Chris Abani 9781526147219

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Chris Abani

Contemporary World Writers series editor john thieme

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already published in the series Chinua Achebe  jago morrison

Alice Munro  coral ann howells

Peter Carey  bruce woodcock

Les Murray  steven matthews

Amitav Ghosh  anshuman mondal

R. K. Narayan  john thieme

Maxine Hong Kingston  helena grice

Michael Ondaatje  lee spinks

Kazuo Ishiguro  barry lewis

Caryl Phillips  bénédicte ledent

Hanif Kureishi  bart moore-gilbert

Caryl Phillips, David Dabydeen and Fred D’Aguiar: Representations of slavery  abigail ward

Doris Lessing  susan watkins David Malouf  don randall Rohinton Mistry  peter morey Timothy Mo  elaine yee lin ho Toni Morrison  jill matus

Salman Rushdie  andrew teverson Amy Tan  bella adams Ngugi wa Thiong’o  patrick williams Derek Walcott  john thieme

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Chris Abani

Annalisa Oboe and Elisa Bordin

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Annalisa Oboe and Elisa Bordin 2022

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The rights of Annalisa Oboe and Elisa Bordin to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Annalisa Oboe is the author of Chapters 1, 3, 4 Elisa Bordin is the author of Chapters 2, 5, 6 Chapter 7 is by both authors Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 4720 2 hardback First published 2022 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Cheshire Typesetting Ltd, Cuddington, Cheshire

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To our mothers

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Contents

Series editor’s foreword page viii Acknowledgmentsix List of abbreviations xii Chronologyxiii 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Contexts and intertexts 1 Peripheral violence in GraceLand42 Trafficking love, Becoming Abigail79 No words for violence? Song for Night115 For Los Angeles, with love: The Virgin of Flames154 ‘State’ violence: The Secret History of Las Vegas190 Critical overview and conclusion 235

Select bibliography 260 Index268

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Series editor’s foreword

Contemporary World Writers is an innovative series of authoritative introductions to a range of culturally diverse contemporary writers from outside Britain and the United States or from ‘minority’ backgrounds within Britain or the United States. In addition to providing comprehensive general introductions, books in the series also argue stimulating original theses, often but not always related to contemporary debates in postcolonial studies. The series locates individual writers within their specific cultural contexts, while recognising that such contexts are themselves invariably a complex mixture of hybridised influences. It aims to counter tendencies to appropriate the writers discussed into the canon of English or American literature or to regard them as ‘other’. Each volume includes a chronology of the writer’s life, an introductory section on formative contexts and intertexts, discussion of all the writer’s major works, a bibliography of primary and secondary works and an index. Issues of racial, national and cultural identity are explored, as are gender and sexuality. Books in the series also examine writers’ use of genre, particularly ways in which Western genres are adapted or subverted and ‘traditional’ local forms are reworked in a contemporary context. Contemporary World Writers aims to bring together the theoretical impulse which currently dominates postcolonial studies and closely argued readings of particular authors’ works, and by so doing to avoid the danger of appropriating the specifics of ­particular texts into the hegemony of totalising theories. John Thieme

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Acknowledgments

I read GraceLand when it first came out: the captivating newness of the writing stayed with me and kept me waiting for the next Abani book. Becoming Abigail, The Virgin of Flames, and Song for Night soon followed, and it was in 2007 that I decided that meeting the author would allow me to gain a deeper understanding of his original voice. In 2008 Chris Abani accepted my invitation to an international conference in Venice, where we could all appreciate the soft power of his incantatory speech, the ease with which he shared experiences, ideas, and provocations, and the kindliness of his warm disposition. It happened a long time ago, but this is a good opportunity to finally acknowledge the beauty of that encounter, which somehow sparked the book seeing the light now. Over the years, sharing a sustained interest in Abani’s writings with the students in my MA course in Contemporary Literatures and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Padua has made it possible to engage in conversations that have become central to the gestation process for this volume: I wish to thank each and all of them for their staying open to the challenges that Abani’s texts pose, for their perceptive analyses of his aesthetics and ethics, and their brilliant exams. Special thanks are due to doctoral students and post-doctoral researchers whose work has included a focus on Abani’s oeuvre, in particular Francesca Giommi, who has the merit of having made Abani’s work known in Italy through her timely reviews and articles, and Giulia D’Agostini, whose doctoral dissertation includes groundbreaking readings of his texts. My deepest gratitude goes to my co-author Elisa Bordin, for her invaluable ability to keep it all together – the daily demands

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Acknowledgments

of a very young family and the growing requests of her academic career  – with serene intelligence and infinite vital energy. This book is the product of a joint venture, whose level of intellectual exchange has always been rewarding and all the more meaningful in the context of the work and life pressures each of us had to put up with while completing the manuscript. Thank you Elisa for joining the Abani project with such conviction, verve, and insight. There is usually a community of people around books, who help their coming to life in a variety of ways: I wish to acknowledge the patience of family and friends who have kept believing that this book would come out sooner or later; willing readers of drafts who provided useful comments; inspirational intellectual figures without whose work this book would be far less incisive; university colleagues who understand that from time to time writing needs to become a priority; a caring department which supports research. The list would be long: I am sure each of you knows why I thank you. Finally, Elisa and I would like to express sincere gratitude to our editors at Manchester University Press, for their support and warm encouragement. A.O. This book was written at a very special moment of my life, just after the birth of my son Federico and during the immediately following pregnancy with my daughter Frida. It is a book that came into being together with two new people and all the challenges that taking care of newborns implies. For that reason I feel greatly indebted to a number of people, who have made the graceful balance of enjoying work and motherhood possible. My first thank you goes to my friend and colleague Annalisa Oboe, for never doubting my ability to surf research and baby care, academic life and breast feeding. She has been an example, an adviser, and an empathic person, who has generously shared interests and knowledge in a very broad sense, well beyond the walls of university. This is a book made by women and thanks to the support of women, my mother, my mother-inlaw, my aunt, who have given me their time so that I could have mine to sit, read, and write. Support can come in many ways: providing arms to hold babies, cooking meals, or in pieces of advice, as those shared by senior colleagues Anna Scacchi and Donatella Izzo

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Acknowledgments xi

who, as mothers and professors, know the challenges of balancing roles and of a changing body. This is a book that evolved through their empathy: thank you for the ability to create new things without destroying older ones. I have started my acknowledgments, very informally, from the personal, but my gratitude equally goes to the institutions who have allowed me to work on this project for so many years. I’d like to thank the University of Padua, where I started this volume as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Department of Linguistic and Literary Studies, under the supervision of Professor Annalisa Oboe; the by-then Director Anna Bettoni and the people at the administrative offices, who have always shown care and willingness to help, humanity beyond their institutional roles; the people of the Beato Pellegrino University Library, for their support in the retrieval of sources at the international level; and the late Roberto, so precious in many practical things and always supporting. The years spent there have been rich in so many ways. My thank you also goes to Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and the Department of Comparative Linguistic and Cultural Studies, which has welcomed me as an Assistant Professor of American Studies and has been providing the institutional and intellectual space for my present research on issues of transnationality, migration, and hybridity. My colleagues have always shown me warm cordiality and friendliness: thank you. My thankfulness also goes to my colleagues in the Editorial Boards of Ácoma, From the European South, and Iperstoria, with whom I have discussed ideas and drafts of this work. E.B.

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Abbreviations

BA DL DW F GL HWW KR S SHLV SN VF

Becoming Abigail Daphne’s Lot Dog Woman The Face: Cartography of the Void GraceLand Hands Washing Water Kalakuta Republic Sanctificum The Secret History of Las Vegas Song for Night: A Novella The Virgin of Flames

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Chronology

1966 Christopher Abani is born on 27 December in Afikpo, Nigeria, of an Igbo father, Michael, and an English mother, Daphne. 1968 Chris, his four siblings, and his mother move to England to flee the Biafran War. 1971 Return to Nigeria. 1983 Delta Fiction Award for his first novel Masters of the Board. 1985 Publication of Masters of the Board. 1986 Six-month imprisonment in Nigeria for anti-governmental activities. 1987 Second imprisonment for anti-governmental activities. 1990 Staging of his play Song of a Broken Flute. Third imprisonment, including six months in solitary confinement. 1991 Release from prison and move to London. 1995 MA in Gender and Culture from Birkbeck College, University of London. 2001 Middleton Fellowship, University of Southern California, USA, and relocation to Los Angeles. Publication of Kalakuta Republic. Prince Claus Award for Literature and Culture, the Netherlands. PEN USA West Freedom-to-Write Award. PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from University of Southern California. 2002 Imbonge Yesizwe Poetry International Award, South Africa.

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Chronology

2003 Publication of Daphne’s Lot. Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship. Hellman/Hammet Grant from Human Rights Watch, USA. 2004 Publication of GraceLand and Dog Woman. GraceLand is a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Dog Woman is nominated for the Griffin Prize in Poetry. 2005 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for GraceLand.  GraceLand wins the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction; wins the Silver Medal of the California Book Award for Fiction; is a finalist of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction and of the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa Region). 2006 Publication of Becoming Abigail and Hands Washing Water. Becoming Abigail is a New York Times Editor’s Choice. 2007 Publication of The Virgin of Flames and Song for Night.  Becoming Abigail is a finalist for the PEN/Beyond the Margins Award.  Song for Night and The Virgin of Flames are a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Teaches Creative Writing at California State, Riverside. 2008 PEN/Beyond the Margins Award for Song for Night. The Virgin of Fames is nominated for Lamada Award. Recipient of the Distinguished Humanist Award, UC Riverside. 2009 Guggenheim Fellow in Fiction. 2010 Publication of Sanctificum, There Are No Names for Red, and Feed Me the Sun – Collected Long Poems. 2012 Board of Trustee Professor of English at Northwestern University, and move to Chicago. 2014 Ford United States Artists Fellow and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Publication of The Secret History of Las Vegas (winner of the Edgar Prize) and The Face: Cartography of a Void. 2018 Publication of Lagos Noir.

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Contexts and intertexts

This study of Chris Abani’s writing – the remarkable narrative range of his production and the compelling quality of his stories, in which love and violence compete, mingle, lose, and win – proposes that its power and beauty greatly hinge on the writer’s ability to face life in all its manifestations and to represent extreme forms of brutality and cruelty alongside unforeseen gestures of kindness. This, in a nutshell, is what drives his writing: an exploration of violence (against other human beings, against the environment) and of love gone wrong, interspersed with epiphanic clues of salvation. ‘The world is never saved in grand messianic gestures’, he says, ‘but in the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion’.1 Against the background of the different geopolitical and cultural contexts in which he himself has lived his hybrid existence, Abani’s books trace the experiential trajectory of women, men, and children split between the pervasiveness of cruelty and the surfacing of micro-acts of care, assumed to be the only possibility for human beings to become human.2 His writings willingly suspend judgment on the conventional meanings and perimeters of ‘humanity’ and in many ways deconstruct grand narratives of identity and subjectivity, particularly as ‘becoming’ is a constituent part of existence; they allow marginal inhabitants of our societies, such as underprivileged individuals, trafficked women, child soldiers, people with disabilities, migrants, and freaks, to make their way to the page, to become visible and assert presence in rather unexpected ways. It therefore seems appropriate to state that the ‘signature’ of Abani’s work can be found in the ways in which it stresses the

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Chris Abani

impossibility of severing literature from a generous embrace of the human, as well as in how it spells out the need of making ‘the wretched of the earth’ visible. The writer’s focus on what allows people to be resilient and to survive, despite tragedies and horrors, connects to and continues the timeless works of great writers of all times (from Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and Dickens to Woolf and Duras, from Baldwin, Ellison, and Morrison to Achebe and Soyinka, just to name a few) and also adds critical momentum to the contemporary debate on literature, human rights, and the future of the planet. His texts offer complex figurative representations of the performative nature of subjectivity by giving life to characters who walk the thin tightrope between survival and death in states of exception: they thus speak metaphorically to notions of biopolitics, necropolitics, and the unresolved concerns in human-rights discourse and policies. Most of the information and inputs about the author and his writings, as well as the overall approach of this first chapter, rely on a series of forceful authorial statements about his own life and literary work, his reflections on the need for identity and the looseness of this notion, his musings on questions of ethical responsibility and the aesthetics of his work. Information about his origins and life experiences can also be found in articles, essays, poems, and interviews. Among the latter the Truthdig interview with Zuade Kaufman provides a summary of Abani’s early life as a writer and activist, which focuses on a decisive phase in his personal and artistic growth. Kaufman writes that, in 1990, ten minutes into the production of his university play ‘Song of a broken flute’, ‘Nigerian literature student Chris Abani found himself under arrest and forced to choose between his own life and the lives of all his fellow student cast members. Abani, then 21, had already been imprisoned and tortured twice, both times for novels he had written that the Nigerian government regarded as subversive.’ The third time around, he was given an ultimatum: he could sign a document confessing to treason or sign the death warrant of all his friends in the play. ‘Abani admitted to treason and was sent – without trial – to death row at a maximum-security prison. He languished there for the next 18 months – six of which were spent in solitary confinement in a six-by-eight-foot hole.’ Such harrowing experiences led to

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Contexts and intertexts 3

his exile from the Nigeria of military dictatorships: in 1991, ‘alone, and with nothing’, he managed to escape to London.3 This reference to some of the most challenging moments in Abani’s life, at the outset of this book, wishes to highlight the entanglement between life and literary work that this chapter intends to analyse, and to anticipate that no attempt is made in this volume to provide a full picture of the life and times of Chris Abani. Our aim in what follows is rather to offer a fresh overview of the substantial literary production of a world-class author, which variously dialogues with an autobiographical substratum that keeps resurfacing.

Charting the immaterial: genealogy and the self (early days) Eha’m bu Chris Abani. Abu’m onye Igbo. My name is Chris Abani and I am Igbo. This is America’s gift to you. Abani, ‘Coming to America’

In an article titled ‘Coming to America – a remix’ Abani tells of his experience of estrangement in the USA, the place he elected as his own after leaving Nigeria and spending a few years in the UK. The piece opens in a busy airport lounge where people come and go. No one notices him and he feels lost to the point that he does not recognise his own reflected image. This triggers a chain of reflections linked to situations in which he is exposed to American people, their expectations, and their beliefs, which leads him to an epiphanic moment at a Starbucks by the beach in Santa Monica when, sipping a cold chai latte, he finally realises that the deconstruction of his sense of self, of family ties, and of linguistic roots that he is experiencing in America is full of potential: you are losing language, your language, and faster the longer you don’t use it. There is, however, an incredible freedom in this, the sudden understanding that your language is fluid, must be, and that as a writer it is your duty to make this language even more plastic. That like Shakespeare you are in the realm of possibility and that all language, like the culture it derives from, is forever evolving.4

By confronting the life of a diasporic black subject in the USA, Abani becomes aware that his sense of self is rooted not in the

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Western obsession with race and racism but ‘in an ethnicity’,5 and that the coexistence of fragments of different ethnic traditions that make up his puzzlingly mixed inheritance may allow him to surge above the strictures of nationalism and national language, and to be honest about the impossibility of fully embodying any one ethnic or linguistic code. All of this, he claims, is a source of freedom for both the artist and the man: You would never have begun this journey when you were still in Nigeria. But you have made a decisive step. You will not become less Igbo […] After all, you are bi-racial, tri-cultural, and trans-national, you are a hybrid […] The many parts of you come together when you no longer have the need to prove absolute residency on the land that birthed you. If it means that you are part Ejagham, Ibibio, Igbo, Aro-Igbo, Igala, English and now American, then you are truly and perhaps for the first time, honestly approaching your fluid self.6

There is no racial (black), national (Nigerian), or continental (African) essence to hang on to or advertise: identity is made up of many different strands, it is constantly becoming, and it manifests itself only in relations and over time, through tangible but not necessarily coherent actions. The writer’s search for the openness of a hospitable subjectivity and for what he calls a ‘comfortable’ face is reiterated in two intense texts, one poetic (Daphne’s Lot) and one narrative (The Face), which reconstruct his ties and belongings in a genealogical or lyrical vein, at the same time probing, critical, and heartfelt. Having definitely left the country of his birth and crossed the Atlantic, he responds to the need of reaching back to his beginnings and the sources of his process of becoming, of acknowledging gifts and debts coming from mother and father, salvaging good memories and elaborating violent heartbreaks on the path to a freer life of beauty. Abani was born on 27 December 1966, just before the onset of the Nigerian Civil War of 1967–70, which began after the unilateral declaration of independence of the predominantly Igbo Eastern Region of Nigeria. The years since independence from Britain had been extremely unsettled in Nigeria, as ‘the federal system that had solidified regional divisions in the 1950s devolved into

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Contexts and intertexts 5

utter d ­ ysfunction’.7 When, on 30 May 1967, Lieutenant Colonel Chukwuemeka Ojukwu, up till then the governor of the Eastern Region, unilaterally declared the independence of the newly founded Republic of Biafra, President Yakubu Gowon’s government proclaimed the state of emergency in Nigeria and imposed an embargo on the secessionist region. What was meant to be a quick ‘police action’ to regain control of the oil-rich eastern area turned into a thirty-month-long ‘total war’ and resulted in heavy casualties, concentrated in particular on the Biafran side as a consequence of the economic blockade imposed on a progressively shrinking enclave.8 The humanitarian crisis that followed was so devastating that it earned Biafra wide international sympathies on the part of both non-governmental and governmental organisations. Despite its notable resilience, the defeat of the Republic of Biafra proved inevitable and, on 10 January 1970, Major General Philip Efiong announced Biafra’s surrender. Shortly after the war, Gowon promised that the country would return to civilian rule within two years, but the state of emergency proclaimed in 1966 was lifted only in 1979, when the new constitution signalling the establishment of the Second Republic was signed into law.9 In the meantime Gowon had been removed from power in the 1975 bloodless coup that initiated the so-called Mohammed/Obasanjo regime. In the essay ‘The graceful walk’ (2016) Abani recalls how his father used to say that his mother’s protracted labour to give birth to him, their fourth son, in December 1966, was a ‘catalyst for the Biafran-Nigerian Civil War’ which began a few weeks later.10 The conflict soon turned Afikpo, Abani’s obscure birthplace, into a key location in the governmental war strategy, being ‘the perfect secondary access point to the Igbo homelands’,11 and undoubtedly a very dangerous place to live in. When the Nigerian troops reached Afikpo, his white English mother decided to gather her four children and to run away without waiting for the return of her husband Michael, who would soon join the Biafran Army. His mother’s bravery ensured the survival of all her children, thanks to her determination to leave the wartorn territory of the unrecognised Biafra State. The dangerous journey to London – interrupted by her giving birth to her fifth child, a girl and the author’s youngest sibling, in an evacuated hospital under an air raid – lasted longer than two years.

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Daphne’s Lot (2003) is a tribute to the author’s mother, the strongest presence in his personal and literary life, and to her selfless love. The second ‘genealogical’ text is The Face: Cartography of the Void (2013), which is about the author’s own mixed heritage and, at the same time, ‘about my father and the lineage I know for sure. The Egu and Ehugbo’ (F, 11).

Daphne’s Lot And I realize, this is all there is. The stitching of life into transfigurations. Abani, ‘People like us’

In a quotation from Exodus 35:35, which stands as an epigraph at the opening of Daphne’s Lot, Abani invokes a sort of divine wisdom of the heart ‘to work all manner of work, of the engraver, / And of the cunning workman, and of the embroiderer’ (DL, ‘Genuflection’, 11). The last poem in the book, ‘People like us’, appropriately concludes the artist’s creative endeavour by embracing ‘stitching’, a woman’s work, which puts fragments (of clothes, of stories, of relationships, of people, of countries, of life) back together, restoring a sort of transfigured wholeness (DL, 111). This is the work Abani sets out to do in order to tell his mother’s story through an act of ‘rummaging’, ‘fashioning’, and ‘pasting’ her yesterdays in Daphne’s Lot – a poetic text in the epic tradition, which subverts the genre’s conventional narrative of the res gestae of the mythical hero by putting a woman at the centre of a background of war and focusing on love and survival (DL, 9). He thus pieces together the existence and character of the Englishwoman who used to work as a typist in Oxford in the 1950s, fell in love with a Nigerian student from Afikpo, ‘a small, rather obscure fishing town at the end of a dusty road going nowhere’ in Igboland, married him and gave him five children.12 A tough silent woman, with a tough life scarred by the tragedy of the Nigerian Civil War, Daphne comes to life again thanks to the recollecting effort and the devotion of her son. At the same time the process of claiming her out of the shadows coincides with the thrilling promise of ‘inventing me, this child, this man’ on the ‘dark

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path’ to poetry (DL, 13). The dedication of his new kind of epos to Daphne, ‘whose dreams are my art / and whose silence became my voice’ (DL, 5), confirms that the text is a tribute both to the gifts of motherhood and family ties, and to the creative, life-giving power of singing the mother out of silence and her child into an aesthetic life. Daphne’s grown-up son thus starts a genealogical quest that celebrates the mother–child link and produces a composition that, ideally, should aim at an ordered structure: ‘Hard. Fast. Structured. Beginning, middle, end’ (DL, 33). However, ‘like Jazz’, the poem holds ‘room always for the gifted / to improvise, create, digress, circumbobulate’ (DL, 33). The digressions, the creative moves away from the facts of history, the surfacing of the interior emotional voice – against the unfolding of a story marked chronologically by the passing of years and by the incessant move from the present of writing (2001) to the past that is being reconstructed – are often the inspired moments in which truth ‘as memory’s best guess’ comes to light (DL, 13). So the ‘jazzy’ story delivers a family picture of Daphne and her offspring – Daphne’s Lot meaning ‘a shorthand for us’ (DL, 60) – in the form of an ongoing negotiation of love and survival, amidst the violence of the civil war and the violence within the family: the fighting in the world out there and the fighting with the demons within. We come across a pattern here, on which it is interesting to pause in view of the following analyses of Abani’s works: in Daphne’s story we experience the porousness of the borders between love and violence, and realise how quickly love may turn into hostility and anger, even in a domestic context. Moreover, the poet weaves subtle connections between macro-phenomena like the Civil War and micro-phenomena such as individual and family life. He makes the link visible by transfiguring the personal notes in his mother’s private diaries, which not only describe the unforeseen reality of war – when ‘just like that, you wake up one day and lose everything by lunchtime’13 – but also her daily life in Igboland, where love almost seamlessly gives way to hidden suffering: Then changing mood with the abruptness of a needle scratching across vinyl, lines describing heat

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Chris Abani rashing the skin between her legs red, burning in the salty sting of sweat. Then the deeper secret. Gathering like dark clouds preparing to break, it brewed thick like tea with too much tannin,

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good only for curing buffalo hide. Then the fists unleash the storm, tattooing her body in bruises like marble cake. The violence always there. Then skimmed over, For the children’s sake. (DL, 30)

