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the confines placed on women’s existence by men.
Abigail is no fool. She knows at an early age what men
can be like. It is important to show that she is faced
with circumstances over which she can exercise little
personal defence and from which others have failed
to protect her. The boundaries of her life offer Abigail
little room to manoeuvre.
Aspects of Becoming Abigail remind me of Mrs
Dalloway. An interior consciousness creates a resonant
cluster of poetic images which acts as critique of patriarchal
control. Maps, poems, the body, needles, all
are densely interconnected and new relationships are
discovered on re-reading. The second time around,
for example, totally transforms the hiss of a cigarette
as it hits the Thames, imbued now with knowledge of
the decision that Abigail is trying to make. One of her
own favourite images is from a Chinese tea ceremony,
where a lotus flowers. It might stand for how the unexpected
developments in the story unfold layer after
layer. As with Woolf’s novel, an authoritarian doctor
fails to avert tragedy by rubbishing a character’s mental
distress. There is also the London location and the way
icons of government and empire are personalized and
subverted. On the Embankment, the phallic Cleopatra’s
Needle is gently ridiculed. The lions have been placed
the wrong way round and Queen Victoria won’t foot
the bill to have them put right. Abani does London very
well. At one point, Abigail stands on the International
BUY Chris Abani books online from and
Date Line at Greenwich, itself a symbol of colonial
over-mapping of the world, and marvels that such a
thin line can separate time. This is a literal symbol of
how time and place are fictionally mapped. “The line is
a lie,” Abigail often riffs. It is intriguing to see London
portrayed through the eyes of ‘the other’. Greenwich
Market is described in the exotic terms of a souk.
Abigail rides the tube when she first arrives in London,
noting with surprise the variety of white faces. At the
station, she hears the mantra “Mind the Gap”, almost a
slogan for the interstitial theme of the novel:
“Bad people didn’t bother her. Like good people they
were a known quantity. It wasn’t even the loose possibility
of these that bothered her. It was the struggle against
either side. That was where the danger lay. What was
it Abigail used to tell her? A house divided, that’s the
dangerous place. She smiled suddenly. Abigail couldn’t
have told her anything.”
The Thames location also recalls Heart of Darkness,
although here the tide flows the opposite way and the
slave trade is given an ironic twist. The book is full of
subtle but awful ironies. The image of a dog peeing on
a statue, the building of a doghouse later proves to be
more brutal than it appeared and a joke about how the
French see Africans as animals to be tamed whereas the
English don’t see them at all resonates through the latter
part of the book. The worst irony of all is that British
social services thinks it knows what’s ‘becoming’ for
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