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numbness towards our own suffering and the time lag
until we truly begin to feel it. It grants us resilience,
protecting us. It might also suggest that sex trafficking
is a societal trauma which needs to develop a process to
deal with it. Books such as this might offer a way.
A relationship of time actually structures the novella,
which flips between chapters headed “Now” and
“Then”. Things begin with a charged description of her
mother’s funeral. Yet, Abigail notes, her mother died in
child birth, so she couldn’t have witnessed it herself.
But if the memory is factually false, it still has emotional
impact and influences the girl’s identity. In this
way, Becoming Abigail explores how memory and the
way we account for our experiences define who we are.
This sounds complex, yet Abani’s technique is works
on us without abstraction. Abigail speaks to us directly.
The intransitive word “becoming” is the key here.
The book is about the liminal state between things – the
gap between girl and woman, male and female, past
and present, Nigeria and England, the space where
things are undefined, as with a trauma which is yet to
be recognized. The book begins with the word “And”, a
broken conjunctive alerting us to the incomplete nature
of things here. In critic Melissa Reburiano’s words,
identity is “not product but process”. In this sense, we
are always in flux, always in a state of becoming. The
novel dramatizes the heroine’s attempts to navigate
these relationships in her struggle to ‘become Abigail’.
BUY Chris Abani books online from and
Simply put, this is a radical reworking of the comingof-age
novel.
The “becoming” of the title is encoded with ambiguity.
The girl is the spitting image of her dead mother,
also called Abigail, a ghost who haunts the book. The
child’s attempts to define herself against her parents is
complicated by the guilt she feels over her mother’s
death, creating a myth almost impossible to overcome.
The title dramatizes the push and pull of becoming
either the mother-Abigail others would like her to be or
an Abigail of her own choosing.
The title also functions as an adjective, raising the
question of what is ‘becoming’ or fitting for a girl like
Abigail. Her father sends her to London because he
thinks it will be good for her. The book is filled with
others’ expectations of how she should dress, behave
and so on. These struggles are further impacted by
the expectations of men who here define themselves
against women. Her father suffers great depression at
his wife’s death. She is portrayed as a kind of crutch
which propped him up, a role which passes to his
daughter. Through his daughter’s independence, the
father loses his wife again. This will have disastrous
consequences. In writing the book, Abani tried to
“evacuate” his masculinity, attempting to write from a
woman’s point of view rather than becoming yet another
male expectation of Abigail’s behaviour. In this
sense, the novel contextualizes sex trafficking within
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