Skimming over, making something invisible does not mean to make it disappear completely. The secret can remain productive in its seeming absence, a sort of ghostly revenant that has social repercussions within and beyond the family. As he brings to light his own family secrets in Daphne’s Lot, exposing the violence of his father against his mother – as well as many other violent secrets in the lives of the troubled fictional characters that fill his narrative p ­ roduction – Abani asks the reader to keep an eye on the links between state violence, institutional violence, environmental violence, and what goes on at a smaller, lower level in society. In other words he juxtaposes and connects ‘spectacular’ forms of violence with what Rob Nixon – mainly addressing environmental issues – calls ‘slow violence’: the uneventful and seemingly undemanding injustices that slip beneath the radar and are easily disregarded or dismissed.14 For Nixon, to confront slow violence is to take up, in all its temporal complexity, the politics of the visible and the invisible. He adds that, in order to shift the balance of visibility, it is necessary to push back against the prolonged inattentions that exacerbate injustices of class, gender, race, and region. Because the underrepresentation of slow violence grows whenever ‘it is the poor who become its frontline victims, above all the poor in the Southern Hemisphere’.15 Nixon’s concept has been applied in sociology to understanding the social causes and impacts of family secrets, stigmas, traumas. The sociologist Ashley Barnwell, whose work analyses ­intergenerational family secrets as slow violence, argues that, bringing Nixon’s idea to the family unit, and examining the symbiosis between intimate lives and wider social attitudes and policies, opens

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Contexts and intertexts 9

a more inclusive socio-temporal scope, ‘one that offers the potential to register less visible forms of violence and locate evasive causes of entrenched inequality’.16 She moves attention towards what Nixon identifies as a need for violence ‘to be seen – and deeply considered – as a contest not only over space, or bodies, or labour, or resources, but also over time’.17 In particular, ‘to think of violence as a contest “over time” may help us to envision and demand different levels of accountability’, Barnwell argues.18 Various forms of slow violence find expressions in Abani’s texts and point to the unacknowledged effects of such temporal contest. In Daphne’s Lot male domestic violence makes visible the failure to take into account prevailing ethnic traditions that slowly carve uncertainty into Michael’s choice of a white wife, and hints at the long-lasting, perverse effects of colonialism’s racial and cultural ruptures through generations of families. In the end the man’s inability to face these cumulative constraints and contradictions, in the form of historical, social, and intimate forces at work within himself and his family, undoes him, like a modern-day Okonkwo (DL, 29). As for the main character in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), his undoing is witnessed by his son, whose difference from his father, and his closeness to his mother, elicits violence and a severe process of re-education. Slow violence within the family, Barnwell says, can take the forms of shaming, silencing, ostracising, withholding recognition, and effectively erasing memories and relationships. All of these forms are present in Abani’s writings. While revealing his own family secrets, fighting silence, and facing shame, he makes public a slower set of ramifications of violence through which ‘we can keep track of how this present resonates, and perhaps also contests the quiet retreat of social responsibility’.19 Generations of families with secrets are at the heart of his novels, too. We can trace the slow accumulation of apparently uneventful injustices in the story of underage trafficked Abigail, of Elvis in the Maroko slum, of the boy soldier My Luck, of the black conjoined twins Fire and Water in Las Vegas, and of Sunil Singh’s South African past and Apartheidtainted family story. This focus is strategic, in that it tells of human beings in fragile, unstable power relations of beauty and ugliness, light and darkness, and it allows him to bring the unsaid to the

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surface, which is the only way to encourage individual and social accountability. As Abani states in the third section of The Face, aptly titled ‘A slow violence’, ‘the thing is that, in the end, we each must decide how comfortable we are with how much we hurt other people’ (F, 7). In stark contrast to her husband’s reiterated physical violence and betrayals, Daphne’s love for her children, whose survival she is able to guarantee, and her desire for love are recorded in her son’s poem: Daphne’s diary spun a wish too precious to speak. I want a man who smiles when he talks about me. Smiles because he knows all of me and loves all of me and does not want me to change any of me. I want a man like that. A man whose voice is the pressure on my hips when he calls my name. Whose shallow breathing traces the arousal of my nipples as I cook him dinner. Whose laugh dips between my legs, catching me by surprise and rocking. Whose hands are rough when he touches my face honestly. Whose embrace is desperate as though I were the only thing keeping him from drowning. Whose lips are moist with desire when he kisses me and whose eyes dance with a dangerous fire. I want, I want, I want a man like that.  (DL, 64)

And yet Daphne’s love does not seem to be powerful enough to withstand Michael’s violence and actually turns into some sort of unwilling ‘complicity’ with an abusive patriarchal order she cannot overturn: her love and care ironically join hands with his hyper-masculine violence to produce the family secret that their son



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will also experience, and finally disclose in his poetry, in a liberating gesture that breaks the chain of intergenerational conflict and shame. In Daphne’s Lot Abani recounts the ways in which his parents’ secret turns into their offspring’s suffering. ‘Let me count the ways in which my father loved me’, Abani says: […] with fists drawing blood, and real threats to rearrange my brain permanently or to beat the monkeys out of me. With a meanness that would make me a man or at least angry enough to hate the world. He loved me in my first book burning because he said – you should be studying not writing. And when that book won me, at sixteen, the second place in an important national book award, he said: ‘If you were any good, you would be first’ In these ways my father loved me. (DL, 72)

Born in times of war, and having experienced spectacular violence, the boy grows up in a dysfunctional family where violence is the grammar of relations as well as a favoured ‘pedagogical’ tool, enforcing a view of masculinity and a gendered culture he finds it difficult to comply with. On his return to Nigeria from England, Abani lived in ‘the detritus of that civil war, playing in burnt-out tanks’.20 Nevertheless his early life was characterised by material and intellectual privilege. His childhood was multilingual and multiracial, certainly because of his mixed family and educated parents, but also because of his Indian and Pakistani teachers, one of whom was so ‘inventive’ as to sidestep the prohibition of talking about the recently ended Biafran conflict by telling him ‘the melancholic history of my people through the melancholic history of another people’: he thus learned about the Igbo tragedy in the Nigerian Civil War through the Jewish Holocaust.21 A further ‘privilege’ was access to a well-furnished library, where the young boy developed a passion for reading that prompted him

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to start writing at the age of six.22 As he grew older, however, his literary inclinations definitely marred the already fragile father–son relationship. His readings started to be demonised as soon as his father discovered his interest in stories by James Baldwin, recounting homosexual love, which he considered unacceptable in terms of Igbo masculine gender roles. Baldwin, whom Abani deems his ‘muse’, will nevertheless remain a constant point of reference in his writing career, marked by a search for a kind of writing which, while avoiding grand political statements, looks for other ways of discussing both the political and the human: ‘I’ve returned more and more to Baldwin’, he would say decades later, ‘because Baldwin is always about the quiet human moment’: He never shied away from race, from the civil rights movement. He never shied away from dealing with issues of sexuality. Being ten and reading Another Country, in a very homophobic culture, I realized that for James the only aberration in the world is the absence of love. And what’s even more perverse is the giving up on the search for love, which is that melancholic voice that carries us in the quiet moments.23

Baldwin was of course part of a series of early literary encounters, both canonical and ‘pop’, that would stay with him and mould his writing: books like The Famous Five (Enid Blyton), Watership Down, Marvel and DC and Commando comics, Crime and Punishment, The Bhagavad Gita, the Bible, the Koran, and Baldwin and Ellison – all these and many more read by the time I was ten. I didn’t discover Achebe and Things Fall Apart until I was almost eleven. My contact with Nigerian literature before this was more Ekwensi, Tutuola, and the plays of Wole Soyinka. Another Country by Baldwin, specifically, made me want to be a writer. I had never imagined an intelligence and spirit such as Baldwin’s and his courage. He remains my muse and photos of him hang over my desk and I in many ways think of myself as a child of Baldwin. I wish I had got to meet him.24

On the other hand, and more in line with the boy’s sensibilities, his mother provided a completely different educational experience, by making him share in her social work. For example, when teaching local women of the countryside the Billing Ovulation Method, she



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used to take him along as an interpreter, as she was still unable to speak Igbo. This increased her husband’s concern about their son’s gender, fearing he might become a woman. In this way, from early childhood the author had to learn how to juggle different cultures and their expectations. Yet his inability or unwillingness to conform to Igbo cultural norms gave his father a pretext for the abuse he soon started perpetrating.

The Face: Cartography of the Void To wear the face of someone you can’t help loving even as you can’t help hating them, is to be caught in an infernal struggle for your own soul. Abani, The Face

In this slender book in segments, which are sometimes lyrical and introspective, sometimes comedic and didactic, Abani takes on the task of trying to say what a face is. Commissioned by Restless Books for a series called ‘The Face’, it consists of twenty sections of varying length through which the author decides to explore his own face, apparently a close replica of his father’s, as well as ideas of the beautiful or the physical appearance of beauty. The apparently oxymoronic subtitle, Cartography of the Void, indirectly poses the question of where one should start mapping a blank space, a vacuum, a lacuna, or an emptiness, as an initial joke from his brother implies: Brother: You’re writing an essay on your face? Me: Yep. Book length. Brother: [Pause.] So a short book then? (F, 5)

The effort Abani is engaged in – as his delving into biology, genealogy, gender, performativity, family legacy, and Nigerian cultural traditions shows – seems to be that of foregrounding the ‘immaterial’ aspects that make up the ‘real’ face of people, alongside and beyond physical shape and the features that different cultures value in facial appearance: ‘It is about more than just what flesh covers my bone structure. It is about reflection too. What we see or want to see in the mirror’ (F, 8). To produce a cartography of ‘the void’ – of the question mark that any individual identity is but, more precisely, of the blank space

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the writer sees in the mirror because he cannot read nor accept his face, resembling that of his father – one needs some co-ordinates in order to start delineating the edges around that enigmatic space that is waiting to be filled with meaning: ‘Biologically my face is a mix of two races, of two cultures, of two lineages. One white – English, perhaps a mix of Celt and Anglo-Saxons, and one black […] But for all that, this essay is not about them. But about my father and the lineage I know for sure. The Egu and Ehugbo’ (F, 8–11). The Face is mostly devoted to grasping the writer’s West African heritage by approaching a site of memory and history handed down to him by his father. As anticipated in ‘Coming to America  – a remix’, in which he briefly refers to what he knows about Igbo cosmology and mythology as a ‘gift’ from his father, Abani engages once again in a love/hate struggle to understand the layers of histories and stories laden on his own face as a gift. Not an easy task, when memories of descriptions of his face are loaded with alienation and estrangement, as well as what looks like the impossibility of acceptance and self-recognition. In the section titled ‘Face value’ he says: No one accepts my Nigerianness, not without argument. In fact, the two things I have been rarely taken for – Nigerian and white – are the very things that form my DNA. Face value. Agemo, the Yoruba say. Chameleon. Most of the confusion about who I am is a product of how my face is read. Thus it is perceived to be where it is thought to belong. And how it is supposed to look. As my father used to say in the heavy Igbo accent he would adopt when particularly disgusted by some new facet of my rebellion, ‘You are just a disappointment.’ Even my grandfather, who cast kola nuts when I was born and who nicknamed me Erusi (spirit), would shake his head and say, ‘You don’t belong here or in the land of the spirits. You are a bat, neither bird nor mammal.’ I loved that. That meant I could be anything. Even Batman. (F, 20–1)

Jokes apart, it is only after recollecting and appropriating some of his father’s teachings about West African cultures that the author can reflect on the very meaning of identity and find a reading key to

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his own face. In this quest his ‘cartography of the void’ becomes a revealing, open piece of writing with great insights into the person, the writer, the son, and the man. As the quotation from ‘Face value’ clarifies, the face is a space of both performativity and reference: ‘The face in Afikpo is a stage, a state of flux, of becoming. The face is a performance, an enactment by the animating consciousness behind it. When used with intent, it is the performance of awareness, behind it’ (F, 22). In Igbo culture a face is the sum total of a person’s interiority, ancestors’ culture, the soul of the land of birth and its people, Abani explains. And beauty is not about ‘the visage of things’: ‘in Igbo, beauty, nma, is also the word for good, meaning that what is beautiful is good as well’ (F, 26). It is a behavioural matrix, as well as an appreciative one, and it is not a concept that works in isolation, but rather a communal or reciprocal epistemological and ethical process of meaning making. As beauty is ‘the composure of being-ness’ (F, 29), so ‘the right face’ is something to cultivate. Stepping away from Western ideas of the beautiful or the physical appearance of beauty, Abani is attracted by different forms of African art in which the head is enlarged, as for example in the Yoruba tradition, and becomes the most prominent part of the human body – its centrepiece of beauty  – not so much for its looks but for what it contains and expresses in terms of spirituality and creativity. The fact of having the same face as his father is troubling for Abani, who remembers that their relationship was ‘an endless bargain of violence’ (F, 51), and that he also wears ‘the face of the dead’ (F, 75), the ghostly inheritance of the Egu, his father’s people living in the Afikpo area from Neolithic times and now extinct. Thus, coming to terms with his ‘chameleon’ face for Abani means having ‘to face’ violence and ghostliness: ‘My face is the mirror of a dead people – an extinct people’ (F, 67). But performativity also guarantees that a face enacts the animating consciousness behind it, and ‘in this way, the face is both the portal and that which is transported’: it can convey character, serenity, wisdom, and experience. The face and its value lay in its ability to reference and perform, which is to manifest the true nature or character behind it […] Lines

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on the outer face lead to what lies not just inside us, but also through a dream-time to our ancestral lineage, to our culture, to the very soul of our land and our people. These lines and the other physical oddities of the face mark the terrain of self and culture, of a community or even communities, at once obvious and yet simultaneously occluded. (F, 23–4)

In the ‘This is true’ section, the writer reconstructs in thirty-nine sentences the story of his father and his own relationship with the man whose face he has to wear, whose face he sees whenever he looks at himself in the mirror and which, finally, shows ‘forgiveness’: 37.  My father is easier to love as a spirit, a ghost, than as a man. 38.  My father’s face stares back at me from the mirror. 39.  My father has been forgiven. (F, 35)

There is comfort in the process of drawing the cartography of one’s own face. Mapping the immaterial can be painful, but it may lead to feeling ‘comfortable’ with one’s appearance, to a recognition of the father’s face where before was just a void, to accept what is formative in his legacy, and to reach ‘that place in West African thought that is calmness, serenity, sensitivity, insight, inspiration – a river, all flow yet relaxed’ (F, 85). When asked what I would say about my face in this essay, I […] thought about my face as a worn-in leather armchair. Come. Sit here a while. (F, 85)

Sons, fathers, and the postcolony (youth) Abani’s work familiarises us with a postcolonial context in which the Western idea of the nuclear, patriarchal family as the organising social principle has impacted heavily on traditional family patterns. Therefore the focus on the father–child relation should also be seen in connection with an epistemological framework that has in part incorporated and naturalised this model. The slow violence the writer introduces us to might be understood as registering how the colonial introduction of the nuclear family system in local ­contexts with alternative conceptions of social order and solidarity has

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contributed to the fragmentation (and violence) of the postcolony. Representations of conflictual family relationships may thus be loosely read as figurations of power dynamics in the postcolonial state, especially in moments of deep social conflict. It is possible to trace metaphorical or allegorical implications in the portrayal of antagonistic intergenerational relationships in the author’s autobiographical and fictional or poetic texts, and contend that the uncertain life trajectory of his young characters ‘reflects’ the condition of the citizen or subject in the postcolony – the absence of a functional family gesturing towards the failed promise of the creation of a functional public sphere and of an inclusive regime of rights.25 The ‘postcolony’ is here intended in the way the Cameroonian philosopher and political theorist Achille Mbembe describes it in his seminal work On the Postcolony (2001), which explores questions of power and subjectivity in postcolonial Africa. At the same time, however, we should avoid reading Abani’s texts only as postcolonial allegories, as this perspective risks overshadowing the uninhibited creativity of the stories they offer. Abani’s own personal growth includes a passage from an antagonistic relationship with his father to one with the Nigerian state when, after publishing his first novel Masters of the Board (1985),26 he was accused of having offered a draft plan for a coup against the Babangida regime and was consequently imprisoned.27 A radical change of vision followed his first detention and turned him into a political activist. The period of ideological opposition to postwar dictatorships was then fought with a whole generation of antagonists to the dictatorial regime through non-violent action and using art as a weapon, which however triggered a violent response from the government. Abani was one of the political dissidents who were repeatedly incarcerated and subjected to a whole range of physical and psychological tortures: these dreadful trials left him deeply scarred, and his sense of defeat and depression was further exacerbated by his father’s disowning him publicly for being an anti-government activist. In ‘Resisting the anomie’ (2004) he tells of the utter psychological and emotional damage this caused to him: ‘To be disowned publicly is to be cut off from [Igbo society], to be placed in a limbo of homelessness, clanlessness, to become nothing. A ghost. This is another form of exile [from the one he

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has ­experienced as a diasporic subject], one even more damaging because you are in the home of your birth and yet treated like a pariah.’28 Reflecting on that hurtful moment years later, Abani revises critically his political campaigning against the Nigerian dictatorships: Upper-middle-class, educated, privileged (although not bulletproof), I campaigned tirelessly to organize protests to rid us of that oppression. I marched with the people I helped to organize – mostly poor, working-class or yet-to-be working-class citizens. Together, we faced down riot police and tear gas and beatings and bullets with nothing more than songs and the uncrushable belief that nothing good could die. But many did, and I paid little attention […] I hardly questioned myself about my privilege and my right to organize these people. Any questions that did come up I rationalized. Had I not myself been imprisoned? Was I not also facing beatings and bullets? I was engaged in a righteous war. Now I have to ask myself if I had the right to place others in harm’s way in the battle for our country’s soul. And it is not because I have regrets, or because I suffer from survivor’s guilt. It is simply that I have to accept this discomfort – that being human, being courageous, requires the ambiguity of doubt. Would I do it again? Probably. Would I feel this conflicted again? Probably. I have no answers. I have no crutches.29

His first poetry collection, Kalakuta Republic (2000), is devoted to the memories of imprisonment between 1985 and 1991 and to the detainees with whom he shared the Nigerian cells, where people could easily be killed with impunity or disappear for ever.30 Written during his exile in the UK, it is not only a poetic denunciation of gross violations of human rights in the Nigerian state-of-exception and its prison system but also a tribute to literature, which for Abani became a way of exorcising trauma. In the ‘Introduction’ to the collection, the Ghanaian poet and critic Kwame Dawes observes that ‘the act of formalizing experience, the business of taking pain and making it into something manageable, something that comes under the control of the artist and then the listener, is the fundamental aesthetic shared by people who write out of suffering’.31 This art lives as a cathartic process, which the readers also have to undertake, as they are confronted with someone else’s apparently unmanageable, absurd pain. But it lives also as an effort to

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produce beauty out of extreme ugliness and suffering. In this sense Abani shares the experience of transfiguring the prison experience through poetry with many African writers (among them the first African/Nigerian Nobel Prize Wole Soyinka, South African poet Dennis Brutus, Ghanaian author Kofi Awoonor, Malawian writer Jack Mapanje), who have produced a kind of art emerging out of the crisis of human existence in the postcolony’s cells, and written incarceration lyrics that are really poems about freedom.32 If it is true, as the British playwright and poet Harold Pinter said, that ‘reading Abani’s poems is like being singed by a red hot iron’,33 it is also part of the experience of reading them that we may begin to understand people’s infinite capacity for resilience and survival. Kalakuta Republic is an intimate reflection on the limits of bodily and psychological existence when absolute power pursues a project of thorough annihilation of all opposition and resistance, demoting its subjects to extreme forms of bare life. As Giulia D’Agostini observes, in this poetry collection the Nigerian prison cell is represented as an extra-juridical space resembling an Agambean concentration camp. Abani’s jails are in fact zones of punishment and interrogation, modelled on colonial prisons, and they recall Giorgio Agamben’s view of the camp as the space that is opened when suspension of the rule of law is no longer ­exceptional.34 In this sense the prison Abani poetically exposes to our gaze could be said to function as a metonymy for the postcolony, a figure indicating the condition of permanent exception in which the Nigeria of the military was caught in the 1980s. Through Abani’s measured and graceful verses, we are invited to a secluded public space where violence is the rule and speaks of a country in a condition of state-sanctioned terror. In line with Mbembe’s vision of necropolitics, the Nigerian prison cell emerges as one of those ‘repressed topographies of cruelty’ where, ‘under conditions of necropower, the lines between resistance and suicide, sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom are blurred’.35 The power of sovereignty, Mbembe argues, is exercised through the creation of zones of death, realms of the disposable, in which mass destruction and ‘living death’ become the dominant logics. In these contexts death turns out to be the ultimate exercise of ­domination as well as the primary form of resistance.

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Because of what most critics consider as its largely autobiographical content, Abani’s collection may be read in the context of the vast body of prison writing that Jack Mapanie, in the introduction to his edited collection of African prison writing, Gathering Seaweed, describes as the ‘defiant recasting of African history through the eyes of some of its finest hostages’: their verses have been one of the most ethically compelling consequences arising out of the many accounts of prison experiences by African intellectuals since the 1950s.36 Not only do these texts provide an indictment of the brutality of colonial and postcolonial regimes of violence but they also constitute ‘an indelible record of the origins, growth and maturity of the struggle for the restitution of human dignity and integrity, justice and peace on the African continent’.37 The ethical relevance of Abani’s poems becomes palpable if we consider that, by giving visibility to spectral lives that are suspended between life and death, they reassert their humanity, thus reconsidering the paradigms of what Judith Butler has called the ‘grievability’ of human life, while exposing the machineries of necropolitical power.38 The title of the collection, Kalakuta Republic, refers to the Lagos home of the Afro-beat star and activist Fela AnikulapoKuti, a collective residence which was given its name in 1975, when the Nigerian musician declared it a republic, independent from the Nigerian state.39 Abani’s choice of title refers to one of the many detention places in Lagos where Fela served time, which was ­ironically called ‘the Kalakuta Republic’ by his prison inmates. As he writes in ‘Rasa’, a poem dedicated to Fela, for whom years later he would also compose a screenplay,40 ‘Kalakuta Republic’ is a name that has the power ‘to honour the death of conscience, / to ridicule them, those despots / swollen by their putrescence’ (KR,  27). Hovering between brutality and lyricism, the brevity and  immediacy of ‘Rasa’ formally exemplify the sense of confinement that the content of the individual texts in the collection conveys. The poems are striking for the pervasiveness of toxic violence and graphic descriptions of its consequences on the bodies and souls of prisoners. Violence, however, does not leave jailers and state officials immune. The captive self is literally a body in pain: its



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s­ upposed integrity is violated, its orifices are filled by torture gears that infringe bodily cavities and depths. Unwillingly we witness how the torture perpetrated by jailers establishes a kind of intimacy between victim and perpetrator, in a surreal form of perversion of pleasantries or acts of love, as happens in ‘Casual banter’: Sergeant Adamu Barkin Zawa rammed the barrel of a rifle – Lee Enfield – up my rectum maintaining casual banter; ‘How is your mother? How is she finding our lovely country?’ interrupted only by the blood spraying from my backside, baptising his heavily scarified face, empty ancient mask. (KR, 53)

The bodies in pain of Abani and his fellow prisoners show that they are open, vulnerable, but also resistant, in spite of their being subjected to ‘tiny daily deaths’ (KR, 111): they are portrayed in attempts to move beyond the boundaries of the metaphorical camp to which they are confined and out of a state of living death. Sometimes death itself does not necessarily mean defeat: Here death is courted. Welcomed. Not in defeat. Or cowardice, but as a statement of our Discontent with this state of barbarism we live Under the shade of a tree executions are mercifully shielded from the harsh sun. (KR, 38–9)

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Death, therefore, may be an ambiguous means of resistance, a final strategy through which the prisoner reasserts ownership over an existence that (necro)power has already disposed of.41 And yet one of the accomplishments of Abani’s work lies in its composite depiction of apparently antagonistic categories of men locked in a deadly relationship: the vulnerable and the invulnerable, the victims and the executioners. His poems show relationships between jailers and prisoners that are not always oppositional whilst, on the other hand, solidarity among detainees is not to be taken for granted. Prison guards may be humane, and some officials may not comply with the rigid rules of the ‘camp’. This is the case of Lt Emile Elejegba, a man who asks the poet to do some ‘paper-work’ in his office, ‘[a]fter cautioning me not to read / under any circumstances the copy of / Anna Karenina on his desk’ (KR, 58–9). The reader is told that Lt Elejegba’s career has been quite unfortunate: he was posted to the Kiri-Kiri prison after being ‘demoted, as / punishment for his refusal to / lead a troop into Ogoniland to / murder fellow compatriots’ (KR, 58). The poem ‘Passover’ recounts how the man is transferred (yet again) to another penitentiary for ‘fraternising with the prisoners’ (KR, 76), which is obviously forbidden in the exception of the dictator’s prison. Before leaving, however, Elejegba visits the poet: Wrinkling his nose against the smell and trying hard not to cry, he handed me a slim worn volume with the picture of a smiling white girl on its cover. The Diary of Anne Frank. ‘This might help,’ he said gently. ‘I hear Nelson Mandela read it on Robbens [sic] Island.’ (KR, 76)

The gift of the Jewish girl’s diary – composed while hiding from Nazi persecution in Amsterdam, and read by the most famous political prisoner of the twentieth century (the future first President of

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democratic South Africa and Nobel Prize for Peace) while in detention in Robben Island’s maximum security penitentiary – further confirms that ‘the Nigerian prison can really be interpreted as a “camp”’.42 At the same time it returns us to the power of writing and reading, which can open up jail doors and put people ideally in touch across time and space, establishing commonality and fostering survival. If finally, in Abani’s quest for a meaningful, comfortable self, the father’s violence can be partly forgiven, the atrocities of the postcolonial state must be opposed till the end. Kalakuta Republic shows that it can be resisted thanks to the manifold, unforeseen manifestations of a resilient and artistic creativity, cultivated in independent republics of the mind and the heart.

