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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
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