Jason Weaver
In the UK right now, there is a real taste for true-life biographies about child abuse. Every bookshop has a section dedicated to small volumes with titles like Please Daddy No and A Child Called It. The covers usually feature black-and-white photos of sad-faced kids and the titles are in a hand-scrawled font. I suspect that the decline of the horror genre is connected to an appetite for these altogether more real stories. It’s redolent of Alan Partridge: “I’d like to understand man’s inhumanity to man… and then make a programme about it.”
On the face of it, Chris Abani’s novella Becoming Abigail should fit right in there. It is ostensibly about the traumas and abuses suffered by a young Nigerian girl caught up in the skin trade. Except that it isn’t just about sex trafficking. Nor should it be. Abani is a thoughtful author who, through the style of his writing, is at pains to avoid further exploitation of the topic through prurient entertainment. During interviews, Abani is both urgent and polemical about the issue, stating that sex trafficking, after guns and drugs, is the third largest growth industry in the world. The author is well-researched and the facts of his story are plausible. Yet he pointedly avoids the documentary approach the subject might automatically warrant. Instead he offers a poem.
In 34 short cantos, Becoming Abigail seems, at first, to be bluntly indicative, short lines expressing fact:
“And Peter came every day. Twice a day. At dawn. At dusk. To feed and water her. With rotting food. Rancid water. Sometimes his piss. By the tenth day she no longer cared. Couldn’t tell the difference.”
The truest thing about Becoming Abigail is a lack of sentimentality. Though poetic, the narrative style is measured, its emotional veracity spot on. Although Abigail is a character with a palpable soul, the more traumatic events are often rendered almost blandly, as if cauterized by shock. As a small child, she is untouched by grief over her mother’s death. It begins to emerge later, through her games and behaviour. Abani seems to be saying that we cannot process such drastic experiences until we have developed the resources to deal with them. So, trauma resides in us until we have figured out the puzzle it has set us. This explains the numbness towards our own suffering and the time lag until we truly begin to feel it. It grants us resilience, protecting us. It might also suggest that sex trafficking is a societal trauma which needs to develop a process to deal with it. Books such as this might offer a way.
A relationship of time actually structures the novella, which flips between chapters headed “Now” and “Then”. Things begin with a charged description of her mother’s funeral. Yet, Abigail notes, her mother died in child birth, so she couldn’t have witnessed it herself. But if the memory is factually false, it still has emotional impact and influences the girl’s identity. In this way, Becoming Abigail explores how memory and the way we account for our experiences define who we are. This sounds complex, yet Abani’s technique is works on us without abstraction. Abigail speaks to us directly.
The intransitive word “becoming” is the key here. The book is about the liminal state between things – the gap between girl and woman, male and female, past and present, Nigeria and England, the space where things are undefined, as with a trauma which is yet to be recognized. The book begins with the word “And”, a broken conjunctive alerting us to the incomplete nature of things here. In critic Melissa Reburiano’s words, identity is “not product but process”. In this sense, we are always in flux, always in a state of becoming. The novel dramatizes the heroine’s attempts to navigate these relationships in her struggle to “become Abigail”. Simply put, this is a radical reworking of the coming-of-age novel.
The “becoming” of the title is encoded with ambiguity. The girl is the spitting image of her dead mother, also called Abigail, a ghost who haunts the book. The child’s attempts to define herself against her parents is complicated by the guilt she feels over her mother’s death, creating a myth almost impossible to overcome. The title dramatizes the push and pull of becoming either the mother-Abigail others would like her to be or an Abigail of her own choosing.
The title also functions as an adjective, raising the question of what is “becoming” or fitting for a girl like Abigail. Her father sends her to London because he thinks it will be good for her. The book is filled with others’ expectations of how she should dress, behave and so on. These struggles are further impacted by the expectations of men who here define themselves against women. Her father suffers great depression at his wife’s death. She is portrayed as a kind of crutch which propped him up, a role which passes to his daughter. Through his daughter’s independence, the father loses his wife again. This will have disastrous consequences. In writing the book, Abani tried to “evacuate” his masculinity, attempting to write from a woman’s point of view rather than becoming yet another male expectation of Abigail’s behaviour. In this sense, the novel contextualizes sex trafficking within the confines placed on women’s existence by men. Abigail is no fool. She knows at an early age what men can be like. It is important to show that she is faced with circumstances over which she can exercise little personal defence and from which others have failed to protect her. The boundaries of her life offer Abigail little room to manoeuvre.