An aesthetic life: art and ethics (maturity) In making my art, and sometimes when I teach, I am like a crazed, spiritfilled, snake-handling, speaking-in-tongues, spell-­ casting, Babylonchanting-down, new-age, evangelical preacher wildly kicking the crutches away from my characters, forcing them into their pain and potential transformation. Alas, or maybe not, I also kick the crutches away from my readers. Abani, ‘Ethics and narrative’

In an article on ‘Ethics and narrative’ (2009) – containing biographical sketches, literary quotations, and philosophical musings  – Abani expresses his hope ‘to create an art that can catalog the phenomenon of our nature, all of it, without sentimentality, but rather by leaning into transformation, so as to offer up what the American photographer Diane Arbus would call the veritable, inevitable, or the possible, so that we can all have that terrible but necessary confrontation with all of ourselves. Whatever we feel about specific situations, we must at all costs avoid the ­sentimental.’43 Rather than a systematic ordering of the infinite manifestations of nature, Abani’s artistic will to ‘catalogue’ human life, particularly in his fiction, suggests an embracing of transformation, and of the possible or the imagined beside and over the mimetic. He thus favours a discursive transcoding of reality, one

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that freely uses figuration and rhetorical interventions to build a more provocative representational strategy, which may include elements of different artistic genres, such as m ­ elodrama, or noir, or the supernatural and the surreal of Bollywood cinema. Words, images, and words and images together, may carry enormous potential for a more inclusive ethics. In 2009, the same year as his reflections on ethics and narrative, Abani published an essay in the Prestel catalogue of the South African photographer Pieter Hugo’s Nollywood series: a collection of thirty-nine photographs that provide an imaginative representation of characters, situations, and stories related to the Nigerian video film industry.44 Abani’s contribution, titled ‘Omar Sharif comes to Nollywood: a storyboard in 10 frames’, is the first of three opening texts that offer a polymorphous critical view of the video film industry in Nigeria: its history, its workings, its themes, and its social impact.45 ‘Omar Sharif comes to Nollywood’, in dialogue both with filmic language and with Pieter Hugo’s photographic images, offers an instance of the dialectics between, on the one hand, aesthetic creativity and freedom and, on the other, the demand for positive and ‘truthful’ images of collective identity on the part of cultural or national communities when they become the object of artistic representation. What is at stake here is the need to outline the disturbing aesthetics informing a variety of artistic interventions dealing with Nigeria. There is a returning image of the human in the works of Abani (and Hugo) that many readers and viewers would prefer to ignore or not acknowledge as belonging to the ‘real’ world of men and women,46 but whose epistemological or ethical potential asks to be unearthed. The ‘Omar Sharif’ piece tackles this edgy terrain first by presenting images of Abani’s early experiences of cinema in Nigeria and of the Nollywood phenomenon, and then by putting them into play with Hugo’s troubling iconography of Nollywood. In the Prestel catalogue words and images comment on each other and, while doing this, they open up a contested but creative space of cultural, artistic, and philosophical reflection that ends up rescuing the ancient, traditional roots of Nollywood, as well as offering a reading key to Abani’s own aesthetics.



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Lawrence of Arabia, John Wayne, and Nigeria’s visual narrative Each of the ten narrative frames of ‘Omar Sharif comes to Nollywood’ corresponds to a kind of movie-shot focusing on locales and situations related to the author’s experience of cinema in Nigeria, including Nollywood. Here the writer borrows a cinematic technique, in which texts work like running images in a montage, forcing a passage from reading to seeing and watching, the effects of which are an explicitly visual narration engaging the reader’s imaginative and critical response. The narrative opens with an ‘establishing shot’ on a dusty car park of a small town in Nigeria in 1972, where people have gathered for the screening of two films. The first is the Hollywood success Lawrence of Arabia (1962), starring the world-famous Egyptian actor Omar Sharif. The audience, adults and children alike, fall in love with Sharif, and all are proud that ‘an African can hold sway on the world stage’, like John Wayne, Abani adds.47 The second ­screening is of a more obscure Egyptian film, in Arabic with no subtitles. The only words the predominantly Christian Igbo audience at the venue can understand are ‘Allah’ and ‘Inshallah’. This episode, Abani tells us, takes place only two years after the end of the Nigerian Civil War (when the predominantly Islamic northern region of Nigeria defeated mainly Catholic Biafra), and the crowd in the car park naturally responds to the film in an angry way: the screening ends abruptly when a gunshot from someone in the watching crowd ‘kills’ the already ancient projector, and a second one punches a hole in the wall where (ironically?) Omar Sharif’s face was projected. So the first Frame starts with a film-shot and ends with gunshots: different kinds of weapons, a similar power to interfere with people’s lives. Right from the beginning Abani, whose love of cinema is well known and an important nourishing strand in his writing (similar scenes of film screenings can be found in his novel GraceLand, for example), signals the enormous energy that the interplay of images and words, photography and narrative, can produce; he stresses the impossible neutrality of either words or images, their ethical existence. They are serious stuff, Abani is saying, virtual and real at the same time, imaginative creations in

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which the aesthetic and the political, the private and the public, inevitably join hands. It is in Frame 4 that we begin to understand Abani’s aim in his introductory piece, which is to offer some sort of genealogy of the Nollywood production. From this point onwards he begins to spin his genealogical thread, linking it to his own personal experience, while also stressing a taste for the magical, the uncanny, the surreal which he sees at the heart of Nigerian culture and that Hugo highlights in his photographs, too. The following frame is an interesting discussion of what kind of shot would best illuminate the interiority of the Nigerian cultural landscape. Abani argues that what individuates the Nigerian personality from the rest of Africa is ‘the ability to insert its imagined self into the heart of every narrative it receives. Not that other cultures don’t do this, but the Nigerian imagination does it so completely and seamlessly that it is quite breathtaking.’48 Paradoxically, while appearing to shoulder an essentialised identity politics, Abani selects for the Nigerian ‘imagined self’ a trait that speaks of strategic mimicry, of performativity (a feature that is further evidenced in Frame 9 with reference to the local theatre tradition), and fluid acceptance of difference. He presses this point by referring to the way in which great Hollywood productions, Blaxploitation films, Bollywood, and the Hong Kong Martial Arts industry have been taken up and used by Nigerians as if they were their own, as happens also for Nigerian TV sitcoms borrowing from American and British TV shows. Through these references he provides an extremely engaging history of the visual narrative of the country from the 1970s onward and, at the same time, a view of its mobile cultural landscape through its relationships with film. Frame 6 and 7 carry on this search for Nollywood in the Nigerian tradition – seeing it as a continuation of the imaginative and commercial creativity of Onitsha Market Literature (a unique example of genuinely popular literature, written in English by African authors for an exclusively African audience) – and, again, as the product of local ‘readings’ or ‘translations’ or ‘voice-overs’ of American Westerns, where, Abani comments, the fascination for the dangerous and ambiguous life of the bad guy always wins over the ethical uprightness of the good guy.



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The grotesque and the beautiful The last three frames of the Storyboard are a critical combination of cultural and personal reflection, appropriately focused on the supernatural, the grotesque, and the representation of the human body. Frame 9 is indeed the key to Abani’s interpretation of Nollywood cinema and of what links it to his own writing. The strategic reference in this piece is to the local tradition of the so-called ‘concerts’, i.e. morality plays about the battle between good and evil, using supernatural elements and often employing grotesque human forms. The grotesque does not coincide with ‘the gross’ or ‘the disgusting’, Abani says.49 The idea of the ­grotesque – eccentric, weird, abnormal – as used in the Nigerian concerts has to do with the subtle manipulation of the human form to destroy the usual perspective and to move things slightly off kilter. The grotesque engenders sympathy, revulsion and real fear simply by employing self-recognition with a little displacement. So the body of an actor is sometimes fully nude, painted a deep black or intense white all over, and then the actor employs odd physicality like walking on his/her hands, crawling like an animal or even just employing silence with a focused open-eyed stare.50

These features that Abani identifies as a sort of shared cultural heritage permeate not only a ‘diffused’ dramatic sensibility – and the characterisation strategies of his own works – but also the literary production of many Nigerian and West African writers, the most relevant perhaps being Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-wine Drinkard (1952) and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954), in which the layout of human existence drops its definition, as Mbembe remarks: In this process in which human beings, animals, and plants are caught up in a series of metamorphoses, assume forms sometimes obscure, sometimes clear, hire their parts and their bodies and get them back, often at high price, exchange features, disguise themselves, and make their outlines tremble, the geography of existence vacillates and loses all stability and compartmentalization.51

Abani refers to and invokes forms of local cultural production that are deeply connected with moral drama, religion and the

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s­upernatural, with forms that have traditionally explored the threshold of the visible and invisible, good and evil, materiality and ghostliness, and which resurface in his writings. In a talk given at the 2010 Mantova Literature Festival, Abani elaborated on what many perceive as shocking in his writing: the borderline characters and stories, the ugliness associated with the peculiar physicality of the bodies he represents, the grotesqueness  of characters and of many narrated situations. These are part, he said, of his artistic search for the beautiful through a kind of art that is also ethical: ‘we’re only beautiful when we can reveal what’s ugly about ourselves’, he explained.52 Or, as he put it in his 2008 TED Talk, ‘we’re never more beautiful than when we’re most ugly’. So the ugly is a route to a kind of beauty – a beautiful that is such because it is a key to the good, just as the grotesque is intended as a way to the transcendental and the sublime, as happens, he suggested in the same talk, in the archetypical story of Jesus. There is clearly a strong liturgical sense in the writing of this Igbo author who studied in a Catholic seminary in Nigeria (and for a while thought of becoming a priest) but, even more than this, there is a will to push against the limits of our understanding of the human, by playing with the potential of our imaginative empathy, urging self-recognition in spite of displacement, using the provocative alienated perspective to renew identification beyond conventional codes. In this way Abani works to bring down the walls that separate people across barriers of race, social inequality, gender discrimination, religion, nation, disability, illness. And he also works, as we have seen, in the face of death. Abani proposes a highly personal language, a strategy of the grotesque, for deconstructing reticence and divisions; for talking about race, for example, without mentioning it, uncovering a deeper link to what connects us under the skin. Most of the times it is a sense of solidarity through suffering, similar forms of vulnerability or abjection, and the experience of evil; other times, it is a response, as he puts it in ‘Resisting the anomie’, driven by ‘some deeper human syntax we can only guess at – that we value the lives of others precisely because we know the limits of our own’.53 This ‘connection’ compellingly recalls Aimé Césaire’s imaginative and political



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embrace of the entire spectrum of the human and the animal world in the famous lines from his Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (1947): As there are hyena-men and panther-men I shall be a Jew-man a kaffir-man a Hindu-from-Calcutta-man a man from-Harlem-who-does-not-vote a famine-man, an insult-man, a torture-man you can grab anytime, beat-up, kill – no joke, kill – without having to account to anyone without having to make excuses to anyone a jew-man a pogrom-man a puppy a beggar.54

Some of these ‘something’-(wo)men may look like the people in Hugo’s disturbing portraits in Nollywood or people from his The Hyena & Other Men, in which the photographer plays with colonial ethnographic photography to offer a vision of a world of outcasts echoing Césaire’s half-human/half-animal marginality, and inquires into the liminal spaces that exist on the vast edges of African cities, where outsider communities almost ‘magically’ survive. Other marginal, disturbing people are just off the pages of Abani’s literary texts analysed in this book, where what is shockingly off-kilter – in characters whose bodies and stories offer grotesque parodies of what we tend to think of as men and women and children – is enabled to cross the threshold of the eccentric, the queer, and the different, and to return an image that can be ­potentially acknowledged, if not shared, no matter how nightmarish. This subversive and almost carnivalesque freedom of representation is the starting point for thinking through the kinds of actions, gestures, movements, passions that constitute the subject in the local-global space-time of contemporary Africa and its diasporas. It certainly has nothing to do with ‘nationalism’ or ‘patriotism’ or ‘cultural authenticity’ or Western-derived notions of universal ‘humanism’;55 nor with claims to exclusivity, purity, or fixity, but rather with coming to terms – aesthetically and ethically – with

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life and death in the postcolony and in the hybrid liminal spaces of globalised neoliberal economies, such as the suburban areas of London, Los Angeles, or Las Vegas. The ‘Omar Sharif’ storyboard thus contains an invitation to rethink the cultural or political space of self-representation of postcolonial and diasporic ‘liminalities’ – the degree of alienation, selfeffacement, victimisation, but also strategic simulation, reinvention, fantasy and performativity at work in individual lives and in the arts – and to reformulate the boundaries of subjectivity as distinct from ‘the nation’ (its tendency to ‘naturalise’ social traits, tastes, and behaviours) and ‘the market’, whose rationale constantly clashes against the porous borders of beingness. It is also an indication of how much psychic unease and violence need to be acknowledged as central to present-day cultures and societies in the global south, so widely represented in Abani’s works. Abani’s writing, however, is never shocking in any shouted or hyper-violent way. There is always a search for balance in his works, whether poetic or narrative, which makes it possible for readers to enjoy the graceful beauty of linguistic registers, inviting us not to refrain from personal engagement and ethical reflection. The author’s project in fact seems to come full circle when he reminds us (repeatedly) that the ethics of literature is not just for writers but also for readers: Ethical reading forces ethical writing, and we soon find that the work we make becomes the beautiful balance: We want narratives that allow for the unrealistic swashbuckling of action and quests without making us bend to others’ superiority, but rather that affirm us all as knights and Jedi warriors. Narratives that allow women to be as fragile and genteel and feminine as they want without fostering masculine senses of entitlement to their bodies, to their domination, that don’t create in college women a complex acceptance of a growing rape culture. Narratives that don’t make all Black men killers or gangsters or even cool, but allow for those of us who are nerds and like to build Star Trek replicas of ships and Cosplay. That allow rap and hip-hop artists to create beautiful songs without the pressure to perform such exaggerated masculinities. Narratives that don’t make all middle-class White men racist. Narratives that don’t mean that hate precedes most people’s actions.



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This is the power of creative culture, of creativity. The symbiotic relationship between the dreamer and the builder, the maker and the recipient. If we must read, then we should do so gracefully.56

The role of the writer is realised, in the words of Abani himself, by trying ‘to balance social and artistic aims’.57 This does not mean that he shares Chinua Achebe’s famous vision of the writer as ‘teacher’, which would make educational responsibility a central aim of literary writing; or Wole Soyinka’s visionary role of ‘interpreter’ for his people. Instead he claims a privileged space for art, for the artist, and for those who approach it in the form of literature. The territory of writing offers itself as a place of ethical questioning, understood as reflection and provocation, imagination and action. But it is also a territory of aesthetic freedom, where freedom means the possibility for poetry and prose to be a traumatic experience, but also to have a healing, regenerative function,58 as well as the power to boost imaginative creativity and cause enjoyment.

(Un)labelling the artist’s imagination We now have a more global moment, diasporas […] There are none of the usual places of engagement anymore. We have to find new topographies for our imagination. Abani interviewed by Colm Tóibín

What does it mean for a writer like Abani to look for new topographies of the imagination in the twenty-first century? In many ways his works, from GraceLand onwards, have steadily engaged with transnational and transcultural settings, which problematise both the nation and the globe, roots and routes or, as Avtar Brah has argued, no longer allow for clear-cut distinctions between those who move and those who stay put.59 The idea of the nation, and what a national identity might mean, remains a ground for dispute, a polyphonic conversation made up of contending ideologies and paradigms in most African countries, including Nigeria; and the nation is also under critical scrutiny in the twenty-first-century late-modern experience in Europe and in the USA, if we refer to Abani’s own migratory routes. The ‘regional’ and the ‘local’ have

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become powerful geopolitical, cultural, and mythical points of reference in the current global dispensation: in Abani’s work they are central but never essentialised,60 and usefully made to dialogue with a constellation of inputs coming from a variety of other times and other places, which speak of a larger vision of planetary connectedness. New topographies, in Abani’s writings, foreground intricate entanglements of temporal and spatial dimensions in the experience of characters whose lives witness the pervasiveness of displacement, marginality, and ‘unbelonging’, whether these take place in the slums or peripheries of African, European, or American mega-cities, during war, migration, or exile. ‘Remix’, the subtitle of Abani’s essay quoted at the beginning of this chapter, is a key word here: ‘remixing’ gives shape to both the form and the content of writing, and at the same time registers the crossings of people which have changed not only the face of the ‘imaginary communities’ of nations but also the face of the planet. This scenario recalls the experimentation of other postcolonial or postmodern writers in the last few decades, and Salman Rushdie appropriately comes to mind when, in Imaginary Homelands, he describes his work as a celebration of ‘hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and bit of that is how newness enters the world.’61 I wish to focus here on ‘how newness enters the world’, because it does not only speak of creativity as a trait of the individual artist but opens to a more contextual conception which views it in terms of significant achievement taking place within dynamic and evolving traditions. According to this conception, creativity is a matter not simply of novelty but also of value, of meeting a need, opening up new, fruitful directions for further exploration, as Abani’s artistic research does. Thus any attempt to ‘label’ Abani’s work sounds like a limitation of its reach. Whenever critics place him and his writing in a particular geopolitical context, generation, literary genre, or cultural trend, he always slips away; by taking a second look, we realise that he is not ‘either this or that’, but that he is ‘this and that’, or both, in

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a transformative remix of modes and ways of seeing and writing. ‘Labels’, he says, ‘are matters of little interest to most writers. We are magpies, we steal shiny things from everywhere and we bring them to our nest and enhance it, so all terms are reductive in that sense.’62 In a particularly revealing conversation with Yogita Goyal, Abani discusses the impossibility for him to identify with any one ‘school’ or ‘generation’ of writers in the Nigerian context, and observes he has paid dearly, in terms of readership and the promotion of his work, for his refusal to write in expected ways and for his exceeding national and continental borders. In relation to the two schools of Nigerian prose writing in English – the first including Amos Tutuola, D. O. Fagunwa, Gabriel Okara, Wole Soyinka, Ben Okri, and Helen Oyeyemi; the second Chinua Achebe, T. M. Aluko, Isidore Okpewho, Festus Iyayi, Sefi Atta, and Chimamanda Adichie – Abani locates himself ‘somewhere in the middle’, in the same way as he sees himself straddling the three generations of Nigerian writers that have come to the fore since the 1950s. He feels he shares something with all of them, both by age and by publication record, but also by virtue of the concerns of my work and my style. It is hard to say more than this. There is so much of my work that is influenced by growing up Igbo, speaking Igbo, and so has that Igbo-ness that we attach to Achebe. But I also grew up with an English mother who read voraciously and taught me to read early, a mother who learned French to read Chaucer in the original Old English when I was a boy, so you can say Englishness influenced me too. I had Indian and Pakistani teachers, Lebanese friends, and grew up on British, American, and Indian pop culture. This creates a certain looseness and fluidity in my work and my approach to place and so forth. I am a product of all the literatures I grew up with and all the strands of Nigerian literature I refer to, but there is something liminal about my process and my end product that resists categories, so I guess that places me firmly in the middle.63

The labels offered by different critical approaches – such as postcolonial, diasporic, migrant – or the categorisations of Abani as an Igbo writer, a Nigerian writer, a British writer, a Los Angeles writer, or even a new diasporic American writer, mostly on the

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basis of the characters and settings of his novels, do not seem to go very far. ‘Literature is larger than this’, Abani states, claiming for himself as a writer the right to feel free from the need to categorise, which on the other hand, as a professor of English and a literary critic, he also exercises, acknowledging that ‘we cannot study and analyse without restrictions, without reduction’.64 What seems unquestionable is that his writing stems from an engagement with life in all its light and darkness, and is imbued with a kind of open, hospitable vision that sees common people connected through experiences of vulnerability and suffering, speaking to one another, to their ancestors, to their animal avatars, and to the reader, out of unexpectedly liminal historical, social, and geopolitical contexts. This shared ethos and wide aesthetic angle in fact allow Abani to take the world as his province, and to find food for his imagination anywhere in its wide topography. Whether darkness comes from South Africa during the years of Apartheid or from nuclear explosions in the Nevada Desert, as in The Secret History of Las Vegas, it has the same power to wreck the life of people – be they scientists, detectives, or freaks; at the same time, small acts of recognition, kindness, or affect can make indelible redemptive marks on a human soul, even when it belongs to a lost child soldier in the warring wasteland of Song for Night.

Notes  1 C. Abani, ‘On humanity’, TED Talk (February 2008). Video. www.ted. com/talks/chris_abani_on_humanity. All websites last accessed 7 April 2021.   2 Abani thus elaborates on the central philosophical question in his life: ‘Is redemption a possibility? And not in a spiritual sense, but in the sense of becoming fully human, in the sense that the Buddhists talk about becoming human. And how far into darkness can a being go and still find their way back to light. And how much is it necessary for there to be darkness for the concept of light to exist’. In Z. Kaufman, ‘In conversation with Chris Abani’, Truthdig (19 April 2006). www.truthdig.com/articles/in-conversation-with-author-chrisabani/.   3 Kaufman, ‘In conversation’.

