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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com Chris Abani: Becoming Abigail 007 Peter Ackroyd: London: The Biography 012 Douglas Adams: The Salmon Of Doubt 014 A Scott Adams: Dilbert: Seven Years of Highly Defective People 016 Keith Altham: No More Mr Nice Guy! 018 Paul Auster: Oracle Night 020 006 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com Review [published March 2008] Chris Abani: Becoming Abigail 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 BUY Chris Abani books online from and 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 007 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
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