Women on the Move

Body, Memory and Femininity in Present-Day Transnational Diasporic Writing

Silvia Pellicer-Ortín,Julia Tofantshuk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429839269
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Women on the Move: Body, Memory and Feminity in Present-day Transnational Diasporic Writing explores the role of women in the current globailized era as active migrants. the authors have brought together a collection of essays from scholars in diaspora, migration and gender studies to take a look at the female experince of migration and globalization by covering topics such as vulnerability, empowerment, trauma, identity, memory, violence and gender contruction, which will continue to shape contemporary literature and the culture at large.

Section 1
Unbelonginess and Displacement in the Diaspora

Finding a Voice through Narrative

1 The Travelling Bodies of African Prostitutes in the Transnational Space in Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail (2006) and Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street (2009)

Cédric Courtois

Nigerian literature has been in the spotlight since the beginning of the twenty-first century: it has indeed known the emergence of a significant number of authors. These “third-generation writers” have so far been torn apart between two different possibilities offered to them: elaborating new subjects and/or dwelling on older themes—which are still part of Nigerian reality—developed by the two previous generations. Pius Adesanmi and Chris Dunton (2005) point out that the third generation is represented by writers born after the beginning of the 1960s, when most African states became independent. They add that “[t]his generation, the first in Africa to be temporarily severed from the colonial event… came to be identified as writers of the third generation Anglophone and Francophone critical traditions” (14). The first and the second generations of Nigerian writers, represented by Chinua Achebe (1930–2013), Buchi Emecheta (1944–2017), or Wole Soyinka (1934–), for example, were “massively overdetermined by [the colonial event]” (Adesanmi and Dunton 2005, 14), while the third generation focuses more on “nomadism, exile, displacement, and deracination” (ibid., 16), as is exemplified in Chris Abani’s (1966–) Becoming Abigail and Chika Unigwe’s (1974–) On Black Sisters’ Street.¹ In a rather controversial review of Zimbabwean novelist NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel We Need New Names (2013), third-generation writer Helon Habila (2013) has denounced what he calls a “Caine-Prize aesthetics” that according to him is representative of the way novelists of his generation write, in order to be awarded the coveted prize:

To perform Africa… is to inundate one’s writing with images and symbols and allusions that evoke… pity and fear,… in a CNN, western-media-coverage-of-Africa, poverty-porn sense. We are talking child soldiers, genocide, child prostitution, female genital mutilation, political violence, police brutality, dictatorships, predatory preachers, dead bodies on the roadside. The result, for the reader, [is] a sort of creeping horror that leads to a desensitisation to the reality being represented.

The representation of the body seems to be ubiquitous in the “Caine-prize aesthetics” Habila alludes to. Whether it be “child soldiers”, “genocide”, “prostitution”, “genital mutilation” or “police brutality”, all point to the mistreatment and abuse imposed on the body; some other elements also seem to indicate the use of the body for mercantile purposes. On the one hand, the two novels under scrutiny in this chapter—Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail and Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street—are, so it seems, no exception to this obsession with atrocities and traumatic events.² On the other hand, unlike what Habila explains in his simplifying summary of contemporary literature as a one-dimensional disaster narrative, some third-generation writers tend to detach themselves from the aforementioned constraining themes by opening their field of exploration onto more global, more cosmopolitan concerns, thus trying to distance themselves from a nationalist-only approach, as explained by Lindsay Green-Simms (2013, 5) who, like Harry Garuba (2005), posits that twenty-first-century Nigerian writing addresses the issues of “globalization, uneven development, and urbanization”. I propose to contribute to the opening up of perspectives on the complexities of contemporary African literature. Green-Simms (Ibid., 5–6) adds: “As Garuba and many others have pointed out, new or third generation African writing is decidedly more global and less national, more cosmopolitan and less ideological”.³ According to this, third-generation writers still find themselves in an in-between position as explained again by Green-Simms (Ibid. 4), who refers to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s (1977–) short-story collection The Thing Around Your Neck (2009) as follows: “[this collection], like the rest of twenty-first century African writing, is by no means monolithic and is certainly still informed both by the stories of previous generations and by the tragic topics of war, hunger, and violence”.

To continue the metaphor at the heart of Adichie’s short-story collection, this “thing around [third-generation writers’] neck[s]” may also well be the literary burden of former generations passed onto them. It is one of my aims in this chapter to show that these writers, unlike what Harry Garuba argues, showcase as many political claims as their literary forefathers and that they are not less “ideological” or political.