Aspects of Becoming Abigailremind me of “Mrs Dalloway”. An interior consciousness creates a resonant cluster of poetic images which acts as critique of patriarchal control. Maps, poems, the body, needles, all are densely interconnected and new relationships are discovered on re-reading. The second time around, for example, totally transforms the hiss of a cigarette as it hits the Thames, imbued now with knowledge of the decision that Abigail is trying to make. One of her own favourite images is from a Chinese tea ceremony, where a lotus flowers. It might stand for how the unexpected developments in the story unfold layer after layer. As with Woolf’s novel, an authoritarian doctor fails to avert tragedy by rubbishing a character’s mental distress. There is also the London location and the way icons of government and empire are personalized and subverted. On the Embankment, the phallic Cleopatra’s Needle is gently ridiculed. The lions have been placed the wrong way round and Queen Victoria won’t foot the bill to have them put right. Abani does London very well. At one point, Abigail stands on the International Date Line at Greenwich, itself a symbol of colonial over-mapping of the world, and marvels that such a thin line can separate time. This is a literal symbol of how time and place are fictionally mapped. “The line is a lie,” Abigail often riffs. It is intriguing to see London portrayed through the eyes of “the other”. Greenwich Market is described in the exotic terms of a souk. Abigail rides the tube when she first arrives in London, noting with surprise the variety of white faces. At the station, she hears the mantra “Mind the Gap”, almost a slogan for the interstitial theme of the novel:
“Bad people didn’t bother her. Like good people they were a known quantity. It wasn’t even the loose possibility of these that bothered her. It was the struggle against either side. That was where the danger lay. What was it Abigail used to tell her? A house divided, that’s the dangerous place. She smiled suddenly. Abigail couldn’t have told her anything.”
The Thames location also recalls “Heart of Darkness”, although here the tide flows the opposite way and the slave trade is given an ironic twist. The book is full of subtle but awful ironies. The image of a dog peeing on a statue, the building of a doghouse later proves to be more brutal than it appeared and a joke about how the French see Africans as animals to be tamed whereas the English don’t see them at all resonates through the latter part of the book. The worst irony of all is that British social services thinks it knows what’s “becoming” for Abigail and defines her as a victim. Her relationship with her care worker, the only man with whom she truly glimpses her own identity, is vilified and taken away from her. The removal of this love is, it seems, crueller to Abigail than the brutalities she has endured.
It is vital that the novel itself does equally reduce Abigail to “victim”, the passive casualty of events. Instead, Abani juxtaposes the blunt, indicative style of writing with Abigail’s own subjunctive voice, aching with imagination and wishes. Her passions are aroused mainly by the experiences she longs for, those she desires and craves to make her who she aspires to be. She is never simply hostage to her experiences. Like all of us, her behaviour is self-consciously modified. Abigail is a character who muses on her own character, without the post-modern sleight of hand that might imply. Telling stories is what we do, Abani seems to argue, who we are. It is inevitable, inexorable, that Abigail works herself out in this way. Even in the most meagre circumstances, we cannot help but be human. Because of this, there is always some anchor to the flux, some kind of residual persona:
“These things just happen. Ije uwa, as the Igbos would say. One’s walk in this life. Interesting that the Igbo don’t believe the path to be fixed, or even problematic. It is the particular idiosyncrasies of the player, not the deck or the dealer, that hold the key. Personality always sways the outcome of the game.”
I find it hard to be critical of a book like this. Its poetic density roots in the imagination and flowers, giving it a perennial afterlife. You live with it and Abigail’s memories mingle with your own. Which is, I think, the very interplay between identity and the fictional process that Abani is trying to achieve. Abigail’s character has an emotional veracity for us in the same way that she must deal with the processes of her own memory. Like the ghost of her mother, Abigail begins to haunt our imagination, which is a more effective way of dramatizing the horror of sex trafficking than browbeating us with atrocity and data. Our sense of loss is personal, our empathy more deeply entwined and Abigail is retrieved from a dehumanized roll call of names and numbers. We might think here of efforts to replace statistics with photographs and biographies of those who died in the Holocaust. Hope lies in trying to unthink the unthinkable rather than complying with a mathematics which makes it possible. This poetic meditation on identity is crucial to a deeper understanding of the full cost of human trafficking, which has implications for our tolerance for brutality disguised behind statistics.
Becoming Abigail is a tough book that wishes to avoid false comfort to the reader. Yet in exploring the dynamics of its character’s psyche, it insists on hope. Towards the end of the book, Abigail reflects on her experiences in light of her cultural background:
“Second chances are a fact of life for the Igbo. A person who lived poor and was buried poor can, when a relative makes enough money, receive a second burial. Full of the pomp and grandeur reserved for the rich. So even in death, in Hades, the dead one can get a chance to taste the wealth that eluded him in his previous incarnation, perhaps sweetening the deal for his next one.”
For Abigail, true wealth lies in a relationship of equals, in being noticed as a person and not as a thing, in wanting to give rather than being forced to take, in becoming a human being against dehumanizing forces. We are like the rich relatives who can, by paying attention to the trafficking industry, eventually sweeten the deal for the women to come. By writing this novel, Chris Abani suggests how the Abigail’s of this world can be given a second chance.
