The Paradox of (Re)Inventing the West in the Nigerian Diasporic Fiction of Helon Habila, Chika Unigwe and Okey Ndibe

Since its advent with the publication of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in 1958, the modern Nigerian novel has engaged itself in the essentialist paradigm of protest. With the turn of the new millennium, however, there has emerged a transnational model in which scores of novels and short stories are written by younger writers on diasporic characters in Europe and America, away from the dogma of combating colonialism and neocolonialism. In what appears to be a manifesto statement of the new direction, Charles Nnolim writes in the influential journal, New Directions in African Literature, defining the new agenda to be the task of “re-inventing Europe and developing International themes in our Literature” just in the same way, he says, “Europe invaded Africa and the world with literature civilization, religion and technology”. The literature arising from the new voluntary diaspora is therefore expected to be more purposefully equipped to retaliate the aggression of colonialism, than to romanticize “the strong-bronzed men or regal black/women” conceptualized by Conte Cullen in writings of the first black diaspora. This study is a cultural materialist interrogation of three Nigerian novels written in the second decade of the 21st century focusing on the quest for intellectual, economic and spiritual survival of Nigerian immigrants in the West. Helon Habila’s Travellers (2019) tells the story of a Nigerian intellectual along with other African immigrants caught in the complex debilitating web of multiculturalism and identify crisis. Chika Unigwe’s on Black Sisters Street (2011) is a tale of four well-endowed Nigerian ladies fleeing poverty at home into sex-slavery in Belgium where they live in the shadow of fear and death. And Okey Ndibe’s Foreign God’s Inc (2017) is an account of an unemployed Nigerian immigrant with divine ancestral connection who chooses to steal his community’s god and sell at a loss to a New York businessman. These three novels illustrate failed attempts by Nigerian immigrants to meaningfully integrate into Western Society, much less, re-inventing a commanding superior vision of a narrative at the expense of their host communities. They rather surrender their intellect, beauty and spirituality to the oppressive homogenizing influence of the divergent globalized culture in a more humiliating manner than those displaced characters in the literature of the first diaspora.