The Refugee as the New Nomad: Reading Helon Habila's Travellers (2019) and Mohsin Hamid's Exit West (2017) as Literature of Mobility

IntroductionIn the last decades, mobility, migration, and nomadism seem to draw the attention of a significant number of prominent scholars.While Tim Cresswell imagines "the nomad" (1997, 360) in relation to mobility and the post-modern primitive, Ada Ingrid Engebrigtsen declares the nomad as the "key figure of mobility" (2017, 42).In his foundational work Mobility: A Cultural Manifesto, Stephen Greenblatt observes that "[t]he reality, for most of the past as once again for the present, is more about nomads than natives" (2009, 6).And Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in their book Nomadology: The War Machine (1986), claim that "[t]he nomad is not at all the same as the migrant; for the migrant goes principally from one point to another […], the nomad only goes from one point to another as a consequence and as a factual necessity" (1986, 50).The nomad, they add, is "a vector of deterritorialization" (53): nomads "[have] no history; they only have a geography" (73).To Greenblatt's and Deleuze and Guattari's diverse perspectives on nomads and migrants, I add that both the experience of nomadism and migration involves not merely mobility (as a new cultural paradigm) in a literal and metaphorical sense (Sheller and Urry 2006, 207-226; see also Merriman and Pearce 2017, 493-508), but more importantly metamorphosis at the individual, cultural, and political level (Urry 2007, 185-290).Indeed, metamorphosis is a direct outcome of movement(s) across borders, integral to the age of global mobility, which may result in dislocation and displacement for the less fortunate.Referring to "mobility" (2006, 2) involving "displacement," Cresswell convincingly alludes to the convergence of movement, travel, and nomadism, which takes central stage in this article (see also Cresswell 2010).According to him, in social theory, "movement is coded as travel, nomadism, routes, or lines of flight" (2006, 2; original emphasis).Considering Cresswell's research, I aim to demonstrate how nomadism in refugee narratives translates into current movements of 'other travellers,' namely 'the less privileged, the less welcome ones' on a global scale.Keeping in view the nomadic and migrant trajectories in cultural and literary discourse, I set out to examine the representation of refugees in Helon Habila's Travellers (2019) and Mohsin Hamid's Exit West (2017) as literature of mobility, both of which particularly mirror new directions and developments in the genre of 21 st -century refugee novels.My contention is that these novels portray refugees as the new nomads, as opposed to the image of nomads in the last centuries, viz. of colonial, imperial, economic, climate, or recreational nomads, most of whom were nomads by choice.The new nomad, as opposed to a regular traveller, is defined as a person whose life is constantly