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  4 C. Abani, ‘Coming to America – a remix’, in A. Oboe and S. Bassi (eds), Experiences of Freedom in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 120.  5 Abani, ‘Coming to America’, p. 119.   6 Abani, ‘Coming to America’, p. 121.   7 T. Falola and M. Heaton, A History of Nigeria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 165.   8 R. Uwechue, Reflections on the Nigerian Civil War: Facing the Future (Victoria: Trafford, 2004), p. 8.   9 E. Osaghae, Crippled Giant: Nigeria since Independence (London: Hurst, 1998), p. 95. 10 C. Abani, ‘The graceful walk’, in A. S. Moore and S. A. McClennen (eds), The Routledge Companion to Human Rights and Literature (New York and London: Routledge, 2016), p. 505. 11 Abani, ‘The graceful walk’, p. 505. 12 Abani, ‘The graceful walk’, p. 505. 13 Abani, ‘The graceful walk’, p. 505. 14 R. Nixon, ‘Slow violence’, The Chronicle of Higher Education (26 June 2011). www.chronicle.com/article/slow-violence/. 15 Nixon, ‘Slow violence’. 16 A. Barnwell, ‘Family secrets and the slow violence of social stigma’, Sociology (8 May 2019), p. 14. 17 R. Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 8. 18 Barnwell, ‘Family secrets’, p. 14. 19 Barnwell, ‘Family secrets’, p. 14. 20 C. Abani, ‘Ethics and narrative: the human and other’,  Witness,  22 (2009), 167–73. 21 C. Abani, ‘Telling stories from Africa’, TED Global 2007. Video. www.ted.com/talks/chris_abani_telling_stories_from_africa/ transcript#t-542263. 22 Information from D. Tunca, ‘Chris Abani bibliography’, www.cerep. ulg.ac.be/abani/. 23 Abani in C. Tóibín, ‘Chris Abani by Colm Tóibín’, BOMB Magazine, 96 (1 July 2006). https://bombmagazine.org/articles/chris-abani/. 24 Abani in Y. Goyal, ‘A deep humanness, a deep grace: interview with Chris Abani’, Research in African Literatures, 45:3 (2014), p. 233. 25 See G. D’Agostini, ‘War-scapes: The Nigerian Postcolony and the Boundaries of the Human’, PhD thesis, Doctoral School of Linguistic, Philological and Literary Sciences, University of Padua, 2013, p. 199.

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26 Masters of the Board is a political thriller based in Nigeria but expanding internationally to Brazil and Europe. It won Abani’s first literary award, the Delta, in 1983. The book was later published in 1985 and precedes the writer’s adult production by at least fifteen years (Kalakuta Republic was published in 2000). The book is not included in the present analysis because it is an early text chronologically distant from the core of Abani’s works. Masters of the Board is in fact extremely different in content and style from the rest of his publications and reads more as a juvenile attempt at a writing career than a mature novel, although it announces the writer’s future use of a transnational frame and his love for thrillers, visible for example in The Secret History of Las Vegas and Lagos Noir. 27 The analogy between the figures of the father and of the sovereign is one of the founding, and most ancient, axioms of Western political thought. The father/children coupling is only one of the numerous parings structuring a configuration that, as Derrida states, is ‘both systematic and hierarchical: at the summit is the sovereign (master, king, husband, father …), and below, subjected to his service, the slave, the beast, the woman, the child’. J. Derrida, The Beast & the Sovereign, vol. 1, trans. G. Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 55–6. 28 His grandfather even said to him, ‘You have become a bat: a creature that is neither bird nor animal. Creatures like that are feared and despised’. C.  Abani, ‘Resisting the anomie’, in M. Hanne (ed.), Creativity in Exile (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004), pp. 23–4. 29 Abani, ‘Ethics and narrative’. 30 It must be noted that Abani’s biography and bibliography, with particular reference to the exceptional episodes just mentioned, have been repeatedly subjected to severe scrutiny, to sceptical remarks, and doubts about their veracity or even existence. Kalakuta Republic, for example, shocked Nigerian readers for its contents, and triggered a controversy over the veracity of the book’s content and Abani’s own personal experience of imprisonment. The present work is aware of the brouhaha surrounding his life story and writings, and of some of its underpinning motivations, but it is not going either to feed or to endorse them. 31 K. Dawes, ‘Introduction’, in C. Abani, Kalakuta Republic (London: Saqi, 2000), p. 13. 32 Dawes, ‘Introduction’, p. 17. 33 Harold Pinter quoted on the book cover of Kalakuta Republic (2000).

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34 See G. Agamben, Homo Sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita (Turin: Einaudi, 2005 [1995]). 35 A. Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, trans. L. Meintjes, Public Culture, 15:1 (2003), p. 40. 36 J. Mapanje (ed.), Gathering Seaweed: African Prison Writing (Oxford: Heinemann, 2002), p. xiii. 37 Mapanje, Gathering Seaweed, p. xiv. 38 J. Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004). 39 M. Veal, Fela: The Life & Times of an African Musical Icon (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), pp. 142–3. 40 C. Abani, Fela! Focus Features and Film 4 (2010). 41 A similar mechanism is at work in Becoming Abigail, where the trafficked young protagonist chooses death against a life of violence and invisibility in a necropolitical global context. 42 D’Agostini, ‘War-scapes’, p. 191. 43 Abani, ‘Ethics and narrative’. 44 Nollywood is a successful phenomenon in the African cultural and economic contemporary landscape: in the three decades since it started it has become an incredibly thriving business, a huge continental and diasporic market. Nigerian films have surpassed Hollywood and Bollywood films in popularity all over Africa, dealing with topics that concern ordinary African people and that fall into a number of distinguishable genres: gangster stories, historical epics, love stories, voodoo or ghost stories, and, more recently, porn. Nollywood films have been hailed as a salient instance of an entrepreneurial activity that started ‘from below’, unique in its early use of the media and digital technology to tell stories that people, both in Africa and in the diaspora, can recognise as their own. Even more than a thriving business, Nollywood may thus be seen as a vital cultural and political enterprise, since it is now generally accepted in Nigeria as an empowering instance of popular and collective self-representation. For an in-depth analysis of Nollywood video films see J. Haynes, Nigerian Video Films (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000) and Nollywood: The Creation of Nigerian Film Genres (Ibadan: Bookcraft, 2017). 45 The second essay is by Zina Saro-Wiwa, the daughter of the late Ken Saro-Wiwa, who is a filmmaker, writer, and founder of AfricaLab; the third is by Stacy Hardy, a South African writer, journalist, and multimedia artist whose writing often accompanies Pieter Hugo’s work. The current analysis of Abani’s ‘Omar Sharif’ is a revised version of my article ‘“As there are hyena-men and panther-men …”: Chris Abani,

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Pieter Hugo, and the shocking life of images’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 51:1 (2015), 95–107. I wish to thank the journal editor, Janet Wilson, for permission to reproduce this. 46 For an explanation of the brouhaha raised by many Nigerian commentators on Hugo’s rendition of Nollywood, which affected Abani as well, see Oboe, ‘As there are hyena-men’. The point made in the negative critical interventions of many ‘Nigerian patriots’ reveals on the one hand a struggle over the soul of Nollywood and on the other the will to dissociate the image of Nigeria from negativity, darkness, and imported Western stereotypes which, according to the accusations, Hugo’s pictures and Abani’s writing would perpetuate. 47 C. Abani, ‘Omar Sharif comes to Nollywood: a storyboard in 10 frames’, in P. Hugo, C. Abani, Z. Saro-Wiwa, and S. Hardy, Nollywood (Munich: Prestel, 2009), p. 7. 48 Abani, ‘Omar Sharif comes to Nollywood’, p. 10. 49 Abani, ‘Omar Sharif comes to Nollywood’, p. 13. 50 Abani, ‘Omar Sharif comes to Nollywood’, p. 13. 51 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, trans. A. M. Berrett et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 204. 52 Author’s personal note from Abani’s talk in Mantova. 53 Abani, ‘Resisting the anomie’, pp. 29–30 (my emphasis). 54 A. Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, trans. C.  Eshleman and A. Smith (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001 [1947]) p. 11. 55 Abani makes reference to a variety of ethical or religious inputs that nourish his vision of the human, distance him from universalist Cartesian-based philosophical ideas of the individual, and offer a more inclusive way of thinking about personal identity, with inputs from non-Western ethical and religious beliefs, such as Buddhism, which reject the emphasis on individuality (which admittedly characterises the Christian ethos, too). The concept of ‘ubuntu’, as predicated in SubSaharan Africa and particularly in post-Apartheid South Africa, is also shaped by the premise that ‘I am’ only because ‘we are’; that a person is a person through other people. Ubuntu – at the same time a quality, an ethics, and a politics rooted in a relational form of p ­ ersonhood – is particularly appealing to Abani, who in his TED Talk ‘On Humanity’, explains: ‘Ubuntu comes out of a philosophy that says, the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back at me. But if you’re like me, my humanity is more like a window. I don’t really see it, I don’t pay attention to it, until there’s, you know, like a bug that’s dead on the window. Then suddenly I see it, and usually, it’s

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never good. It’s usually when I’m cussing in traffic at someone who is trying to drive their car and drink coffee and send emails and make notes. So what Ubuntu really says is that there is no way for us to be human without other people. It’s really very simple, but really very complicated.’ 56 Abani, ‘The graceful walk’, pp. 504–5. 57 Abani, ‘Conversation with W. Mosley’, PEN American Center, 2010. Video. www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9UR2XLNYn4. 58 ‘African writers have always been the curators of our humanity on this continent’ (Abani, ‘Telling stories from Africa’). 59 See A. Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London and New York: Routledge, 1996). 60 ‘About my work, it is in many ways post-national and global not only in its reach, but in its attempts to locate a very specific African sensibility without attempting to limit it with certain kinds of arguments about essentiality and so forth’ (Goyal, ‘A deep humanness’, p. 230). 61 S. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta Books, 1991), p. 394 (emphasis in the original). 62 Abani in Goyal, ‘A deep humanness’, p. 235. 63 Abani in Goyal, ‘A deep humanness’, p. 234 (my emphasis). 64 Abani in Goyal, ‘A deep humanness’, p. 235.

References Abani, Chris. ‘Abigail and my becoming’, Truthdig (19 April 2006). www. truthdig.com/articles/chris-abani-abigail-and-my-becoming/. All websites were accessed 7 April 2021. ———. ‘Coming to America – a remix’, in Annalisa Oboe and Shaul Bassi (eds), Experiences of Freedom in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 117–21. ———. ‘Conversation with W. Mosley’, PEN American Center, 2010. Video. www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9UR2XLNYn4. ———. Daphne’s Lot (Los Angeles: Red Hen Press, 2003). ———. ‘Ethics and narrative: the human and other’, Witness, 22 (2009), 167–73. ———. Fela! Focus Features and Film 4 (2010). ———. Kalakuta Republic (London: Saqi, 2000). ———. ‘Omar Sharif comes to Nollywood: a storyboard in 10 frames’, in Pieter Hugo, Chris Abani, Zina Saro-Wiwa, and Stacey Hardy Nollywood (Munich: Prestel, 2009) pp. 7–14.

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———. ‘On humanity’, TED Talk (February 2008). Video. www.ted.com/ talks/chris_abani_on_humanity. ———. ‘Resisting the anomie’, in Michael Hanne (ed.), Creativity in Exile (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004), pp. 21–30. ———. ‘Telling stories from Africa’, TED Global 2007. Video. www.ted. com/talks/chris_abani_telling_stories_from_africa/transcript#t-542263. ———. The Face (New York: Restless Books, 2016 [2013]). ———. ‘The graceful walk’, in Alexandra Schultheis Moore and Sophia A. McClennen (eds), The Routledge Companion to Human Rights and Literature (New York and London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 499–506. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita (Turin: Einaudi, 2005 [1995]). Barnwell, Ashley. ‘Family secrets and the slow violence of social stigma’, Sociology (8 May 2019), 1–16. Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London and New York: Routledge, 1996). Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004). Césaire, Aimé. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, trans. C. Eshleman and A. Smith (Midtown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001 [1947]). D’Agostini, Giulia. ‘War-scapes: The Nigerian Postcolony and the Boundaries of the Human’, PhD thesis, Doctoral School of Linguistic, Philological and Literary Sciences, University of Padua, 2013. Dawes, Kwame. ‘Introduction’, in Chris Abani, Kalakuta Republic (London: Saqi, 2000), pp. 11–19. Derrida, Jacques. The Beast & the Sovereign, vol. 1, trans. G. Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Falola, Toyin, and Matthew M. Heaton. A History of Nigeria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Goyal, Yogita. ‘A deep humanness, a deep grace: interview with Chris Abani’, Research in African Literatures, 45:3 (2014), 227–40. Haynes, Jonathan. Nigerian Video Films (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000). ———. Nollywood: The Creation of Nigerian Film Genres (Ibadan: Bookcraft, 2017). Hugo, Pieter. The Hyena & Other Men (Munich-Berlin-London-New York: Prestel, 2007). Kaufman, Zuade. ‘In conversation with Chris Abani’, Truthdig (19 April 2006).  www.truthdig.com/articles/in-​c​o​n​v​e​r​s​a​t​i​o​n-​w​i​t​h​-​a​u​t​h​or-​ch​ris-​a​b​ ani/. Mapanje, Jack (ed). Gathering Seaweed: African Prison Writing (Oxford: Heinemann, 2002).

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Mbembe Achille. ‘Necropolitics’, trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture, 15:1 (2003), 11–40. ———. On the Postcolony, trans. A. M. Berrett et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Nixon, Rob. ‘Slow violence’, The Chronicle of Higher Education (26 June 2011). www.chronicle.com/article/slow-violence/. ———. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Oboe, Annalisa. ‘“As there are hyena-men and panther-men …”: Chris Abani, Pieter Hugo, and the shocking life of images’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 51:1 (2015), 95–107. Osaghae, Eghosa E. Crippled Giant: Nigeria since Independence (London: Hurst, 1998). Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta Books, 1991). Tóibín, Colm. ‘Chris Abani by Colm Tóibín’, BOMB Magazine 96 (1 July 2006). https://bombmagazine.org/articles/chris-abani/. Tunca, Daria. ‘Chris Abani bibliography’, www.cerep.ulg.ac.be/abani/. Uwechue, Raph. Reflections on the Nigerian Civil War: Facing the Future (Victoria: Trafford, 2004). Veal, Michael E. Fela: The Life & Times of an African Musical Icon (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000).

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Peripheral violence in GraceLand

GraceLand, what type of novel? GraceLand is Chris Abani’s first acclaimed novel, winner of the 2004 Barnes and Noble Discover New Writers Award, the 2005 Hemingway Foundation / PEN Award, and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction, among others.1 A syncretic narration that mixes European literature and Caribbean music, the Holy Quran and American comics, Western movies and Bollywood films, Nigerian food and Igbo recipes, GraceLand has as its protagonist Elvis Oke, a Nigerian boy who leaves his home village Afikpo together with his father Sunday in the 1980s to reach Lagos.2 Here the boy discovers the violent life of Maroko, one of the city’s many slums; he tries to make a living as an Elvis impersonator, flirts with the idea of a criminal life as offered by his friend Redemption, and teams up with the King of Beggars, finally to realise he is inadequate to be a part of Lagosian society. The novel ends with Elvis leaving for the USA on Redemption’s passport – a conclusion that has been interpreted as the ultimate collapse of national grand narratives and, in general, of the possibility of achieving a unitary identity at the end of adolescence.3 In their attempts to explain the novel’s workings, critics have resorted to different narrative moods and genres spanning magical realism and even modernism.4 While less enthusiastic critics have described GraceLand’s mixing of styles and influences as an example of bad realism, Yogita Goyal has greeted GraceLand as an example of a global novel, because of the weight of the work’s international musical, literary, and filmic references and its transatlantic

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Peripheral violence in GraceLand 43

finale.5 These are, according to Goyal, features which mark the transition from a national to a global imaginary and, in general, a shift in Nigerian literature, which is less and less focused on strictly national issues and more open to global dynamics and interpretative paradigms. Focusing more on GraceLand’s adolescent protagonist than on the planetary crisscrossing the novel depicts, other critics have labelled the book as a Bildungsroman, although the category has often been doubted satisfactory in the African context, because of its markedly European origins contrasting the African continental history of coloniality and state-formation.6 Elvis’s inability to mature into the bourgeois citizen who is usually the protagonist of Western coming-of-age novels has in fact encouraged Ashley Dawson and Joseph Slaughter, among others, to rather interpret GraceLand as a disrupted novel of formation, for the ‘unequivocal failure of self-formation and socialization’ which, in the end, forces Elvis to leave Lagos for the United States.7 In spite of a certain freedom in the mixing of narrative modes, the narrative structure of GraceLand is carefully arranged, with each chapter framed by a double epigraph and a sort of ethnographic add-on in the form of Elvis’s mother’s diary.8 Structure does play a role also in the general economy of the book, which is divided into two major sections, Book I and Book II. Whilst the second section focuses on Elvis’s life in Lagos in the 1980s, the first one has an internal binary framework, with chapters alternating Elvis’s past in Afikpo and his present in Lagos. The book thus offers opposing settings and timing as an expedient introducing the contradictions we find in the protagonist, an adolescent stuck between his dreams of becoming a professional dancer and the harshness of making a living as a poor teenager in an African megalopolis. Opposition characterises also some of the characters: once in Lagos, Elvis is guided through the underground city life by Redemption – whose name is apparently inconsistent with his role as Elvis’s guide into Lagos’s drastic violence – and by the King of Beggars, a paternal figure of sorts who provides visions of rectitude against Redemption’s life as a thug. These two characters multiply antagonisms and oppositions, which create GraceLand’s elusiveness: in its oscillation between past and present, scenes of extreme violence

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and episodes of self-respect, the book leaves the reader wondering whether Elvis is able to find a way out of his life of miseries or is doomed to falling into even darker obscurity. Because of the series of menial activities Elvis is involved in and the apparent flavour for ‘episodes with no discernible resolution’ which preclude character development, Stacey Balkan has interestingly expanded one of Susan Andrade’s suggestions by defining GraceLand as a petro-picaresque novel, that is, a work similar in some ways to the European picaresque genre of the fifteenth century that started fiction, especially in Spain, but with an environmentalist touch.9 Whilst acknowledging the discussion about GraceLand as Bildung, Balkan reads the picaresque novel as a more adequate narrative form that contrasts the bourgeois coming-of-age novel by providing a narrative space for the working-class protagonist. ‘Rather than attempting to fashion themselves into secure members of a property-owning class’, Balkan writes, ‘rogues like GraceLand’s Elvis engage in the more transient ­ transformations  […] in the pursuit of sustenance’.10 Replicating Goyal’s emphasis on globality, Balkan places GraceLand near to the Peruvian-American Daniel Alarcón’s City of Clowns (2003; 2015) and Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco (1997). These texts are examples of a ‘new literature of roguery in the Global South’, which provides ‘an aesthetics of indigence’,11 a ‘parodic counterpart to that of affluence’ and to the middle-class notions of personhood typical of the Bildungsroman.12 Role-playing, wandering, and grotesque images of privation and hunger are, according to Andrade and Balkan, the picaresque motifs Abani enacts and that allow for such an interpretation in contrast to the Bildungsroman’s possibility of interior and social development, which is in fact precluded to the new poor of the neocapital globalised world. In this perspective Abani’s is not a form of bad realism but ‘the “gritty realism” of the “third world” city – a mode of realism […] that is more appropriate for narrating the exigencies of survival in places like Maroko’.13 The focus of this chapter is on the environmental, socioeconomic, and cultural violence to which Elvis is exposed, together with the possibility of resistance to it. Despite its promising title, an ironic reference to Elvis Presley’s mansion and to a ‘land of grace’, GraceLand in fact presents Nigerian society as permeated

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Peripheral violence in GraceLand 45

by ­systemic violence and ‘necropolitical conditions’ which ‘negate all possibilities for Elvis’s development’.14 GraceLand is here analysed as a site for the representation of a double form of violence: the violence of Maroko, Lagos’s poor periphery, and the violence of being the weak end of contemporary cultural cross-pollination, that is, Elvis’s position in the world’s unbalanced mediascape. As Dustin Crowley points out, ‘Through Elvis’s experience as an urban newcomer […] Abani explores the enigma of the urban landscape, especially in its interactions with the vagaries of globalization’ – a theme the writer also develops in The Virgin of Flames and The Secret History of Las Vegas.15 The ‘peripheral’ of my chapter title does not refer to violence as a marginal element of the book; on the contrary, violence is a central experience of peripheral lives, so much so that it becomes almost commonplace and, therefore, unquestioned. Such a thematic approach allows readers to interpret GraceLand as a work which talks of illegitimacy, forced marginality, and survival. Poverty becomes a defining matrix in the narrative, which partly explains the diverse forms of violence experienced by the character. I understand poverty in the meaning used by Gavin Jones, who regards it as socioeconomic impoverishment experienced as a kind of suffering. Being poor, in other words, does not perfectly match the idea of being impoverished and deprived; rather, being poor becomes ‘impoverishment specifically when it is experienced, by an individual or a group, as a kind of suffering’.16 Besides the ‘materiality of need’, Jones argues, the question of poverty ‘opens into the nonmaterial areas of psychology, emotion, and culture, with poverty moving away from the absolute and the objective toward the relative, the ideological, and the ethical’.17 Whilst poverty is often measured as an economic factor, in this definition it operates as a form of socioeconomic inequality, which gives way to expressions of violence. The difference between poverty and impoverishment is essential in our understanding of Elvis and explains, for example, the difference between Elvis and his friend Redemption, their perception of Maroko, and their reactions to it. Whilst both boys live in an  impoverished environment, only Elvis is depicted as suffering. On the contrary, Redemption is presented as an upbeat yet rough

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and aggressive character, at ease in Lagos’s slums. Elvis’s suffering rather uncovers his poverty as a condition of lack of emotional satisfaction, of communication opportunities, of personal development. Such a condition explains other issues in the book, that is, the physical, environmental, and cultural violence which we will deal with in what follows. The second part of this chapter looks at Maroko, the area of Lagos where Elvis lives, and the violent practices the slum reality entails. The third and fourth sections deal with Elvis’s performances as Presley. Although ‘becoming Elvis’ is only one of the different activities the boy is involved with, the centrality of such an act is testified by the attention critics have devoted to this performance, interpreted both as a violent desire deriving from his deficient subaltern position and as an attempt at answering actively to his situation by means of references to a global mediascape.18

The ecological and economic violence of the slum A mega-city of more than twenty-one million people, Lagos has been at the centre of many recent novelistic representations, becoming ‘one of the world’s preeminent fictionalized cities, as  with London and Paris more than a hundred years before’.19 Critics have focused on Lagos in Nigerian fiction,20 each addressing Abani’s GraceLand as a central text in the depiction of the city as ‘a dystopian space of deprivation, despair and dislocation’,21 a place of ‘brutal and ugly life, one where poverty is experienced as violence’.22 As will be clear from the following analyses of The Virgin of Flames and The Secret History of Las Vegas, the city space plays a pivotal role in Abani’s fiction. As the writer himself has indicated on different occasions, cities are central in his aesthetics, not just as ‘geographical locations’ but as ‘psychic spaces of existential melancholy and desire’.23 As Rita Nnodim points out in her analysis of Lagos in Nigerian literature, in the city ‘landscapes of poverty intersect with more affluent neighbourhoods and middle-class spaces’,24 the megalopolis containing urban and economic disparities in a mix of multiple realities and times typical of the postcolony.25 In GraceLand

