanisms of exclusion and denial. Through this, Habila critiques the assumption of borderlessness on which globalization ostensibly thrives.