Becoming Abigail and On Black Sisters’ Street furnish a fair ground for substantial analysis. Namely, the thematic similarities between these two works are particularly striking. Becoming Abigail is a novella which brings to the fore the coming-of-age of the eponymous character, a teenager whose mother dies while giving birth to her, and whose father commits suicide, eaten away by sorrow, when she is fourteen. She is then sent to London to live with her cousins who are ironically called Peter and Mary; Abigail is unaware of Peter’s decision to prostitute her on the streets of the British capital. On Black Sisters’ Street is the story of four African women (three Nigerian and one Sudanese) who, willingly for some, reluctantly for one of them—and this can be considered a parallel between the two novels, since Abigail is reluctant to go to London—have accepted their pimp’s “passage to Europe” (Unigwe 2010, 247), in order to work in Antwerp, Belgium, as prostitutes. It is the death of one of them, Sisi, that triggers the liberation of their tongues, thus enabling them to voice what has hitherto not been spoken out.

One of the main points at issue in these works is how this commitment in the political field is made through the representation of the black African female body and in particular the body of the female African prostitute. How does prostitution shape the diasporic African female experience? How are these women’s bodies used in order to convey their experiences in the transnational space? Is the body enough to put across meaningful statements or should these women also be given a proper voice?

I will first take a look at the various locations attributed to African prostitutes in the two novels. Thereafter, a significant emphasis will be placed on the representation of the travelling body as both a site of abuse and exploitation, but also resistance, thus negating and transcending the classic dialectics of victim/perpetrator, passivity/action, etc. Related to this exploitation and resistance, these diasporic women seem not to be simply willing to “fill the void with sounds” in Unigwe’s novel (37), but rather, as it remarkably happens in Abani’s novella, with meaningful silences.

Locating the Travelling Bodies of African Prostitutes

In Unigwe’s novel, the main reason why some of the displaced⁴ women decide to go to Europe is the economic situation of Nigeria and, to a lesser extent, Sudan forcing them to leave. Even the most talented youth might face unemployment when they do not have the right “connections” (Unigwe 2010, 22; original emphasis). This is the case for Chisom/Sisi, who is a university graduate but, because she does not know influential people in corrupt Nigeria, remains unemployed despite her intellectual assets. She will have no choice but to travel to Europe to find a job. On a totally different level, the example of Alek/Joyce is equally striking since she finds herself in a refugee camp in Sudan, after her parents and her brother have been assassinated and after she has been raped by soldiers belonging to the Janjaweed militia.⁵ The refugee camp epitomises a liminal space of transition, a sort of limbo, a purgatory even, where people are stuck between the known and the unknown. This refugee camp as liminal space is one of the examples used by Unigwe to show that the women who are presented in her novel—but it is also the case in Abani’s—are depicted as bodies on the move, as travelling bodies.

The two works under scrutiny are third-person narratives structured around a similar pattern, hinging round a back-and-forth movement between the present and the past, thus sometimes conveying the impression that these women are stuck in-between the past and the present, in a liminal space. In his essay entitled “Reflections on Exile”, to which multiple references will be made in this chapter, Edward Said (2000, 173) writes: “Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted”. He adds that even though many stories of successful exilic lives exist in literature, there will always be a feeling of “estrangement…, of something left behind forever” (Ibid., 173). This idea is conveyed in the two novels through a number of metaphors and images of locality, such as a glass door, threshold, phone booth, or the whole cityscape of Lagos vs. Antwerp and London. As theorised by Mary Louise Pratt (2008, 6–7) in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, such spatial and temporal disjunctions could point to the “contact zone”, which she defined as “an attempt to invoke the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historic disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect”. The notion of contact zone can sound positive at first, but in the two novels under study, which deal with exilic African women who are sent to work as prostitutes in Europe, it does not seem to be exactly the case. Indeed, in “Arts of the Contact Zone”, Pratt (1991, 34) also defines this notion as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today”. There seems to be a dearth of equality in the contact zone, where a group controls another one. In Unigwe’s novel, the contact zone gives rise to the testimonies—fictional ones admittedly, but inspired from real-life experiences—of the four women whose stories are told.