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Peripheral violence in GraceLand 47

the city’s wealth and modernity are exemplified by the elegant neighbourhoods of Ikoyi and Victoria Island; at their opposite is Maroko, one of Lagos’s many slums and the place where Elvis and his father Sunday forcedly move when they have to leave their ­middle-class life in Afikpo because of Sunday’s debts. A former fishing village absorbed by the expansion of Lagos, Maroko figures as a daily encounter with poverty, unemployment, and crime, a place of incompleteness, marginality, and destitution. Here broke, young, and estranged from his family (after the death of Elvis’s mother, Sunday lives with a new woman, Comfort, and her three children), Elvis is the subaltern of a subaltern periphery, constituted by the slum and its underworld inhabitants and economy. Lagos, and especially the slum as a signifier, makes their entrance in the very first pages of GraceLand, when Elvis, ‘giving up reading  […], stared at the city, half slum, half paradise’ (GL,  7). The duality of the city, ‘half slum’ and ‘half paradise’, talks of the contradictions of a capitalist economy that, while enriching a part of the population, saw the progressive ruin of agriculture and the movement of thousands of farmers to Lagos, where they engrossed the city’s slums. As Dawson points out, the rapid growth of Lagos in the 1980s was a new and unprecedented phenomenon, yet common to other cities of the global south, whose augmented size, however, did not match a similar economic development.26 Like Elvis and Sunday, the economic migrants of the global south moving to the cities are faced with the difficulties of finding shelter and a new job, which often translates into a cultural and emotional dislocation and impoverishment. In this sense Lagos’s slums are ‘spaces of destitution’,27 an urban edge whose principal function remains that of a ‘human dump’, as Mike Davis writes in his wellknown study on global slum dwelling.28 As Elvis contemplates, Lagos comprises diverse poor areas: ‘There were Maroko, where he lived; Aje, where Redemption lived; Mile Two; parts of Mushin and Idi Oro and several other unnamed settlements under other bridges like this one scattered across Lagos. All in all, he thought, there were over ten’ (GL, 116; see also GL, 51). These places share the features Davis has pinpointed as the characteristics of slums: ‘overcrowding, poor or informal housing, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation, and insecurity of tenure’.29

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Maroko is the centre of GraceLand and of Elvis’s life. As the result of an absence of proper urbanisation projects and provisional makeshift accommodation made permanent, Maroko is defined, among other things, by bad geology, precarious architecture, and unhealthy environmental conditions. As the narrator tells, Maroko was ‘built of a confused mix of clapboard, wood, cement and zinc sheets, raised above a swamp by means of stilts and wooden walkaways. The other half, built on solid ground reclaimed from the sea, seemed to be clawing its way out of the primordial swamp, attempting to become something else’ (GL, 48). The economic violence of which Maroko is an expression entails environmental disorder, a form of ‘slow violence’, to use Rob Nixon’s term, especially experienced in oil-prospecting countries such as Nigeria. Nixon thoughtprovokingly distinguishes between two types of violence, the usual understanding of violence as an ‘event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility’; and ‘a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and ­accretive’.30 The latter is more typical of environmental abuse, whose ‘slow’ casualties – ‘human and environmental – are the casualties most likely not to be seen, not to be counted’, not newsworthy but inexorably expanding.31 This form of environmental and, as a consequence, economic violence is visible in Maroko’s unbalanced combination of earth and water, life and toxic dump, the simultaneous presence of eating and defecating practices which talk of a survival existence with animal hints, reminiscent of the obscene and grotesque that are, according to Achille Mbembe (2001), the attributes of the postcolony, as we can read in the following passage from GraceLand: ‘As he looked, a child, a little boy, sank into the black filth beneath one of the houses, rooting like a pig. Elvis guessed it was some form of play. To his left, a man squatted on the plank walkway outside his house, defecating into the swamp below, where a dog lapped up the feces before they hit the ground. Elvis looked away in disgust and saw another young boy sitting on an outcrop of planking, dangling a rod in the water’ (GL, 48).32 Erin Fehskens highlights that ‘[i]n this scene the man, the two boys, and the dog exist in a circular relationship based in filth and excrement, exemplifying the ways in which play, foraging, and

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Peripheral violence in GraceLand 49

waste elimination occupy the same space and use the same materials in the slum’.33 Further commenting on this scene, one of the most analysed in GraceLand, Dolores Phillips states that, similarly to other tropes of African literature such as the child boy, ‘excrement has been noted as a prominent trope in African postcolonial cultural production’,34 so much so that Dawson talks of an ‘excremental urbanism’ formed of ‘the violently evacuated waste products of today’s world economy’, such as Elvis and Sunday.35 The just-mentioned passage depicts Maroko in clear opposition to the description of other rich parts of Lagos, with their ‘beautiful brownstones set in well-landscaped yards, sprawling Spanish-style haciendas in brilliant white and ochre, elegant Frank Lloyd Wrightstyled buildings and cars that were new and foreign’ (GL, 7–8). Such heterogeneous landscape, juxtaposing the previous ‘excremental’ description of Maroko to areas with ‘tarred roads, well-laid-out grounds, huge villas and mansions in white’ (GL, 164), talks of a dualism in a city whose economy has boomed in the last decades, with the consequent contradictions of rapid urbanisation and social divisions. Mbembe’s notion of the postcolony, an age and place which ‘encloses multiple durées made up of discontinuities, reversals, inertias, and swings that overlay one another, interpenetrate one another, and envelope one another’, aptly describes the multifarious Lagos we find in GraceLand.36 The city is indeed a place where different temporalities are entangled: the impalpable circulation of international wealth, appearing as a global architectural style, admits Lagos into the world of modernity; yet such neocapital modernity, which catapults the city out of its locality, stands side by side with a literally rotten sector like Maroko, where the drainage system does not exist and where people fish and flush in the same canal in animal-like (read premodern) ways. As is typical of the postcolony, Lagos paradoxically interlocks people who ‘seemed transplanted from the rich suburbs of the west’ (GL,  7) with a population dumped in the city by global economic flows gushing them out of both farmlands and metropolitan economy. Instead of the hoped-for passage to modernity, Maroko comes then to symbolise modernity’s nightmare to these poor urbanites, whose journey to the city is a dystopian journey into the abuses of human dignity of the contemporary urban globality.

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If the metropolitan space has usually been depicted in contrast to the rural environment (represented by Afikpo in the novel) as a ‘promise of liberation from oppressive tradition and clan ties’,37 connecting the new urbanites to an enabling sense of globalisation, in Elvis’s experience Lagos converts into a Dantean hell. Borrowing Fanon’s words from The Wretched of the Earth where he comments on the colonial town, Maroko can be described as ‘a world without spaciousness; men live there on top of each other. The native town is a hungry town, starved of bread, of meat, of shoes, of coal, of light. The native town is a crouching village, a town on its knees, a town [quite literally] wallowing in the mire’.38 The visual rendition of bodily redundancy in Fanon’s words (‘men live there on top of each other’) is captured in GraceLand by the corpses piled at the side of the roads. They are casualties of a wild traffic – one of the plagues of global southern slums and a typical element of the Lagos novel39 – but also a visual reprimand of someone’s inability to cope with modernity and its technologies of mobility. Expelled from the  circuits of labour, Maroko’s inhabitants are ‘surplus population’, ‘unintended and unplanned “collateral casualties” of economic ­progress’.40 Zygmunt Bauman calls these unconsidered, redundant and unclassified people of the metropolis ‘human waste’: people with no precise function in their society’s design and therefore disposable, alien to ideas of rights and sovereignty supposedly granted by their status as citizens.41 Dumped by a fast growing economy and city which cannot contain them, Maroko’s inhabitants become the actors of an informal and survival economy, which always means poverty and, in Hendrick’s and Feshkens’s readings, also a form of contemporary slavery. Survival economy is not exclusive to Maroko though. Even as a child, when living in Afikpo, Elvis gets involved into what can be considered menial informal economic activities. That is the case, for example, of his mail fraud at the expense of his grandmother, when instead of using the money his grandma gives him to send letters to her penfriends around the world, he steals the money to buy cinema tickets. However, once in Maroko, this innocent attitude to stealing explodes. The dehumanising life conditions of the slum, together with its offer of informal labour, become increasingly exploitative and lawless in the protagonist’s experience. Elvis

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Peripheral violence in GraceLand 51

is absorbed into the city’s criminal world, chaperoned by his friend Redemption. As a would-be thug, the latter functions as Elvis’s Charon, carrying the newly-arrived-in-Lagos boy through a river of escalating criminality and initiating him into a number of illegal and morally deplorable activities. In the succession of crimes that constitute Elvis’s only access to the survival economy of the slum, the reader is exposed to an escalation of criminality that shatters the ethical standing of the protagonist. This is paradigmatic in the transition from Elvis’s involvement with what can be considered petty crimes, such as the preparation of drug portions (GL, 108–10) or dancing prostitution (GL, 91–2), to his participation in the traffic of human beings. Elvis’s apprenticeship in Lagos’s subterranean economy presses him to take part in the trade of spare parts of human bodies and the slavery practices connected to it. Uninformed about the details of the work proposed by Redemption, he is captivated by the idea of fast and easy money gained by escorting a transport to Togo; however, as Elvis soon discovers, the van he and Redemption are accompanying contains a ‘bunch of kids, boys and girls, ranging in age from about eight to sixteen’ (GL, 232): his own age. Not only is Elvis taking part in human trafficking, but the cooling boxes the kids are sitting on are discovered to contain six human heads and organs such as hearts and livers, all destined to the international black market (GL, 237). Redemption explains ‘de rich whites buy de spare parts from de Arabs who buy from wherever dey can’ (GL, 242). He also adds a price catalogue of sorts: ‘Human head fetch ten thousand dollars  […] heart is also ten thousand. De oders, like kidney, are like three to ten thousand dollars’ (GL, 242). Elvis’s reaction to the discovery of his implication with such a crime is intense; shocked, he leaves the convoy and runs away. This episode marks the climax of the violence implicit in the poverty of Maroko and the limited possibilities of life it produces, which questions human dignity for both those who are the perpetrators and those who are the victims of such a violent economic act. Whilst the sad fate of those kidnapped kids does not need further commentary, Elvis’s position requires interpretation. Both victims and perpetrators are unified by a precariousness marked by poverty and marginality which limit their human possibilities.

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Elvis’s victims suffer the ultimate form of such precariousness, being literally deprived of their lives, but Elvis’s humanity is also limited, because his involvement in such a business transforms him into an (unconscious) perpetrator of crimes against humanity. The denied access to the economic circuits of the city, with the consequent submersion into illicit economy and its underworld, culminates in these acts of new slavery and ‘cannibalization’, which mark Elvis’s moral decay and ‘represents an image of the African metropolis tied into a global network at its most negative – with Nigeria as a breeding ground for the global market in cheap spare body parts’.42 In his analysis of poverty Jones states that ‘[a]s a condition of socioeconomic suffering, poverty is primarily material and economic. It rests on levels of possession and power, and is physical at its extreme, returning ultimately to the body as the site that bears the marks, the damage, of being poor.’43 It is to this idea of the body as the ultimate bearer of poverty that I would like to devote attention. The capture of children’s bodies indicates a form of contemporary slavery which erases the value of human dignity within human life, as scholars of slavery have amply described. It is indeed the nullification of those people’s humanity that makes their bodies seizable, sellable, and expendable. In a perverse hierarchy of human lives, those kids’ bodies are disposable, in the double meaning of the term: something available, that can be taken as a provision for medically advanced countries, substitution for other bodies’ right to continue living, so that ‘rich white people […] can save their children or wife or demselves’ (GL, 242). But they are also something that can be ‘thrown away’, since ‘not all survive de journey’ (GL, 243). The paradoxical value of their body is clear: they are profitable for the agents of such a horrific market and vital for those whose lives depend on the bodily replacement they provide; yet they are non-essential, as bulk goods and therefore only partially valued. So trivial is the value of those who were people that the boxes containing their human parts can be used as chairs and mixed with everyday objects, such as ‘bottles of beer and what looked like food’ (GL, 237). As Redemption’s down-to-earth words elucidate, ‘Dis world operate different way for different people’ (GL, 242). In a similar way to the past exploitation of African bodies during the slave

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Peripheral violence in GraceLand 53

trade, these kids are at the mercy of Western economic and bodily abuse, implemented in their countries by the military who commissioned the job. In this sense in GraceLand there is ‘no end to colonialism’, Amy Novak argues, ‘only a transformation of US and European policies and methods. Conquest and slavery are replaced by the creation of a market’, a carnivorous demand which feeds on human bodies for its subsistence.44 Capitalism replaces the conquest, colonialism, and slavery of the past, adding amorality to the experience of economic deprivation. It may not be inconsequential, then, that one of the drivers of the convoy of human traffickers is named Conrad, a reminiscence of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) and a literary homage that implicitly continues the denunciation of the never-ending exploitation of Africa. The violation of the integrity of the body, which reaches its peak in the human trafficking episode, is presented in the novel also in other forms. His prostitution as a taxi-driver is a mild form of bodily exploitation in comparison to the various episodes of sexual violence present in the book, such as the diverse occurrences of rape or Elvis’s friend Okon’s selling of his own blood (GL, 76). It must be noted, however, that cases of rape, such as the ones perpetrated against Elvis’s cousin Efua and Elvis himself, take place in Afikpo and not in Lagos, thus expanding the geographical reference of violence in the novel.45 It is not only Maroko, as the outcome of the mega-city’s underworld and exploitation, which produces violence. Whilst Lagos is a dystopian place, ‘there is no idealization of [Elvis’s] childhood in Afikpo’ either.46 All Nigeria is responsible for the expansion of brutality which invades Elvis’s family, Maroko as well as Afikpo with its scars of the Biafran War, as exemplified by the madness of Innocent, Elvis’s cousin and the killer of their other cousin Godfrey (GL, 20; 151; 174). Such paradigmatic violence, however, is not always similar to itself. We could distinguish between a form of active violence, when Elvis performs or uses violence against the others, and a form of passive violence, when he experiences or witnesses violence. If in Afikpo the boy comes into contact with violence passively, in Maroko Elvis actively perpetrates it, as in the case of the already mentioned trafficking of human bodies and organs, or when he becomes the guardian of a group of semi-enslaved child-beggars. As readers we

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don’t know what kind of emotional turbulence such an involvement in active violence may cause in Elvis. Abani lingers more on the memories of past suffered abuse rather than on a proper examination of brutality in the novel’s present. The attacks on human dignity are so numerous in GraceLand that violence becomes pervasive, diffused. Especially in Maroko, it percolates almost every situation and belongs to any walk of life, becoming almost superficial. The ecological violence mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, for example, couples with a ‘juridical’ violence that transforms the city’s inhabitants into a mob faltering ‘between lust for and indifference toward […] violence and death, counting it as simply a daily part of their experience in the city’.47 This is the case of vigilante justice against thieves, which establishes the ‘necklace of fire’, a popular mode of execution consisting of ‘a tire around the neck doused with petrol and set on fire’ (GL, 30) and a trope in novels set in Lagos.48 This is, for example, how Jeremiah, a suspected thief, finds death (GL, 228). While he is burning, the gathered men watch him screaming, satisfied with the result of their lynching. The policemen, a few yards apart, ‘were watching the scene with bored expressions’ (GL, 227). Even ‘a young girl, no older than twelve’ (GL, 225), picks up a stone and throws it at Jeremiah: youth is not innocent in Maroko. In his attempt to run away from his destiny Jeremiah escapes; in his motion he ‘looked like a floating sheet of flame’ (GL, 228), an image of fire that emerges again and again in Abani’s prose and poetry alike.49 Elvis watches the scenes unable to help, paralysed by the excess of violence yet almost indifferent, passive. The narration continues in the following scene, with Elvis accumulating experience but unable to commit himself to a deep analysis of events. Although every single abusive episode has an impact on the young protagonist and contributes (possibly) to his coming-of-age, Abani presents all the violations the reader is exposed to as matter of fact, without engaging the reader in a conscious examination. As the author himself explained in an interview, ‘it is not the spectacle of violence that we seek to show as artists, but its erasure of everything, including itself’:50 the series of violent scenes Elvis and the readers are exposed to creates the effect of reading or watching something common, rapid, real, and unquestionable, but also impregnable,

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impenetrable, impossible to stop, impossible to understand. Any intervention is impractical. As such, violence becomes ‘peripheral’: something to get used to and not an overwhelming condition of life. It is, rather, a part of life: unsurprising, yet seen and acted; not accepted but unregistered; a complement to the rampant poverty depicted in GraceLand. It does not have a revitalising effect or a destructive one on Elvis, who passes fluidly through it. Violence just stands, present, in his daily life, eventually becoming an impediment to the fulfilment of his destiny and desire, more and more remote in Lagos’s underbelly. Unable to keep to the formal labour he had found on his arrival in Maroko and to make a living through his informal activity as a Presley impersonator, Elvis comes to be a further example of the city’s underdogs. He throws himself into the small criminality Redemption offers, abandoning any idea of becoming an active member of the society around him and reclaiming any rights in it. That attitude belonged to a generation older than Elvis, the one of his father Sunday, who had joined the political life of Afikpo and who, despite his lack of success, manages to fight against the state-ordered destruction of Maroko – a fight that, eventually, causes his death. Elvis is estranged from such civil passion: although dubious, he is unable to take a clear stance, floating adrift on his boat of small illicit behaviours. He accepts the illegality of the underworld unquestionably, so much so that, in the end, he himself becomes illegal when he leaves Nigeria for the United States using Redemption’s visa and name.

A violent desire? Becoming Elvis What if he had been born white, or even just American? Would his life be any different? Stupid, he thought. If Redemption knew about this, he would say Elvis was suffering from colonial mentality. Abani, GraceLand

The end of GraceLand, with Elvis possibly embarking on a flight to the USA, has been alternatively read as a journey of resistance of ‘a black Atlantic hero of the kind that Gilroy so influentially envisioned’, or as a last sign of passivity on the part of a hybrid

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subject of the postcolony, unable to cope with the reality in which he lives.51 In both cases it marks the end of the ambivalent relation with the United States the young protagonist shows throughout the novel. Many critics have addressed such topics in their analysis  of GraceLand, individuating in the transnational presence of the USA, the ghostlike presence of Elvis Presley in particular, but also the massive presence of Caribbean and Indian filmic and musical references, an articulated element of signification and innovation, which gives the novel an original global and transnational touch.52 However, the globalism of the novel is addressed ambiguously because, as the epigraph in the book explicates, the idea of (white) America is embraced as a form of cultural power and success in Elvis’s imagination, as well as an expression of an imperial geoculture to fight – even though it is hard to say how authentic Elvis’s anti-colonialism is. ‘His fascination with movies and Elvis Presley aside’, Elvis muses, ‘he wasn’t really sure he liked America’ (GL,  56). Nevertheless ‘the idea of America didn’t seem so bad’ (GL, 311). More of an idea than an actual place, as testified by the recurrent use of the term ‘America’ instead of the more correct United States, the USA plays hence a double role in the novel, as an escapist fantasy and as an imposing capitalist power to resist. The centrality of American cultural life in Nigeria is evident from the very beginning of the book, because of the title’s reference to Elvis Presley’s mansion Graceland53 and the protagonist’s name,  another homage to the King of rock. Elvis Oke owes his  name to his mother’s love for the American singer, to whose music mother and child danced in Afikpo in sweet embrace before the woman’s death. Linked to memories of tenderness and fun, Afikpo represents an African tradition connected to global flows in a positive way. At the same time, however, the detail of Elvis’s name instils the much broader issue of cultural violence and resistance in a neo-colonial and neo-capitalist world, positioning the young Oke as the result of worldwide intellectual and aesthetic practices and mediascapes.54 The predictive power implicit in Elvis’s name becomes explicit during the boy’s adolescence, when he dreams of a future as an Elvis Presley impersonator. In the informal economy he has access

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to in Lagos, he ekes out a living through his performances on Victoria Island’s beaches, in front of white tourists (GL, 10). In his study on Elvis Presley impersonators worldwide, Eric Lott affirms that impersonations are ambivalent because, although the performance implies an empowering fascination, it also implicates a sense of inadequacy. Both desire and identification are at play during such performances, and in highly contradictory terms, because ‘[a]ppreciation, deference, spectatorship, and emulation compete with inhabitation, aggression, usurpation, and vampirism’.55 In this sense the impersonation can be seen as a positive source of play and energy.56 Yet it also ‘castrates’ the performer, first because of the inability to ever match the icon; second because of the implicit ‘transvestism’ which destabilises the normativity of race, gender, and sexuality.57 It is this ambivalence of Elvis-as-Elvis, an empowering but also castrating performance, a site of passivity but also of resistance, which I explore in the following paragraphs, in which I will make use of Arjun Appadurai’s major work on contemporary imagination and desire. In the global framework of GraceLand, imagining oneself as the other can be seen, using Appadurai’s words, as ‘neither purely emancipatory nor entirely disciplined’ but as ‘a space of contestation in which individuals and groups seek to annex the global into their own practices of the modern’.58 Abani is not the first author to use Elvis as a form of shared intellectual property. With GraceLand, he positions himself within what Slaughter defines the ‘informal global Elvis-scape’ and which includes short-stories collections (The King Is Dead: Tales of Elvis Postmortem, 1994) and novels such as Stark Raving Elvis by William McCranor Henderson (1987) or P. F. Kluge’s Biggest Elvis (1999).59 However, unlike the other white ‘Elvises’, Abani’s Elvis is black and African, thus complicating the use of Elvis as a moving cultural product. The ritual of ‘becoming Elvis’ is a recurrent moment in the first part of GraceLand. Preparing for his performance, Elvis ‘slipped into the white shirt and trousers, pulled on the socks and canvas shoes, and jammed the wig down on his head […] he turned to the small tin of talcum powder stuck in one of the pockets of his bag. He shook out a handful and applied a thick layer, peering into the mirror’ (GL, 11). The ceremony of dressing up uncovers the

