Mobility Humanities

Chika Unigwe is an Igbo writer from the Nigerian city of Enugu. She migrated to Belgium in 1995 and, two decades later, published a collection of ten short stories titled Better Never Than Late. These overlapping stories portray the everyday lives of Igbo immigrants in the Belgian cities of Turnhout and Antwerp. While migration to the Global North is one of the salient features of postcoloniality, studies of Afrodiasporic literature seldom apply the New Mobilities Paradigm. This interdisciplinary framework problematises the inattention to and trivialisation of concrete and embodied mobilities. I therefore examine literary representations of mobility and nostalgia in Better Never Than Late through the narrative technique of heteroglossia. I argue that Unigwe deploys a diversity of Igbo diasporic voices in her short stories, whose formal dialogism enables a thematic critique of mobility exigencies and psychodynamics. The heteroglossic narration centres on Agu and his wife, Prosperous, who routinely host or visit members of the Igbo diasporic community. More pertinently, the climactic denouements of the short stories create hermeneutic blanks, within and through which both implied and actual readers of varying ideological orientations can join Unigwe in interrogating the ethical situatedness of Igbo mobility and nostalgia.