There is a scene in A Stranger’s Pose, Emmanuel Iduma’s new nonfiction book, when he wanders the Moroccan city, Rabat, with a companion who offers to, “show you how Nigerians live here.” Iduma finds himself in a crowded house, where people, drinks and drugs are for sale. “I was trying to make it to Europe,” says Iduma’s host later as they walk home. “But then I came to Rabat.”

From the time he was 22 to 26, Iduma traveled to 20 African cities, the majority in West Africa. Some of Iduma’s trips occurred during the years he participated in Invisible Borders, a project that funded African artists to travel across the continent and document their experience. Others Iduma took on his own.

As we follow Iduma through his travels, we are briefly transported to new communities. Letters, stories, poems and images surface within the broader text, often making connections between previous eras and people. There are images by African photographers, from Burkina Faso’s Siaka S. Traoré to Ethiopia’s Michael Tsegaye, including portraits in which Iduma shyly poses.

Iduma sometimes omits certain details—names, locations and mode of transport. The result is, at times, intentionally disorienting. But Iduma’s lyrical prose and curiosity allow for delicious submersion. The result is a journey through emotion, thought and place that is not restricted to specific countries. It is also a personal meditation on transience and grief; the ways in which movement can and cannot heal.

I met Iduma on a crisp October afternoon at an empty coffee shop in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, right before the US launch of his book. We talked about his lifelong fascination with photography, the politics of travel and why home remains an elusive concept.

Today across Africa, borders are becoming more, not less, militarized. In the name of stopping migration and counter-terrorism, European countries are funding biometric technology, border guards and training police. Few African governments have resisted. In the book, Iduma meets people on the move to Europe and understands that already he is traversing through a different reality: he will never know what it is like to undertake those crossings. “The ocean is the world, without partition or division, only depth and expanse,” writes Iduma. “The opacity of the sea is therefore its rich, dangerous promise. Some will drown, and some will reach harbour.”

Yet A Stranger’s Pose remains a powerful testament to the possibilities that result from human movement.

(The following has been condensed and edited for clarity).