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performativity implicit in identity formation and, at the same time, reveals the impossibility of achieving Elvis’s dreams. The result of the performative act is in fact poor and distant from reality: ‘this was not how white people looked’, he muses (GL, 11). In a following moment the description of Elvis’s preparation to become the ‘real’ Elvis is even more detailed, the tools of his transformation scrupulously described so as to shed light on the emotional investment of such a practice: ‘Opening the box, he adjusted the mirror he had taped to the inside cover. Then, methodically, with the air of ritual, he laid out the contents: a small plastic compact of hard, pressed face powder, a few tubes of lipstick in different colours, a plastic case with eye shadow in several shades of blue, a small bottle of mascara with a brush hardening in it, an eye pencil and a tin of Saturday Night talc’ (GL, 77). Not having access to more professional make-up, Elvis uses a mix of face powder and talcum to whiten his face. To this he adds red lipstick, shades of blue on his eyes, outlined with black eye pencil. The result is that of a mask rather than a realistic impersonation, the imitation of an imitation, as Slaughter has evidenced.60 However, Elvis is satisfied with his making-up effort and concludes his transformation by pulling the wig on; then he bends ‘to look in the mirror. Elvis has entered the building, he thought, as he admired himself. This was the closest he had come so far to looking like the real Elvis, and he wished he had a camera’ (GL, 78). Yet living the perfect moment of his coming-to-life as a ‘mask’ of Elvis is impossible; as soon as he moves to Presley’s music he sweats and the make-up melts and cracks, revealing his black complexion. When watching himself in the mirror he confesses that he looks like ‘a hairless panda’. Make-up is not enough to cross the racial (and national) boundary that distinguishes Elvis Presley from Elvis Oke and, ‘[w]ithout understanding why, he began to cry through the cracked face powder’ (GL, 78).61 The superimposition of the foreigner (Presley) on to the local (Oke) may blur the definite nature of such terms, creating thus a potential ‘third space’ in which original and copy are not ­essentialised.62 The grotesque element of Elvis’s make-up, if read in Bakhtinian terms, may similarly provide a form of resistance to the imposition of American neo-colonial cultures. But this is not the

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desire of Elvis, who strongly, and maybe naively, desires to identify. In the end what emerges is just the evidence of the boy’s subaltern position. His lack of adequate economic funds means that Elvis does not have access to the necessary tools to accomplish his performance as he would like to. The use of poor make-up, with the retro and artificial image of the Saturday Night talcum tin as the only source of racial alteration, stresses even more the impalpability and evanescence of whiteness in Elvis’s hands. Rather than being a point of access to artistic performance, his make-up unveils the incongruity of practices of blackface in reverse and nullifies the potential of the Bhabhan third space. If his memories of listening to Elvis’s music in Afikpo with his mother and Aunt Felicia talk of a rural past of cohesion, which put together global influences and local traditions,63 once in Lagos his Elvis performances reveal the fragmentation of the postcolonial cosmopolitan sense of identity; the whiteness of Elvis’s powdered face is, in this line of reading, reminiscent of Fanon’s groundbreaking Black Skin, White Masks (1952). But, if in metropolitan France Fanon’s blackness is too visible (‘Look, a negro!’), in Lagos Elvis’s whiteness becomes an invisible attempt at artistry. As the boy admits, ‘It was hard eking out a living as an Elvis impersonator, haunting markets and train stations, as invisible to the commuters or shoppers as a real ghost’ (GL, 13–14). Whilst on the one hand the choice of Presley as a source of imitation may be considered a matter of ‘narrative destiny’ because of the kid’s name, on the other the use of a white idol instead of a black musical icon is an author’s choice that reinforces the unnaturalness of Oke’s performance. One wonders if, in 1980s Lagos, a global star like Michael Jackson might have been just right as a choice; the figure of Presley, instead, adds issues of impersonation and race alongside those of the global circulation of culture. First, because of the chromatic result on Elvis’s skin; second, because Presley is a controversial icon himself, perceived as a racial impostor for his music’s indebtedness to the African-American tradition. This is not to say that, in an impersonation play, racial authenticity must play a role. Far from that. As Lott reports, black artists do exist and have also reached considerable appreciation as Elvis impersonators. This is the case of Clearance Giddens, a

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black performer who has excelled in various contests over white ­impersonators.64 Racial and gender belonging is thus not a discerning feature of an impersonator’s success, as other cases of Native American or women performers have proved.65 Still in GraceLand, because it is associated with poverty, race does constitute an impediment to Elvis’s artistic development, as the inadequacy of the artist’s tools make his blackness an element impossible to disregard. Contrary to the success of real-life black impersonators such as Giddens, Oke’s copy of Elvis is the worst performance ever in the global Elvis-scape. The white tourists of Victoria Island point out that Abani’s Elvis ‘doesn’t look like any Elvis I know. Besides, ain’t that wig on back to front? Do you think he speaks English?’ (GL, 12), questioning not only his image but also his belonging to the colonial sphere of influence of English. In this reading Elvis’s mimicry does not grant identification. Rather, what is eerie about Oke’s performance is exactly his rendition of Presley: his use of make-up reveals, instead of concealing, his desire, showing its impossible realisation. For its being a violent desire of escapism that clashes against the impossibility of achieving it, scholars have read Elvis’s performances in a negative way, as an example of the castrating effect of a consolidating US cultural power in Africa.66 Elvis’s dream, together with the many literary, musical, and filmic American references spread throughout the text, express a new form of coloniality, a manifestation of ‘cultural corruption disseminated in the guise of entertainment’ that unveils Elvis’s reduced power of cultural negotiation vis-à-vis the influence of the USA.67 For this reason GraceLand has been read as an example of a certain cultural marginality, in which the USA figures predominantly (as opposed to Britain) as a consequence of the impact American pop culture had in 1970s and 1980s Nigeria, as Abani himself has confirmed.68 The novel’s syncretism, together with the centrality of Elvis’s mimicking practices, is hence a sample of the multifarious cultural reality of the postcolonial mega-city, whose fragmentation talks of a long history of colonisation and of its global entanglements in the present, a history of violent cultural imposition on the periphery of the cultural and economic trajectories of today’s world.



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The ambivalent resistant agency of imagination In this section I’ll try to complicate the role of the USA and, ­especially, of Elvis’s performances as Presley, in light of the contributions of three scholars, the already quoted Eric Lott and Achille Mbembe, and Jordanna Matlon; none of them comments specifically on GraceLand, but they inform my reading of Elvis’s performance as a form of imagined resistance. In his already mentioned analysis of worldwide Elvis impersonators Lott reads ‘the King’, among others, as a token of ‘class revenge-fantasy’.69 Such reasoning offers space to alter the interpretation of Elvis’s impersonation as an act of passive domination. In a comparable way Mbembe encourages more nuanced evaluations of postcolonial relationships, out of the binarism of resistance/domination and its derivatives like counter-discourse/ hegemony, etc.70 Contemporary sociological studies such as the one by Jordanna Matlon embrace such a stance.71 Capitalising on the works of James Ferguson and Paulla Ebron, Appadurai and Paul Gilroy, Matlon works on narratives of modernity and circuits of global stardom in western Africa, reading subalterns’ use of powerful popular cultural images as commodities to negotiate the status quo in their local society. As she states, in the transatlantic contemporary interplay, ‘the urban periphery transforms supralocal cultural references into material practices that buttress local identities’.72 This is especially true in the context of fast urban growth, as in the city of Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, Matlon’s field of investigation, as well as other African megalopolises such as Lagos, my focus here. As already stated, in our times the movement of masses of people from rural environment to the city, represented in the novel by Sunday and Elvis’s move to Lagos, does not grant the inscription within the city’s economy and its modernity. Rather, the absence of formal jobs pushes the newcomers to the margins of sociability; this, however, does not stop their exposure to global mass media circulation on the one hand and, on the other, their human potential, which is expressed in forms of hope and imagination. Only through ‘the prodigious power of hope and the profuse diffusion of the mass media’, argues Matlon,

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is the growth and survival of the urban ‘surplus population’ comprehensible.73 It is with this in mind that we may read Elvis’s performances, carried out during Elvis’s adolescence and, consequently, even more meaningful for the importance of imagination during a person’s growth and their identitarian processes. ‘In the new transcultural global milieu’, says Chielozona Eze, ‘there is no longer an exclusive stamp of cultural ownership’.74 Global transculturality is multimeshed and inclusive, in transition, and not delimited by national, racial, or gendered boundaries. Within such a world, of which Abani provides numerous examples in GraceLand by way of ostentatious literary, cinematic, and musical intertextuality, the new urbanites look for an identity ‘within a globally conceived popular culture’;75 here they may seek both belonging and distinction through a possible identification with global celebrities, which help them carve out a personal space of action within the megalopolis and its dynamics. By providing ‘elements – of speech, gesture, and materials’, the circulation of such celebrities across global mediascapes offer ‘a haven for people’s passions to live differently’, and a power which should not be underestimated.76 The impersonation of Elvis in the postcolony, therefore, is to be understood as a space of reciprocal agency, in which the US entertainment industry travels to Nigeria but is, meanwhile, subverted as a tool of resistance and autonomy in the postcolony. When faced with less and less social and economic opportunities, the use of an international icon as Presley may be interpreted as an attempt at inscribing oneself out of one’s bleak locality to seize power by association with a transatlantic and global cultural practice. The use of the ‘mask’ of Elvis, therefore, is understandable as an answer to Oke’s invisibility as a young subaltern in a city of the global south, described alternatively as a ‘ghost’ to his fellow beings, a cockroach for his government, and a pain in the neck even for his father Sunday, busily safeguarding the last bastions of traditional Nigerian masculinity. Elvis’s performance as Elvis, then, although goofy and rough, speaks of an attempt at imagining a different living than the one possibility offered by Maroko, fighting the limitedness of that extreme locality by expressing a global consciousness. Dancing, together with the many literary references

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in the book (actually, in the very first pages of the novel, Elvis is presented in his room reading), are artistic forms suggesting a narrative of restoration and, why not, even redemption. They are anchors to avoid sinking in the immorality of Maroko’s underlife. We can therefore consider Elvis’s performance, although disastrous, as an expression of agency, deeply related to the hope of carving one’s space out of the constricting locality, because in the periphery of the global south, Matlon notes, ‘[l]ooking or playing the part is the next best thing to being it’.77 Oke’s attempt at performing as Elvis is hence an artistic playful practice that, potentially, gives Oke access to self-representation, self-imagination, and reinterpretation. Even though success is not possible for GraceLand’s protagonist, his performative and identitarian play does talk of the possibility to become, of not being fixed into a ‘single story’, a single category of human beings. Accepting Appadurai’s suggestion that ‘[t]he imagination is today a staging ground for action, and not only for escape’, we may interpret Elvis’s impersonation not as a passive form of evasion but as a moment for claiming movement and pleasure, despite the risk of failure.78 In his The Principle of Hope (1954) the philosopher Ernst Bloch writes that ‘[e]verybody’s life is pervaded by daydreams: one part of this is just stale, even enervating escapism, even booty for swindlers, but another part is provocative, is not content just to accept the bad which exists, does not accept renunciation. This other part has hoping at its core’.79 And hope is a central theme in Abani’s aesthetics, which emerges in GraceLand to a limited extent but becomes more visible in following works. Elvis’s impersonation is a risky practice because, as we have seen above, Elvis’s failure is patently anticipated. Yet his effort is valuable, because it talks of the boy’s inner and precious doubt that his life cannot be restricted to ‘the bad which exists’, the illicit and underworld reality he experiences in Maroko. His lack of success as a Presley impersonator is therefore not just the defeat of a dream; on the contrary it urges us to consider Elvis’s inner hope for variety within human life as mediated visions and fictions of elsewhere necessary for emotional survival. It marks, in other words, the persistence of hope and, therefore, of Elvis’s humanity. In this reading the boy’s use of such cultural commodity is only a partial imposition: if, in the c­ ontemporary circulation

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of mediascape, ‘where there is consumption there is pleasure, and where there is pleasure there is agency’, the American presence in GraceLand is more elaborate than it might appear at first glance, because it contributes to sustaining an imagination that Appadurai defines as ‘a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility’.80 What emerges most powerfully in the transnationality Abani depicts in GraceLand is hence ‘the creative adaptation of foreign culture, not any form of brainwashing’.81 The fact that Elvis’s impersonation does not reveal only a passive prostration to neo-colonial influences is evident in the passage about the Ajasco dancers, in which the global and the local talk to each other in the formation of a new cultural practice. Here Elvis describes the African dancers performing Presley in ‘Hound dog’; ‘in high wigs, dark sunglasses and white long-sleeve shirts, gloves, trousers and white canvas shoes [they] danced to the music, bodies fluid’. After watching ‘mesmerized’ their free-flowing movements, the boy decides ‘what he wanted to do more than anything else’, that is, being an Elvis performer, and starts to move ‘his feet along in silent learning’ (GL, 65). As Fehskens explains, ‘“Ajasco” is a Nigerian English word for dancing with fanciful footwork, which is not necessarily the same as Presley’s choreography’. This means that ‘Elvis’s Presley imitation is mediated by prior Nigerian receptions of it, divesting the iconic American figure of some of his power as a solely “American” commodity’, which is rather rearticulated in its receptive locality.82 Expelled from society as ‘surplus population’, Elvis strives to enter it again via his practices of emancipative imagination and impersonation. He thus lives in a liminal space, caught between patent passivity and imaginative agency. He is, in point of fact, unable to react to any form of brutality he witnesses, ethically paralysed by the violence experienced; in fact ‘he rarely engages in any direct struggle or confrontation with a representative of state power’.83 Yet he demonstrates ‘an oblique form of resistance through the posture of refusal’: refusal of seeing Lagos just as an ugly place and of accepting strict boundaries, be they racial, cultural, or gender-related, as his impersonations show.84 Elvis’s lack of success, in this light, is meaningful but not all-encompassing.

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The boy’s ‘becoming’ rather communicates an identity in formation ready to take some risks: at sixteen, Elvis’s uncertainty, visible in his identity quest but also in his moral ambiguity towards the many forms of violence he witnesses, can be read as an auspicious sign. His taking a chance fails; still, accepting the risk of failure is an audacious act if read against the examples surrounding him. His are minor acts of a fruitful doubt and risk: being a dancer despite his father’s rebukes of being a useless son; questioning human morality despite Maroko’s examples of violence; and even questioning the King of Beggars’s simplistic vision of America as bad versus Nigeria as the good old tradition (GL, 154–5, 280). The game of imagining and performing possible different identities goes beyond Oke’s infatuation with the American singer, and talks of a broader fascination with the possibilities of bodily performativity and identitarian play that does not match a straightforward fascination with American culture. For example, when still a child in Afikpo, Elvis watches his Aunt Felicia and her friends getting ready to go out and is enthralled by her use of cosmetics and hairdos. He ‘longed to try on their makeup and have his hair plaited’ and finally manages to have his hair done into cornrows that, summed to some lipstick and ‘Aunt Felicia’s too-big platforms’, make the boy ‘pranced about, happy, proud, chest stuck out’ (GL, 61). In a following passage he draws attention to the fact that watching Aunt Felicia making up makes him ‘amazed not just at how much makeup made her aware of herself, but by how much he wanted to wear that mask. […] He envied her this ability to prepare a face for the world. To change it any time she liked. Be different people just by a gentle hint of shadow here, a dash of color there’ (GL, 173, my emphasis). What little Elvis envies his aunt is the possibility of containing multitudes, of having a polychromatic identity and not being stuck in fixed categories and personae. Elvis’s identitarian play does not stop with his infantile infatuation with Felicia’s make-up or his adolescent mimicking of Presley. When Elvis is on tour with the Jaguars, a theatre group, he watches a boy performing women’s roles and admires his ability of inhabiting different genders fluidly.85 In the ultimate identitarian twist of the novel, Elvis literally becomes Redemption. Recovering from a bad fever, the boy accepts

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his friend’s suggestion to leave Lagos and go to the USA, where his Aunt Felicia now lives. Although his Elvis-game has not granted any fruitful identification with the foreign country, the narration returns to the topic and gives its protagonist a last opportunity to ‘enter’ the USA, this time physically thanks to Redemption’s passport. That cultural mobility, forced on him through a historically charged name, becomes a geographical mobility that sees Elvis on a plane to America. He had considered migration to the USA at the very beginning of the novel, because of America’s supposed positive consideration of dancers (GL, 24–5). As Redemption remarks, the USA is ‘de place where dreams come true, not like dis Lagos dat betray your dreams’ (GL, 26). Because of the boys’ mythic vision of America, the United States becomes a place of racial otherness-as-one, completely disconnected from its reality of racial discrimination. There, Redemption adds, ‘[i]t is full of blacks like us. American Negroes wearing big Afros, walking with style, talking anyhow to de police; real gangsters’ (GL, 26). The USA stands, in Redemption’s imagination more than in Elvis’s, as an escapist vision to which they have access for different reasons: because of a racial point of access, being America’s blackness read as a historical success and a similarity; on account of their participation in American material culture of cigarettes and Bazooka bubble gums;86 and finally in view of a shared cultural indoctrination which starts very early in Afikpo, where silent Westerns were shown ‘courtesy of an American tobacco company’ (GL, 146). As this initial vision of America may suggest, the USA is created as a space for ‘fame, wealth and even “redemption”’, with ‘horizontal mobility’ matching ‘an idealistic upward mobility in perceived social position’.87 But with the unfolding of the narrative, Elvis’s Bildung develops a more doubtful vision of the future host country: ‘He mused over his mixed feelings. His fascination with movies and Elvis Presley aside, he wasn’t really sure he liked America. Now that the people he cared about were going there, he felt more ambivalent than ever’ (GL, 55–6).88 In his very last moments in Lagos, after his father’s death and the destruction of Maroko, Elvis ‘wasn’t sure how to feel. On the one hand, he had the opportunity to get away from his life. On the other, he felt like he was abandoning everything that meant anything to him’ (GL, 318).

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Slaughter provides evidence that, despite its bitterness, Elvis’s last travel is sweetened somehow ‘not only by thoughts of his aunt Felicia already in America but also by what is commonly known in English as “miracle fruit” (Synsepalum dulcificum Daniell)’.89 The scholar speculates on the narrative construction of GraceLand, each chapter concluding with a piece of what he calls ‘cultural exposition’,90 a page from Elvis’s mother’s diary including a recipe or a botanical annotation. The one preceding the book’s last chapter contains a description of an ‘oval, purplish fruit’ (GL, 298) that ‘has the lingering after-effect of making acid substances consumed within three hours of it taste sweet’ (GL, 298). In Slaughter’s words, ‘in this case, the “lingering after-effect” may help to render more palatable what is essentially an acrimonious exile from Nigeria’, resembling the one Abani himself has chosen for himself.91 It is ironic that one of the major neo-imperialist nations of our times, the United States, is apparently proposed as a place of ‘redemption’. However, even though he is partially identifying with an oppressive power, Elvis’s destination is useful to the development of his character: as readers, we close the book hoping he continues his daily struggles, now somewhere else after his father Sunday has died and Maroko has been destroyed by the city government. Whilst some critics such as Alexander Greer Hartwiger have interpreted Elvis’s departure from Lagos as ‘the failure of the nation-state to provide the opportunity and values that Elvis needs to have in order to join the national community on his own terms’, it feels safe to read GraceLand in line with Goyal: the book is, in this regard, less about Nigeria than about Elvis, who happens to be Nigerian.92 After all, as the epigraph by the South African author Bessie Head reads, ‘[i]t seemed almost incidental that he was African. So vast had his inner perceptions grown over the years’ (GL, 1). Putting the novel near Abani’s following narrative production, we see how GraceLand ends with a wink at global entwinings and settings that we find in Becoming Abigail, The Virgin of Flames, and The Secret History of Las Vegas as well. Whilst Becoming Abigail divides between Africa and Europe, The Virgin of Flames and The Secret History of Las Vegas are set in the USA, confirming that transnational perspective already present in

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Abani’s juvenile novel Masters of the Board. More cosmopolitan than diasporic, Elvis has forfeited his claims to a particular place.93

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Notes  1 GraceLand was also a Silver Medallist in Fiction in the California Book Award, a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, Africa Region, the LA Times Book Prize for fiction and a finalist for the IMPAC Dublin Prize 2006. On Abani’s controversial publishing record see Chapter 1 above.   2 On the use of names in GraceLand see J. Schwetman, ‘Leaving Lagos: diasporic and cosmopolitan migrations in Chris Abani’s GraceLand’, Pacific Coast Philology, 49:2 (2014), 184–202, and S.  Andrade, ‘Representing slums and home: Chris Abani’s GraceLand’, in D.  James (ed.), The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 225–42.   3 R. Nnodim, ‘City, identity and dystopia: writing Lagos in contemporary Nigerian novels’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 44:4 (2008), p. 32.   4 The use of the category of magical realism to address GraceLand is controversial. One episode in particular can be read as an example of African magical realism, in the line with Amos Tutuola’s famous The Palm-wine Drinkard (1952). This is the appearance of the leopard at the end of the novel, when the animal, together with Beatrice, appears to Sunday in the form of a spirit or ghost. The description of Sunday’s death suggests that the man has transformed into a leopard before being crushed by the advancing bulldozers (GL, 286–7). The episode of the King’s death can also be read in magical realist terms, as Andrade underlines (‘Representing slums and homes’, p. 241).   5 Y. Goyal, ‘We need new diasporas’, American Literary History, 29:4 (2017), p. 654.   6 On the topic see A. G. Hartwiger, ‘Strangers in/to the world: the unhomely in Chris Abani’s GraceLand’, Matatu, 45 (2014), p. 241; S.  Harrison, ‘Suspended city: personal, urban, and national development in Chris Abani’s Graceland’, Research in African Literatures, 43:2 (2012), p. 99; A. Aycock, ‘An interview with Chris Abani’, Safundi: The Journal of South Africa and American Studies, 10:1 (2009), 1–10; M. Feldner, Narrating the New African Diaspora: 21st Century Nigerian Literature in Context (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019,



Peripheral violence in GraceLand 69

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E-book); S. Andrade, ‘Representing slums and homes’; and S. Durrant, ‘Creaturely mimesis: life after necropolitics in Chris Abani’s Song for Night’, Research in African Literatures, 49:3 (2018), 178–206. How the Western Bildungsroman has been used in Africa is a complex issue I cannot explore here, but I find Ogaga Okuyade’s summary useful. As the critic writes in ‘Introduction: familiar realities, continuity, and shifts of trajectory in the new African novel’, Matatu, 45 (2014), p. xxi: the African variant of the coming-of-age narrative differs from the ­ traditional Western variants. Unlike the prototypical Western Bildungsroman, the African coming-of-age narrative does not emphasize self-realization and the harmonious reconciliation between the protagonist and his or her society. Instead, it expresses a variety of forces that inhabit or prevent the protagonist from achieving self-realization – exile or dislocation, problems of transcultural interaction, poverty, and the difficulties of preserving personal, familial, and cultural memories.