The disjuncture alluded to in Pratt’s definition appears in the following two examples taken from the two novels: “Abigail hesitated at the gap between the door and the platform” (Abani 2006, 80; emphasis added). This passage shows the moment when the protagonist arrives in London with her cousin Peter. The gap, the passage between the train and the platform, has to be crossed by Abigail—literally becoming the passage to Europe, between Nigeria and London. In another passage, “[s]he crept out of bed, tiptoeing across the creaking floorboards to stand at the threshold of the door leading into the living-room” (Ibid., 87; emphasis added). Abigail finds herself in a liminal position again; she has a transient status, very much like the one inferred from the places that women in Unigwe’s novel (2010, 9) go to in order to call their families back home for example: “a glass-doored booth in a Pakistani Internet/phone café in Antwerp”. The dash on “glass-doored” and the slash on “Internet/phone” both insert graphically on the page the rift that Edward Said refers to in his essay, a rift that gives rise to melancholy and sadness for the characters. The booth from where one of the characters, Efe (Unigwe 2010), calls her relatives, has a transparent door—reminiscent of the windowpane of the brothel where she works in the red-light district—which could indicate that she is part of the Belgian society yet, in the same manner as a “glass-ceiling”, there is an invisible barrier that ostracises her—and her colleagues—from the locals.

The women in the two novels travel in a globalised context. Globalisation—particularly one of its seediest aspects, the global sex trade—can be seen as a continuing tie between the former colonies and empires—as exemplified by Belgium in Unigwe’s novel and Britain in Abani’s. In the Online Etymology Dictionary, the entry for the word “travel” is interesting when applied to the two novels under study. Indeed, the entry reads: “… to journey, from travailen… ‘to make a journey,’ originally ‘to toil, labor’ (see travail). The semantic development may have been via the notion of ‘go on a difficult journey,’ but it also may reflect the difficulty of any journey in the Middle Ages”.⁶

Obviously, the travelling bodies—from Sudan to Nigeria, from Nigeria to Europe—of the women in the two novels are pretty much linked to the etymological root of travel since they end up toiling on the streets of Antwerp and, possibly, London. The four women who live in the same house in Antwerp in Unigwe’s novel are considered privileged by their relatives, who seem to be unaware of the plight that awaits or which these women are going through. The narrator relates that during a phone call to her family in Nigeria, one of the characters, Efe, learns about the death of her grandmother (Unigwe 2010, 8): “The news of [her grandmother’s] passing had been a mere aside between ‘Buy me a Motorola mobile phone’ and ‘Papa Eugene wants to know how easy it is to ship a car from there to here’”. In this quotation, living in Europe seems to be considered a boon by the women’s relatives, a belief also shared by the four female characters, which may echo Said’s argument (2000, 173) that exile can be “strangely compelling to think about”. Indeed, in spite of their despicable working conditions, they claim to prefer their current situation to their living conditions in Lagos—a metonymy for Nigeria—a city depicted as “[a] place [which] has no future” (Unigwe 2010, 18; original emphasis). However, it is possible to imagine that what they say is a desperate attempt to convince themselves that they are better off in Europe than in Africa, as shown in the following hyperbolical passage where Ama and Alek/Joyce both agree on one point: “… and Antwerp was, for all its faults, the best city in the world and Belgium had the best beers, the Leffes and the Wesmalles and the Stella Artois” (11). The criterion that is used to name the best city in the world—the quality of its beers—can sound ridiculous. Chisom/Sisi even thinks: “… I’m very lucky to be here, living my dream. If I’d stayed back in Lagos, God knows where I’d have ended up” (15). Her thoughts are ironical to the extreme since she actually works in Antwerp’s red-light district, behind a windowpane where she is exposed, in the same way Snow White is exposed by the seven dwarves in “a coffin of clear glass” once she has been poisoned.⁷ The four women in Unigwe’s novel are trying to convince themselves of a false reality, that life is better in Europe than in their home country, because reality in Europe is too hard to face.

In a similar way, in Becoming Abigail (Abani 2006, 64) the protagonist’s father’s comment when referring to her cousin Peter—regarded as a benevolent man because he takes young relatives with him to London on a regular basis—is equally ironical. Indeed, he says that “[Peter] always takes one young relative back to London as well, … [i]magine how lucky those children are!” This imperative form can also be read as an address to the reader. With hindsight, the exclamation mark does appear to emphasise the irony of the situation at stake, an irony used in order to say what is unsaid, to criticise the system that Peter has put in place. As a member of the Nigerian diaspora, the man seems to be very generous, willing to share his luck with young people, but he is only exploiting them in the worst possible manner.⁸ This so-called “luck” might not be the most appropriate term for these women who very often end up undocumented or with fake IDs in the host countries and thus have no rights whatsoever, as it happens when Chisom/Sisi arrives in Antwerp and the character called Madam takes away her passport:

‘Ah, hand over your passport. From now until your debt is paid I am in charge of it.’

Handing over her passport would be tantamount to putting her life into someone else’s hands, would it not? Wha...