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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 Postmodern 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.”
BUY Chris Abani books online from and
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
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