  7 See A. Dawson, ‘Surplus city: structural adjustment, self-fashioning, and urban insurrection in Chris Abani’s Graceland’, Interventions, 11:1 (2009), pp. 19–20; J. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.; and F. Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (New York: Verso, 2000).   8 Critics have intervened generously on this matter. See L. Mason, ‘Leaving Lagos: intertextuality and images in Chris Abani’s GraceLand’, Research in African Literatures, 45:3 (2014), 206–26; D. Phillips, ‘“What do I have to do with all this?” Eating, excreting, and belonging in Chris Abani’s GraceLand’, Postcolonial Studies, 15.1 (2012), 105–25; Feldner, Narrating the New African Diaspora; Durrant, ‘Creaturely mimesis’; Krishnan, Contemporary African Literature in English: Global Locations, Postcolonial Identifications (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); and Goyal, ‘We need new diasporas’.   9 S. Balkan, ‘Rogues in the postcolony: Chris Abani’s GraceLand and the petro-picaresque’, The Global South, 9:2 (2015), p. 21. Balkan matches her narrative investigation of GraceLand with the environmental lens that is typical of her approach to literature. The reference to ‘petro’ in her definition of Abani’s novel is an abbreviation for petrol, the kind of exploitative business that defines the economy of the Nigerian Delta region and, indirectly, of Elvis’s life. Andrade reads GraceLand as partly picaresque because of the novel’s thematic structure, which includes ‘[t]he search for home by a poor, orphaned young man’, ‘the endless episodes of travel and adventure of the trickster figure’, ‘its elaborate role-playing or masquerade, its exploration of the grotesque

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or horrible and, above all, its episodic structuring of events: life is a series of adventures with no strong narrative arc’ (‘Representing slums and home’, pp. 236–7). 10 Balkan, ‘Rogues in the postcolony’, p. 21. 11 Balkan, ‘Rogues in the postcolony’, p. 25. 12 G. Maiorino, At the Margins of the Renaissance: Lazarillo de Tormes and the Picaresque Art of Survival (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), p. 27. 13 Balkan, ‘Rogues in the postcolony’, p. 27. 14 M. Omelsky, ‘Chris Abani and the politics of ambivalence’, Research in African Literatures, 42:4 (2011), 84–96; Durrant, ‘Creaturely mimesis’, p. 189. 15 D. Crowley, Africa’s Narrative Geographies: Charting the Intersections of Geocriticism and Postcolonial Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 129. 16 G. Jones, American Hungers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 3. 17 Jones, American Hungers, p. 3. 18 A. Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 19 Dunton, ‘Entropy and energy: Lagos as city of words’, Research in African Literatures, 39:2 (2008), p. 68. 20 See H. Dannenberg, ‘Narrating the postcolonial metropolis in Anglophone African fiction: Chris Abani’s GraceLand and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 48:1 (2012), 39–50; Feldner, Narrating the New African Diaspora; and Nnodim, ‘City, identity and dystopia’. 21 Nnodim, ‘City, identity and dystopia’, p. 321. 22 Andrade, ‘Representing slums and home’, p. 230. 23 C. Abani, ‘Lagos: a pilgrimage in notations’, in Ntone Edjabe and Edgar Pietersepp (eds), African Cities Reader I: Pan-African Practices (Cape Town: African Centre for Cities & Chimurenga, 2010), p. 7. 24 Nnodim, ‘City, identity and dystopia’, p. 322. 25 A. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, trans. A. M. Berrett et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 26 Dawson, ‘Surplus city’, p. 17. 27 Nnodim, ‘City, identity and dystopia’, p. 323. 28 M. Davis, Planet of Slums (London and New York: Verso, 2006), p. 47. 29 Davis, Planet of Slums, p. 23.

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30 R. Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 2. 31 Nixon, Slow Violence, p. 13. In his analysis of this very same scene from GraceLand, Dawson reports that ‘[i]n Nigeria’s urban areas, those living in extreme poverty (defined by the World Bank as individuals surviving on $1.25 or less per day) have grown from 28 percent in 1980 to 66 percent in 1996, creating slums so destitute that outside observers don’t know how the poor survive’ (‘Surplus city’, p. 17). 32 Note the similarity of this passage to a previous one in which Elvis dreamt of a house infested by rats: ‘Elvis finally settled into an uneasy sleep, dreaming he was drowning in a rat-infested lake and every time he tried to swim to safety, the rats would drag him back under the waves. He struggled and spluttered but couldn’t get away from them’ (GL, 32). 33 E. Feshkens, ‘Elvis has left the country: marronage in Chris Abani’s GraceLand’, College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies, 42:1 (2015), p. 102. 34 Phillips, ‘What do I have to do with all this?’, p. 115. 35 Dawson, ‘Surplus city’, pp. 20–1. 36 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, p. 14. 37 Dawson, ‘Surplus city’, p. 19. 38 F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. R. Philcox (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1983 [1961]), p. 30. 39 Davis, Planet of Slums, pp. 130–1; Feldner, Narrating the New African Diaspora, p. 68. 40 Z. Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2004), p. 39. 41 Bauman, Wasted Lives, pp. 39, 40, 81. 42 Dannenberg, ‘Narrating the postcolonial metropolis’, p. 44. 43 Jones, American Hungers, p. 3. 44 A. Novak, ‘Who speaks? Who listens?: The problem of address in two Nigerian trauma novels’, Studies in the Novel, 40:1–2 (2008), p. 35. 45 Examples of sexual violence are recurrent in the novel. Efua, Elvis’s cousin and closest friend in Afikpo, is raped by her father, Uncle Joseph (GL, 64; 144), who rapes Elvis too (GL, 188). 46 Afikpo is a site of womanhood in Elvis’s life, thanks to the presence of his mother, his aunt, and his grandmother, but also a place of estranging notions of manhood, as exemplified by the ritual of killing an animal to mark the passage from childhood to manhood, or the idea of honour in one’s family’s name endorsed by Sunday. See Schwetman, ‘Leaving Lagos’, p. 195; and Feldner, Narrating the New African Diaspora, p. 77.

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47 Crowley, Africa’s Narrative Geographies, p. 138. 48 Feldner, Narrating the New African Diaspora, p. 61. 49 For a deeper investigation of images of fire in Abani’s works, see Chapter 5 below on The Virgin of Flames. 50 C. Abani, ‘Painting a body of loss and love in the proximity of an aesthetic’, The Millions (25 November 2013). https://themillions. com/2013/11/painting-a-body-of-loss-and-love-in-the-proximity-ofan-aesthetic.html. Accessed 13 May 2019. 51 Goyal, ‘We need new diasporas’, p. 654; see also C. Eze, ‘Cosmopolitan solidarity: negotiating transculturality in contemporary Nigerian Novels’, English in Africa, 32:1 (2005), p. 106; Mason, ‘Leaving Lagos’, p. 217; Feldner, Narrating the New African Diaspora, p. 73. 52 See Harrison, ‘Suspended city’; Durrant, ‘Creaturely mimesis’; D. Thomas, ‘New voices, emerging themes’; Goyal, ‘We need new diasporas’; Balkan, ‘Rogues in the postcolony’; Omelsky, ‘Chris Abani and the politics of ambivalence’; and Feldner, Narrating the New African Diaspora. 53 Abani’s book’s title differs from Elvis’s mansion’s name because of a capital L in the middle of the word Graceland. According to J.  Slaughter, Abani may have made use of this little difference in order to escape the regulations of the Elvis Presley Enterprise, Inc., the company administering the intellectual property of ‘Elvis’ (‘World Literature as Property’, Alif, 34 [2014], 1–35); alternatively, the capital L may be read as a way to emphasise the dichotomy of Nigeria as a place of violence and a ‘land of grace’. 54 Appadurai, Modernity at Large. 55 E. Lott, ‘All the king’s men: Elvis impersonators and white working-­ class masculinity’, in H. Stecopoulos and M. Uebel (eds), Race and the Subject of Masculinities (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 198. In this reading, Elvis is the ‘mimic man’ of H. Bhabha, ‘Of mimicry and man’, October, 28 (1984), 125–33. 56 Lott, ‘All the king’s men’, p. 201. 57 Garver in Lott, ‘All the king’s men’, p. 193. 58 Appadurai, Modernity at Large, p. 4. 59 J. Slaughter, ‘Form and informality: an unliterary look at world literature’, in R. Warhol (ed.), The Work of Genre: Selected Essays from the English Institute (Cambridge: English Institute, 2011), p. 185. 60 Slaughter, ‘World literature as property’. 61 On the idea of Elvis’s performance as an act of border crossing, see Harrison, ‘Suspended city’, p. 106. 62 H. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (Oxford: Routledge, 1994).

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63 Fehskens goes even further in this reading, asserting that Elvis’s love for Presley may be due to ‘his abiding love for his lost mother rather than with a fascination of American pop music’ (‘Elvis has left the country’, p. 108). 64 Lott, ‘All the king’s men’, p. 209. 65 Lott, ‘All the king’s men’, pp. 207, 210. 66 The only dissentient reading of Elvis’s attempted performances is the one by G. Etter-Lewis, who, in a completely Africanist perspective, reads Elvis’s made-up face as a mmuo, an iconic Igbo mask. See her ‘Dark bodies/white masks: African masculinities and visual culture in GraceLand, The Joys of Motherhood and Things Fall Apart’, in H. N. Mugambi and T. J. Allan (eds), Masculinities in African Literary and Cultural Texts (Banbury: Ayebia, 2010), p. 176. 67 V. Hendrick, ‘Negotiating Nigeria: connecting Chris Abani’s GraceLand to Africa’s past’, in W. P. Collins, III (ed.), Emerging African Voices: A Study of Contemporary African Literature (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2010), p. 86. 68 C. Abani, ‘An interview with Chris Abani’ The Believer (1 April 2004). https://believermag.com/an-interview-with-chris-abani/. Accessed 13 May 2019; and ‘At the confluences’, Sentinel Poetry: The International Journal of Poetry and Graphics (November 2007). www.sentinelpo etry.org.uk/1107/interview.htm. Accessed 13 May 2019. 69 Lott, ‘All the king’s men’, p. 211. 70 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, p. 105. 71 J. Matlon, ‘This is how we roll: the status economy of bus portraiture in the black urban periphery’, Laboratorium, 7:2 (2015), 62–82. 72 Matlon, ‘This is how we roll’, p. 62. 73 Matlon, ‘This is how we roll’, p. 67. 74 Eze, ‘Cosmopolitan solidarity’, p. 101. 75 Matlon, ‘This is how we roll’, p. 67. 76 Simone in Matlon, ‘This is how we roll’, p. 68. 77 Matlon, ‘This is how we roll’, p. 69. 78 Appadurai, Modernity at Large, p. 7. 79 E. Bloch, ‘Introduction’ to The Principle of Hope (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995 [1954]). www.marxists.org/archive/bloch/hope/intro duction.htm. Accessed 18 April 2021. 80 Appadurai, Modernity at Large, pp. 7 and 31. 81 Goyal, ‘We need new diasporas’, p. 655. This is visible in Elvis’s impersonation of Presley, but also in the elaboration on and re-interpretation of Hollywood westerns, for instance. 82 Fehskens, ‘Elvis has left the country’, p. 108.

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83 Feshkens, ‘Elvis has left the country’, p. 103. 84 Feshkens, ‘Elvis has left the country’, p. 103. 85 This ambivalence towards gender conformity and the rejection of compulsory definitions of masculinity is a theme of GraceLand, to be found also in other narrative and poetic works by Abani. Think, for example, of The Virgin of Flames or Sanctificum, in which Abani returns to the ritual of killing an animal to mark the passage from childhood to manhood, also described at the very beginning of GraceLand and a central topic in his TED Talk. In poem 1, section ‘Histories’ of the collection, the narrating voice states:



Boys are taught to kill early. Five When I shot a chick in my first ritual. Eight When chickens became easy. Ten When I killed a goat. I was made to stare Into that goat’s eyes before pulling My knife across its throat. Amen. I thought it was to teach me the agony Of the kill. Perhaps it was To inure me to blood. To think nothing of the jagged resistance of flesh, To make the smell of rust and metal and shit familiar. (S, 77)

Yet, as comes to the forefront in the above quoted passage about Elvis’s fascination with Aunt Felicia’s make-up, the narrative voice of the poems in Sanctificum tells he also ‘liked dolls and tea and playing with my sister’ (S, 81), thus expanding definitions of traditional Nigerian masculinity. 86 Omelsky, ‘Chris Abani and the politics of ambivalence’, p. 90. 87 Omelsky, ‘Chris Abani and the politics of ambivalence’, p. 92. 88 Krishnan explains that ‘Igbo mythology mandates a social view of the world where individuals exist not in a vacuum but through their society and as part of a social whole. As part of a social fabric, the individual exists beyond his or her own skin through the existence and perpetuation of the family clan, emphasized through the belief in reincarnation within a family line’ (Contemporary African Literature in English, p.  101). Because of this reading, Krishnan interprets Elvis’s travel to the USA as ‘breaking this communal pact. He is aware that, by leaving Lagos, he will cut himself out of the traditional tapestry-like existence of the community, effectively enacting his own death therein’. Krishnan

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therefore reads the USA as a character of sorts, a ‘place which is taking his loved ones from him (GL, 165–8), reducing his already fractured family unit to none’ (Krishnan, Contemporary African Literature in English, p. 107), and not as a source of life, given that Aunt Felicia continues her life there and Elvis, too, would have probably died if he had continued his life in Lagos. 89 Slaughter, ‘Form and informality’, p. 222. 90 Slaughter, ‘Form and informality’, p. 222. 91 Slaughter, ‘Form and informality’, p. 222. 92 Hartwiger, ‘Strangers in/to the world’, p. 242. 93 Schwetman, ‘Leaving Lagos’, p. 194; Eze, ‘Cosmopolitan solidarity’.

References Abani, Chris. ‘An interview with Chris Abani’, The Believer (1 April 2004). https://believermag.com/an-interview-with-chris-abani/. Accessed 13 May 2019. ———. ‘At the confluences’, Sentinel Poetry: The International Journal of Poetry and Graphics (November 2007). www.sentinelpoetry.org. uk/1107/interview.htm. Accessed 13 May 2019. ———. Becoming Abigail (New York: Akashic Books, 2006). ———. GraceLand (New York: Picador, 2004). ———. ‘Lagos: a pilgrimage in notations’, in Ntone Edjabe and Edgar Pietersepp (eds), African Cities Reader I: Pan-African Practices (Cape Town: African Centre for Cities & Chimurenga, 2010), pp. 7–11. ———. Masters of the Board (Lagos: Delta, 1985). ———. ‘Painting a body of loss and love in the proximity of an aesthetic’, The Millions (25 November 2013). https://themillions.com/2013/11/ painting-a-body-of-loss-and-love-in-the-proximity-of-an-aesthetic.html. Accessed 13 May 2019. ———. Sanctificum (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2010). ———. The Secret History of Las Vegas (New York: Penguin, 2014). ———. The Virgin of Flames (New York: Penguin, 2007). Andrade, Susan. ‘Representing slums and home: Chris Abani’s GraceLand’, in David James (ed.), The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 225–42. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

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Aycock, Amanda. ‘An interview with Chris Abani’, Safundi: The Journal of South Africa and American Studies, 10:1 (2009), 1–10. Balkan, Stacey. ‘Rogues in the postcolony: Chris Abani’s GraceLand and the petro-picaresque’, The Global South, 9:2 (2015), 18–37. Bauman, Zygmunt. Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2004). Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture (Oxford: Routledge, 1994). ———. ‘Of mimicry and man: the ambivalence of colonial discourse’, October, 28 (1984), 125–33. Bloch, Ernst. ‘Introduction’ to The Principle of Hope (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995 [1954]). www.marxists.org/archive/bloch/hope/intro duction.htm. Accessed 18 April 2021. Crowley, Dustin. Africa’s Narrative Geographies: Charting the Intersections of Geocriticism and Postcolonial Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums (London and New York: Verso, 2006). Dannenberg, Hilary. ‘Narrating the postcolonial metropolis in Anglophone African fiction: Chris Abani’s GraceLand and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 48:1 (2012), 39–50. Dawson, Ashley. ‘Surplus city: structural adjustment, self-fashioning, and urban insurrection in Chris Abani’s Graceland’, Interventions, 11:1 (2009), 16–34. Dunton, Chris. ‘Entropy and energy: Lagos as city of words’, Research in African Literatures, 39:2 (2008), 68–78. Durrant, Sam. ‘Creaturely mimesis: life after necropolitics in Chris Abani’s Song for Night’, Research in African Literatures, 49:3 (2018), 178–206. Etter-Lewis, Gwendolyn. ‘Dark bodies/white masks: African masculinities and visual culture in Graceland, The Joys of Motherhood and Things Fall Apart’, in Helen Nabasuta Mugambi and Tuzyline Jita Allan (eds), Masculinities in African Literary and Cultural Texts (Banbury: Ayebia, 2010), pp. 160–77. Eze, Chielozona. ‘Cosmopolitan solidarity: negotiating transculturality in contemporary Nigerian novels’, English in Africa, 32:1 (2005), 99–112. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks, trans. C. Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967 [1952]). ———. The Wretched of the Earth, trans. R. Philcox (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1983 [1961]). Fehskens, Erin M. ‘Elvis has left the country: marronage in Chris Abani’s GraceLand’, College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies, 42:1 (2015), 90–111. Feldner, Maximilian. Narrating the New African Diaspora: 21st Century Nigerian Literature in Context (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). E-book.

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Goyal, Yogita. ‘We need new diasporas’, American Literary History, 29:4 (2017), 640–63. Harrison, Sarah K. ‘Suspended city: personal, urban, and national development in Chris Abani’s GraceLand’, Research in African Literatures, 43:2 (2012), 95–114. Hartwiger, Alexander Greer. ‘Strangers in/to the world: the unhomely in Chris Abani’s GraceLand’, Matatu, 45 (2014), 233–50. Hendrick, Veronica C. ‘Negotiating Nigeria: connecting Chris Abani’s GraceLand to Africa’s past’, in Walter P. Collins, III (ed.), Emerging African Voices: A Study of Contemporary African Literature (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2010), pp. 75–99. Jones, Gavin. American Hungers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). Krishnan, Madhu. Contemporary African Literature in English: Global Locations, Postcolonial Identifications (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Lee, Christopher J. ‘Review of GraceLand’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 37:3 (2004), 568–70. Lott, Eric. ‘All the king’s men: Elvis impersonators and white working-class masculinity’, in Harry Stecopoulos and Michael Uebel (eds), Race and the Subject of Masculinities (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 192–228. Maiorino, Giancarlo. At the Margins of the Renaissance: Lazarillo de Tormes and the Picaresque Art of Survival (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003). Mason, Lauren. ‘Leaving Lagos: intertextuality and images in Chris Abani’s GraceLand’, Research in African Literatures, 45:3 (2014), 206–26. Matlon, Jordanna. ‘This is how we roll: the status economy of bus portraiture in the black urban periphery’, Laboratorium, 7:2 (2015), 62–82. Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony, trans. A. M. Berrett et al, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (New York: Verso, 2000). Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2011). Nnodim, Rita. ‘City, identity and dystopia: writing Lagos in contemporary Nigerian novels”, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 44:4 (2008), 321–32. Novak, Amy. ‘Who speaks? Who listens?: the problem of address in two Nigerian trauma novels’, Studies in the Novel, 40:1–2 (2008), 31–51. Okuyade, Ogaga. ‘Introduction: familiar realities, continuity, and shifts of trajectory in the new African novel’, Matatu, 45 (2014), ix–xxxii. Omelsky, Matthew. ‘Chris Abani and the politics of ambivalence’, Research in African Literatures, 42:4 (2011), 84–96.

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Patterson-Stein, Jacob. ‘De-nationalizing American music in the “third space” of GraceLand’, eSharp 13 (2009), 48–68. Phillips, Dolores. ‘“What do I have to do with all this?” Eating, excreting, and belonging in Chris Abani’s GraceLand’, Postcolonial Studies, 15:1 (2012), 105–25. Schwetman, John D. ‘Leaving Lagos: diasporic and cosmopolitan migrations in Chris Abani’s GraceLand’, Pacific Coast Philology, 49:2 (2014), 184–202. Slaughter, Joseph R. ‘Form and informality: an unliterary look at world literature’, in  Robyn Warhol (ed.), The Work of Genre: Selected Essays from the English Institute (Cambridge: English Institute, 2011), pp. 182–226. ———. Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007). ———. ‘World literature as property’, Alif, 34 (2014), 1–35. Thomas, Dominic. ‘New voices, emerging themes’, in Abiola Irele (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 227–42.

3

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Trafficking love, Becoming Abigail

A cubist way to see the world. Fractured histories, At once present and absent. Abani, ‘Benediction 2’ But life is this and it will not Be contained. The Igbo say: No one can outrun their shadow. And this is good. This is hope, Because, or maybe, we cannot outrun love. Abani, ‘Dog woman’

Abigail’s life begins when her mother’s life ends. Like other characters in Abani’s oeuvre,1 she is a motherless child, whose existence is burdened from the very beginning with the weight of loss, accompanied by the paradoxical sense of missing someone she has never known and will never be able to know, since the mother died while giving birth to her daughter. Becoming Abigail (2006) is rooted in a knot of ‘ghostly’ family relationships that, far from being supportive of one’s own sense of self, are predicated around absence, violence, pain, and troubling memories. Emotional and psychological trauma in Abigail’s early life in time expands like echoing waves to flood her whole existence in a dysfunctional world. What is at stake, for the young Nigerian girl, is her subjectivity, her feelings, her place and role in the world, and the possibility of making free choices in the context of a local and global patriarchal system that ‘consumes’ her body and voice. The ‘becoming’ of this motherless child is literally haunted by the

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ectoplasmic residue of the dead – not just of her mother but also her father, family, and a male-oriented cultural tradition. As the author stresses, ‘so much of the ectoplasm of these ghosts is patriarchy and masculinity’.2 The story of this Igbo girl, who is allowed no control over her life or body, is the only work in Abani’s literary production with a UK setting, and has a footing in unsettling news from ‘real’ life. Two separate news items seem to be responsible for the genesis of the book. While living in Britain in the 1990s Abani read a newspaper article about a Nigerian couple who had taken to London some distant relative, ostensibly to help as a nanny, and then tried to subject her to servitude (it is not clear whether domestic labour or sex work).3 As the writer tells, ‘And when this young girl had refused, they chained her in the back garden in winter, and the neighbours found out and called the police’.4 This isolated incident stayed in the back of his mind, and then combined with his reading about a judge in France, who had presided over an immigration case that involved a fifteen-year-old Moroccan girl, had fallen in love with her, and they had an illicit affair with consequences to both.5 The ‘ghosts’ of these two young women from Africa, Abani explains, started to ‘haunt’ him. They came together first in two short stories, ‘Jazz petals’ (1996), and a two-thousand-word text with the same title as the later novella (2000).6 Becoming Abigail was published after extensive research on the issue of sex trafficking. Abani was then ready to respond to the trafficked young women by writing a book with a single human being at its core, combining a deeply personal lyrical narrative, a critique of gender discrimination, a condemnation of sex trafficking, and a denunciation of the failings of human rights policies. The declared intention of the novella, however, is to try to remove any sentimentality and polemic and to stay away from numbers and statistics, because, as the author states, ‘in the end it doesn’t matter how many young women are victims of this trade. One is already one too many.’7 Abani always pays attention to the social contexts in which the becoming of his characters takes place, because humans in extreme situations, or far outside of what we would think of as ‘normal’, offer the possibility of finding out the ways that we become who we are. ‘And that really is becoming. That’s really why I wrote

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Becoming Abigail’, which focuses on a girl who has so much taken away from her and yet continues to be human.8 Written after GraceLand, the novella was well received by reviewers and readers,9 and perceived as both a natural development and a radical departure from the earlier novel. The two books share some character figures and traits, such as the spectral presence of a dead mother and a father who drowns the pain of having lost a much-loved wife in alcohol and jazz. Both protagonists, Elvis and Abigail, experience ‘trafficking’, albeit with different degrees of agency and accountability: young Elvis unwittingly becomes involved in a business that ships young Nigerian children, as well as human organs, to America and the Middle East, whilst fourteenyear-old Abigail becomes a victim of the global sex trade. In both narratives, a character leaves Nigeria on a fake passport, feeling on the brink of a new phase of becoming, in a different place away from their country of birth. But Becoming Abigail is a more compressed and stark text, a poetic rendering of a girl’s growing up lonely in an uncaring home, and an excruciating rendition of the brutality and inhumaneness of human trafficking. By choosing a female character, moreover, Abani turns his attention to gender discrimination and to women’s sexuality, which leads to a completely new approach to representations of the sex trade in fiction. Finally, the parallel question of what goes on inside the family and what happens in the interstices of the neoliberal globalised world works just as powerfully here as in GraceLand but, far from the large canvas of the earlier novel, this short lyrical narrative thrives on its sharp focus and a gendered perspective that produces a lasting ethical resonance. The book cover explicitly states that Becoming Abigail is ‘A Novella’, a rarely practised genre that in recent times has received ambivalent criticism for its being less complex and sophisticated than a full novel and less condensed and tightly written than a short story. Critics have suggested that the story of Abigail, as well as Abani’s second novella Song for Night (2007), may be considered  as ‘an incomplete Bildungsroman, a novel as violently truncated as the life of its protagonist’,10 or ‘a radical reworking of the coming-of-age novel’.11 These are interesting suggestions as regards Becoming Abigail, in which ‘becoming’ is a central, m ­ ultifaceted

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and ambiguous concept, and not only because it describes the process of Abigail’s troubled growing into a young woman. It also draws specific attention to things in flux, transformation, and the liminal state between life and death, presence and absence, girl and woman, male and female, past and present, Nigeria and England, human and animal, the real and the ghostly. It should also be noted that literary genre does not fully describe the unique nature of Abani’s relatively short prose work. The text gains an extraordinary complexity by its deployment of an interior lyrical consciousness – reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s and Marguerite Duras’s stylistic experimentations, as well as of Toni Morrison’s Beloved – by its mixing of poetic and narrative strategies, and the use of entangled different temporalities, which keep the readers’ minds busy and their hearts beating.

