Literacies of the Flesh in Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail

Abstract

Eerily, the violence is familiar, familial. Nigerian author Chris Abani’s novella Becoming Abigail (2006) mobilizes the pornotropes of slave narratives to tell a story of contemporary human trafficking.1 Abigail, a fourteen-year-old Nigerian girl, is sent from her home in Lagos to London by her father, believing she will attend school under the care of her maternal aunt and uncle. Instead, she encounters physical abuse, forced sex work, punishment by starvation, rape, chains, and other bodily violations. Fighting her way out of imprisonment, Abigail appears to find solace in an interracial, intergenerational sexual affair with her social caseworker—until their sexual relations are discovered by his wife and he is sent to prison for statutory rape. After unsuccessfully petitioning for her caseworker’s release, the girl, Abigail, drowns herself in the Thames River—her life told through a grammar of abjection, erotics, and death. In short, the novella traces the structural violence through which Abigail becomes legible, elucidating how Black and African girls tend to be rendered visible as legal subjects in the global North only through a “salvationist gaze” activated by real or imagined sexual vulnerability.2 In that sense, Abani’s novella serves as a site through which the theft of the body—a “severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire,” in Hortense Spillers’s words—can be critically mapped.3 However, in deploying the dominant scripts of erotics and abjection used to simultaneously gaze at and erase Black and African migrant girls in the global North, the novella grapples with how to render visible that salvationist gaze while, at the same time, opening a space for Abigail’s humanness outside of the constraints of that gaze. Indeed, Abani’s prose marks the difficult work of hearing Abigail’s truth under these conditions. The novella attempts to navigate this narrative dilemma by developing