Abstract
Europe occupies a powerful place in African migrant imaginaries as a site of economic redemption, social mobility, and structural stability. This paper interrogates the idea of Europe as a space of “better opportunities” for African migrants. While Europe offers measurable economic advantages; higher wages, social welfare systems, and remittance potential, these opportunities are unevenly distributed and embedded within racialized labour hierarchies and restrictive border regimes. African migrant narratives have increasingly challenged this long-held imagination of Europe. This paper examines how Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street and Helon Habila’s Travellers dismantle the myth of Europe by representing migration as a condition of prolonged exile, disillusionment, and existential unhomeliness. Drawing on the postcolonial, Marxist, and feminist thoughts, the paper argues that both novels reconfigure Europe not as a destination but as a liminal space of economic exploitation, bureaucratic violence, and psychic displacement. While Unigwe foregrounds the gendered commodification of African female bodies within sexual economies, Habila exposes the precarity of refugee masculinity and the endless temporariness of migrant life. Through close textual analysis, this study demonstrates that the migrant dream collapses into a crisis of belonging in which “home” becomes unattainable, fragmented, or reimagined beyond geography. The paper contributes to migration studies by reading exile as a shared yet gender-differentiated condition and by positioning contemporary African migrant fiction as a counter-narrative to Eurocentric fantasies of mobility and freedom.
Keywords: Migration, Exile, Unhomeliness, Myth
DOI: 10.36349/alqajolls.2026.v01i02.032
author/Ibrahim Aishatu Alhassan
journal/AL-QALAM JLLS 1(2) | June 2026
