Literacies of the Flesh in Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail

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 a literacy of the flesh: turning attention to Abigail’s self-narration through embodied practices. Ultimately, I argue that the novella’s narrative commitment to the protagonist’s articulation of her embodied experiences and of her techniques for archiving those experiences through her body activate simultaneous frames for reading her vulnerability in ways that pose challenges to dominant discourses surrounding human rights, agency, and consent.

Human Rights and the Right to be Human

In the few scholarly studies of Abani’s lyrical novella, the narrative has been primarily analyzed through a human-rights oriented discourse. It has been praised both for the empathy with which it portrays a victim of human sex trafficking, and for the way it reveals the neoliberal foundations of human rights. Arguing that Becoming Abigail “dramatize[s] the struggles of such unhoused individuals to assert a sense of identity and agency under the most inimical of conditions,” Ashley Dawson demonstrates the ways in which nation-state citizenship and human rights regimes operate through similar judicial narratives that reproduce exclusions for non-normative, non-Western subjects.⁴ Meanwhile, scholars such as Alexandra S. Moore and Elizabeth S. Goldberg elegantly articulate Abani’s vision of a human rights regime based on acknowledging a shared capacity to harm and be harmed, and accepting the mutual responsibility that this capacity engenders.⁵ Echoing Moore and Goldberg’s theorization of Abani’s “aesthetics of risk,” Pamela McCallum insightfully explores the novella’s grounding of a readerly ethics through a shared corporeal vulnerability.⁶ This body of scholarship meticulously highlights the structural imbalances contained within a universal discourse of human rights. This previous work strategically intervenes in the narrative framings of human rights and points to ways such framings could become more inclusive and capacious. Moreover, the aforementioned scholars productively situate the common ground of human subjects as one of inherent vulnerability, rather than of preexisting agentic capacity.

This article continues this line of inquiry, but rather than taking vulnerability as a universally shared condition out of which a new human rights subject can be articulated, it will foreground the specific valences of vulnerability in narrative representations of Black and African girls’ lives. More specifically, I will...