Tropes of Itinerancy: A Picaresque Reading of Helon Habila's Travelers and Chika Unigwe's On Black Sisters' Street

Contemporary literary criticism of African transnational migration narratives has produced rich thematic analyses, focusing on trauma, identity, and socio-political contexts. However, a significantly persistent formal gap exists in the application of the picaresque genre to this critically underexplored corpus. This study addresses this oversight by arguing for a picaresque reading of Helon Habila’s Travelers (2019) and Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street (2007). It positions these novels as modern iterations of the picaresque to interrogate how the genre’s constitutive conventions— the episodic journey, the marginalised picaro/a, and satirical critique— are reconfigured to articulate the alterity and fractured reality of migrant life. By utilising a literary-critical methodology framed by postcolonial theories of hybridity and othering, and complemented by the psychoanalytic concept of parapraxis, this analysis demonstrates that the picaresque form is a defining narrative strategy. The findings reveal the specificities of migrant adaptation and survival, demonstrating that new identities are realised through complex acts of agency, using the genre’s episodic scope to challenge homogeneous migration narratives.