Lyrical fragments from Now and Then The fourteen-year-old girl’s life is marred by bereavement and a sense of guilt caused by her father’s implicit accusation of her being responsible for her mother’s death: ‘The shadows under the smiling eyes that said over and over – you killed her. You. Why her? I loved her’ (BA, 46). Much of her childhood is an effort to claim her mother out of spectrality, first to ‘become’ like her in response to her father’s desire – ‘The shape of that Abigail was so clearly marked, the limits traced out in the stories that filled the world around this Abigail, that it was hard to do anything but try to fill the hollowed-out shape’ (BA, 46–7) – and then to distinguish herself from the woman whose name she carries, in order to be ‘Abigail, this Abigail, the daughter not the dead one, the mother’ (BA, 20). As the girl grows up, she realises that her unusual resemblance to her mother elicits incestuous yearnings in her father. She already knew he wanted her to be Abigail, but now ‘she realized that there was also something else: a patience, a longing. The way she imagined a devoted bonsai grower stood over a tree’ (BA, 22). When she is on the verge of becoming a woman, Peter, a relative who has often taken children from the village to England, volunteers to escort her to London so that ‘she can finish school there’ (BA, 68).

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Her father decides to let her go in spite of misgivings concerning the fate of his daughter, and hangs himself shortly before she is to leave. Peter, the husband of Abigail’s cousin Mary, turns out to be a trafficker and ruthless guardian of his young charge; he subjects her to both physical and psychological abuse, and makes her live the life of a dog when she refuses to become a sex worker. Abigail eventually escapes from Peter’s nightmarish prison, glimpses hope and possibility in an affair with Derek, the white social worker assigned to her by the British protection protocol, but in the end she realises she will never succeed in moving out of her invisibility, into light and love. The book opens with a section enigmatically entitled ‘Lay it as it plays’,12 which works as a kind of prelude to the ‘Now’ and ‘Then’ alternating strands of the rest of the narrative. The first four pages familiarise the reader with the relevant facts in Abigail’s life preceding the caesura brought about by her father’s suicide and her leaving for London with Peter. Here we get to know about her birth and troubled childhood marked by her mother’s absence; of her depressed widowed father who for a long time does not even see her; of the growth of his sexual interest in his daughter and his decision to send her away. The rest of the narrative proceeds in thirty-four fragments, or what Weaver calls ‘short cantos’.13 The ‘Now’ sections feature Abigail as she spends her last hours sitting on a London monument, thinking and remembering; the ‘Then’ sections contain Abigail’s recollections of her earlier life in Nigeria and in London. The thread connecting this fragmentary structure is Abigail’s consciousness, her words and her memories that keep resurfacing, and although the third-person narrative presupposes a narrator (here largely unobtrusive), the reader is led in and out of the present moment, in and out of the London location, by the continuity of her voice and standpoint, interrupted only by intervening silences that we are invited to hear. The overall result is a dramatic narrative that is almost ‘classical’ in its condensation to a few hours, before darkness descends over London, over the Thames waters, and her tragic life. The form Abani devises for Abigail’s story is indeed the one key factor of the text, as the literary critic Daria Tunca convincingly argues in her Stylistic Approaches to Nigerian Fiction  (2014). In

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a chapter devoted to Abani’s bi-textual poetics (where bi-textual refers to the author’s free juggling of poetry and prose in his works), Tunca explores why the novella is widely considered poetic or lyrical, beyond easily noticeable features such as its fragmented syntax, abundant imagery, emotional passages, and musicality. Her in-depth stylistic analysis proves that the form of the text ‘literally enacts its content’, showing how its formal features are ‘part and parcel of what constitutes the character of Abigail’.14 Tunca mentions such devices as ‘linguistic deviations used to convey the full horror of sexual violence; minor sentences and oppositional constructions designed to reveal the restorative force of bodily rituals; deviant similes employed to suggest the unreality of the imagined memories that shape our existence; rhythmic patterns expressive of a paradoxical desire to be yet not to be; or repetitions aimed at conjuring the heroine into being’.15 It is because of these stylistic traits, registering the deviation of poetry from the language of prose, that Abigail exists in our imagination in the many different ways that she does, and the book takes on an almost incantatory function, ‘as though it were itself a ritualistic chant willing its ghostly protagonist into being’.16

Cartographies of the invisible The desire to signify, to make sense of herself in relation to her dead mother, to not be a ghost that nobody really sees, is conveyed through Abigail’s repeated and varied efforts to become visible, to gain presence and voice. ‘Being seen’, she reflects, is ‘the deeper joy’ (BA, 56) she could experience only when feeling Derek’s eyes on her, indicating how much the other’s gaze (in a deeply Lacanian sense) is essential to one’s becoming a subject. As a child Abigail is intent on conjuring up the image of the dead mother by staging extravagant mourning rituals and collecting memories. She hungers for anecdotes about the first Abigail and writes them down ‘in red ink on bits of paper which she stuck under her skin, wearing them under her clothes, all day […] until she became her mother and her mother her’ (BA, 36). ‘Becoming’ here implies identification with an unknown woman with whom

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she shares a name, under the pressure of her father’s pain and her own sense of guilt, but also the absence of a guide during the challenging time of becoming a woman. As she grows she becomes aware of the imaginative work in the representations she has produced for herself. In the first ‘Now’ section at the beginning of the novella, which introduces Abigail sitting by the Thames in London, we see her trying to summon memories of her mother’s death and burial, remembrances that she knows are fabricated by her imagination and by her childish attempts to grasp and understand her flawed origin. ‘This memory, like all the others, was a lie’ (BA, 19), she reflects. Feeling unsure about Peter’s reasons for taking her to London, she seeks her mother’s advice – ‘What was it Abigail used to tell her?’ – only to check the free play of her fervid imagination: ‘Abigail couldn’t have told her anything’ (BA, 79). Yet the imagined dialogue with her mother continues through the years, enacting the trauma of birth and death through compulsive repetition, and stays a source of reference for the girl, who in time faces treachery and extreme violence. Abigail’s mother, at least in the daughter’s memories, was a powerful and respected woman, ‘feared by most men for her independent spirit; who at thirty-five became a judge, and set up the first free women’s advocacy group’, and ‘was known to confront wife beaters and explain to them, quietly and politely, that if they didn’t change she would cut off their penises’ (BA, 46). The desire to become like this mother, a role model that speaks of the possibility of empowerment, independence, and freedom for women, works as a safety anchor for the daughter, until all she clings to collapses. The proleptical reference to ‘cutting off penises’ as a punishment for domestic violence, however, not only indicates the daughter’s desire to identify with her feminist mother, but anticipates the terrible and ironic twist in her process of becoming, which leads her, as an abused girl forced to become a dog, to put into practice what her mother as an authoritative judge only threatened to perform: Then XXIV Fifteen days, passing in the silence of snow. And she no longer fought when Peter mounted her.

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Wrote his shame and anger in her. Until. The slime of it threatened to obliterate the tattoos that made her. Abigail. (BA, 97)

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Then XXV One night. Unable to stand it anymore, she screamed. Invoking the spirit of Abigail. And with her teeth tore off Peter’s penis. (BA, 99)

This act of rebellious vengeance against Peter, whose violence threatens to erase the inscriptions on her skin – ‘the tattoos that made her’ (BA, 97) – turns abject Abigail into a figure of the castrating woman, a ‘gorgon with bloody mouth and hands’, who runs through the streets of London with the end of her torturer’s penis ‘held up like a torch’ (BA, 101). Early in her adolescent years Abigail had realised the ephemerality of memories and discovered ‘the permanence of fire’ (BA, 36): through ‘burning’ she turns her own skin into an archive of tales and desires. Her body markings are an act of claiming herself out of ghostliness. Scarring, tattooing, burning – practices often associated with the secret language of oppressed subcultures – ­strategically produce her own bodily discourse, the story of Abigail, which someone else might get to know if they cared to crack the code. The girl begins to reappropriate her own body by conceiving it as a geographical territory. She gets hold of her bodily space by ‘textualising’ it. Abigail purposefully turns herself into a living map, in order to own her story through her own personal encryption: ‘Not Abigail. My Abigail. Her Abigail? Ghosts. Death. Me. Me. Me’ (BA, 36). The ‘burning’ need to escape the ghostly life of the dead and become visible uncannily recalls the rituals practised by Abani’s fellow ­prisoners in the death rows of Nigerian jails in the late 1980s: Invisibility stalks our every step. Some men brand, with cashew sap, their names on buttocks, stomachs,

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Hidden

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from view. A welt to remind them of who they really are, their past, their only hope. (KR, 49)

Abigail too practises burning to stave off spectrality. Once in London, after her love-making with Derek, she burns herself again with a needle and writes on her skin in ‘bubbles of Braille’ (BA, 55) – significantly a language for blind people, for those who cannot see – which her lover fingers and connects, drawing ‘the map of her’ (BA, 55). The resulting design allows him to see Abigail as ‘she emerged in pointillism’, while the fourteen-year-old girl moves out of the shadow for the first time in her life. The link between the body, language, visualisation, and psychophysical existence could not be clearer. Derek sees Abigail, and in this seeing she gains an acceptance that she cherishes and labels as love. In Precarious Life (2004) Judith Butler points out that the request for recognition is part of an ongoing process of fashioning the self: When we recognize another, or when we ask for recognition for ourselves, we are not asking for an Other to see us as we are, as we already are, as we have always been, as we were constituted prior to the encounter itself. Instead, in the asking, in the petition, we have already become something new, since we are constituted by virtue of the address, a need and desire for the Other that takes place in language in the broadest sense, one without which we could not be. To ask for recognition, or to offer it, is precisely not to ask for recognition for what one already is. It is to solicit a becoming, to instigate a transformation, to petition the future always in relation to the Other.17

Readers of Becoming Abigail are challenged to practise the reciprocity of the gaze and recognise the interconnections they share with Abani’s character and those who inhabit the invisibility of the spectral, illegal world of human trafficking. By making that connection, ‘they acknowledge an ethics of vulnerability’ through the intervention of the literary text.18 Mapping is one of the most captivating motifs in Becoming Abigail. Abani handles maps subtly and imaginatively, showing he is aware that, as depictions of the world, they have been a crucial

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target of deconstructionist analysis: the assumption being that, in modern times and for strategic purposes, cartography has long been associated with colonialism and imperialism and has produced instruments and representations of power, as happened during the scramble for Africa, after the Berlin Conference  of 1884–85. In the novella we see Abigail engaging with maps as cultural texts, feeling attracted to the textual agency that they appear to force on to a landscape – a mechanism that resembles what she herself experiences while growing up in a male-dominated context that imposes itself violently on her own existence as a girl child: ‘She was a foreign country’ (BA, 29) to all the men in her life, who took from her and gave nothing back. The colonial metaphor, associating woman–land–Africa, hints at the rape culture, pillage, and theft of colonialism, but also points to the continuing existence of two power systems – patriarchy and neoliberal globalisation as a contemporary form of colonial imperialism – at work in the life of Abigail. Men in Abigail’s life do not see her, and behave with her as the imperial powers in the colonies: a foreign land to be appropriated and exploited, to be subjugated and sold for profit. Abigail peers over old world maps for long hours, till her imagination transmuted the parchment into her mother’s skin. The landmarks taking on deeper significance. The Himalayas marking the slope of Abigail’s forehead, spreading into the Gobi desert. The hook of Africa became her nose. Australia her bottom lip. And the islands between India and Tasmania became the fragments of teeth bared in a smile. In true cubist form, the Americas were her eyes. Everything else became the imagined contours of her inner life. (BA, 73–4)

Through her own creativity Abigail morphs into a ‘cartographer of dreams’, as well as ‘of ghosts’ (BA, 74),19 blending the living and the dead, the scientific and the artistic gaze, through a free imaginative intervention that reviews the work of modern cartographers. By this act the mother comes to exceed the boundaries of Africa and the daughter, as her double, takes the world as her province. We should pay attention to the ways in which the girl’s perception pushes the limits of visual representation and everything else becomes ‘the imagined contours of her inner life’ (BA, 73–4). I would argue that

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the writer empowers his character with an ability to establish a synesthetic continuity between seeing and t­ouching, thinking and feeling, language and corporeal expressiveness, as well as between modes of existence that are neither separate nor alternative but coterminous and entangled. This is Abigail’s own area of textual agency, where she exercises her capacities, her thoughts, her feelings, her imagination, and her humanity. As readers we should concentrate on the power of the creative act to ‘rescue’ her otherwise than literally, to project a visionary ethical horizon for character and reader, in which the limits of ‘real’ life are exploded. Authoritative critical interventions on the novella have debated the question of whether Abigail can indeed exert agency from her position as an enslaved, trafficked girl. I believe we should reflect, as Pietro Deandrea also suggests, on the cultural and, in my view, radical potential of narratives to provide nuanced representations of trafficked people, on the capacities of literary texts to convey what is often unnarratable, to ‘mediate’ problematic situations through the power of the imagination. In his reading of Abani’s novella Deandrea identifies some of the limitations of mainstream trafficking discourse (which are debated in the last section of this chapter), and highlights how British legislation and institutions are seldom prepared ‘to offer real help for the recovery of self-dignity’ to the victims of contemporary ‘new slaveries’.20 For him Abani’s book develops a valuable cultural perspective which runs against ‘the institutional denial of agency and full personhood’ to the victims of trafficking.21 Similarly, but with a welcome accent on gender difference, Ashley Dawson says that mainstream trafficking representations ‘tend to perpetuate stereotypes of gendered helplessness’, and that ‘[n]ot only do such wellmeaning representations rob women of their agency; they also set up an invidious standard of innocence to which few trafficked people can lay claim’.22 By playing out the complexities of agency and its destruction within the shadow economy, Dawson argues, Abani’s novel ‘offers important lessons about how we may avoid diminishing displaced people’s security by reinscribing gender hierarchies’.23 In addition, by tracing its protagonist’s resistance to the forms of gendered subordination inherent in the family and in current frameworks of legal citizenship, ‘Becoming Abigail represents the struggle for agency of those who are rendered human cargo’.24

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In Susan Hall’s view Abani’s representation of the sex trade aligns with human rights or sex work or liberal feminist positions associated with policy debates on trafficking. However, she thinks it necessary to expand the parameters of the discussion of Abigail’s agency by taking into account not only the material and sociopolitical factors that impinge on her ability to act and to make choices but also ‘her unconscious desire that governs her conscious life’.25 Her analysis of the psychoanalytical references in Abani’s work confirms that Abigail’s range of action is quite limited: the repetition of the traumatic cycle, or ‘the prevalence of ritual’ as Abani puts it (BA, 61), ‘suggests that her agency remains governed by the psychic fantasy in which she is positioned as the object of her father’s desire’.26 Nevertheless, for Hall, Abani’s revision of the typical trafficking representation is interesting because it claims that ‘it is not Abigail who is in need of rescuing but that the familial and social spheres are in need of radical reformation’, and his treatment of Abigail’s condition as a ‘ghost’ in London is a ‘much needed neocolonial critique of structural problems that create conditions that oppress and exploit people in situations like that of his protagonist’.27 Similarly, and partly following Deandrea’s and Dawson’s lines of argument, Pamela McCallum writes that Becoming Abigail has the merit of constructing and representing for the reader ‘the shadowy spaces of human trafficking’, and of giving figuration to a ‘spectral world’ that otherwise we would not ‘see’, by means of the embodied words of a fully human character. As we witness Abigail’s becoming, the text stresses ‘the marking of spaces by histories and memories, the lives and deaths of the past persisting within the present, and the interconnections left by colonialism, imperialism, and global capitalism’.28

The ghostly Abani’s cartographies of the invisible show the ‘spectral’ self of Abigail in its contiguity with the challenging reality around her. In so doing they not only redefine the reach of Abigail’s possible agency but sidestep theoretical positions that rely on a separation between the real seen as orderly, rational, and devoid of wonder, and a ghostly (supposedly invisible) interruption. The sense of

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haunting that emerges in the novella out of the crossings of contiguous but separate spheres, where invisibility and ghostliness are a real danger for ‘marginal’ people, loosely recalls the postcolonial gothic mode developed by other contemporary Nigerian or Black British writers, such as Helen Oyeyemi for example. The Icarus Girl (2005), her remarkable debut novel, filters the central motif of the double (Doppelgänger) through Yoruba mythology and produces a memorable depiction of cultural displacement, alienation, and confusion. A cultural African matrix is operative in Oyeyemi’s book, which may be traced back to the work of different generations of writers and thinkers who show the consequences of a drastic unmooring of the lines separating different realms. The Nigerian authors Amos Tutuola and Ben Okri, as well as the Cameroonian critical thinker Achille Mbembe, have enabled conceptualisations of the notions of a ghostly everyday and an everyday ghostliness in the West African context. In this regard I share Esther Peeren’s comment concerning the settings of Tutuola’s and Okri’s fictions, which do not oppose a quiet everyday to the shock of the ghostly ‘but present an everyday in which this interruption has become routine, thus prohibiting any sense of stability and any straightforward opposition of ghosts and the living’.29 The two Nigerian authors, one writing in the 1950s and the second in the 1990s, and both drawing from Yoruba folklore though in different measures and modes, not only show ghostly presences in the everyday but also trace the everyday in the ghostly, indicating that also the spirit world has its own ordinariness and a set of practices that make it liveable.30 In Okri’s The Famished Road (1991) the protagonist Azaro’s abiku home is haunted by ghosts that create a ‘world of dreams’,31 where exchanges with the spirit world, though challenging, may stimulate agency and vision. In Tutuola and Okri the relationship with the ghostly is neither pacific nor easy – as in the crazily daring journey of Tutuola’s palm-wine drunkard in search of his tapster, or in the adventures of a seven-year-old boy fleeing a group of armed slave-traders, who accidentally enters the Bush of Ghosts – but they may include violence and laughter, similarity and difference, love and hate. Starting from Tutuola’s tales (which a Western reader may read as examples of Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘carnivalesque’), Mbembe

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describes his vision of the ghostly as connected to and informing his theorisation of contemporary necropolitical power. In a chapter devoted to ‘the phenomenology of violence’ in On the Postcolony,32 as well as in a following article titled ‘Life, sovereignty, and terror in the fiction of Amos Tutuola’ (2003), he rereads the porous worlds of Tutuola’s The Palm-wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts as mirroring a postcolonial context in which ‘ghostly power harasses the subject, screams, beats him mercilessly, starves him for an instant, and then in the next instant forces him to eat exactly as one feeds an animal, and makes him drink his own urine’.33 The subject, or the inhabitant of the postcolony, appears as passive and impotent in the hands of a vicious and tyrannical otherworldly power. Were we to replace the personal pronoun ‘him’ with ‘her’ in the quotation from Mbembe, the context would immediately expand the eerie picture of the African postcolony to include the everyday globalised world inhabited by new slaves and trafficked women, including Abigail. The actions mentioned in the passage correspond exactly to what the Nigerian girl is forced to experience in Peter’s house in London – the beatings, the starving, the animalisation, the urine drinking, aimed at forcing her into submission. Though accidental, the parallels are strong, and they trigger an extended necropolitical vision (beyond the borders of Africa) of what may indeed happen anywhere in the underworlds of the ‘neoliberal’ globe. Mbembe’s way of including and amplifying the necropolitical role of the ghostly in the ‘normalcy’ of the everyday, however, seems to leave little room for agency or hope or resistance. This not what happens in Becoming Abigail. The idea of ‘agency’, which Abani interrogates from a contemporary experiential and literary viewpoint that mixes West African cultural roots with critical readings of the ghostly in the global context of human trafficking, needs to be carefully spelled out. In the novella the author widens his Nigerian horizon and moves his gaze towards the surfacing of more and more ‘ordinary’ ghosts – non-persons, as Alessandro Dal Lago would call them (2004), or invisible people like Abigail – in necropolitical spaces all over the planet, inviting the reader to rethink the relation between the ghostly and the everyday on a planetary scale and in ethical and social terms. Abani’s ‘global Igbo’ standpoint makes his readers perceive the complexity, not



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the absence, of agency for trafficked people and, at the same time, allows us to enter a textual space that gives visibility to ghostly acts of resistance, such as the ones that let Abigail signify and exert her own right to exist in the text.

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The power of lines, the interstitial, the liminal Taken together, Abani’s works may be seen as the result of a project of relinquishing the reassuring modern division of the world into binary opposites, to let go or deconstruct a Manichean vision of the real that erases the complexities of human life. In this novella, through references to maps as metaphors, Abani stresses the human need to exercise some form of ‘dominion over things’ (BA, 71), but at the same time he warns that such a dominion, when not a violent imposition, is often elusive and untrustworthy. Thus, Becoming Abigail is also a reflection on what escapes control, or the aesthetics and politics of the ‘interstitial’. Many lines of demarcation are scattered in the text. Perhaps the most famous is the historic Prime Meridian of the World in Greenwich, where Derek and Abigail stand on the line that conventionally separates time and space, a marker of Western colonial power over both. The borderline between life and death is symbolically secured in the text by the ‘taut rope’ from which Abigail’s father is found hanging (BA, 115) and, in a more positive image, by the cable of the electric blanket through which Peter’s wife Mary gives Abigail a possibility of survival while she is chained to the doghouse (BA, 92). The dog chain itself marks the distinction between the human and the animal condition, but we see Abigail move beyond that threshold, into animalisation and dog life itself. Similarly, the lines on Abigail’s skin, though appearing as the product of a lifelong endeavour to discern between memory and invention, between the factual and the ghostly, actually represent a deconstruction of the possibility of doing so. However, it turns out that the British protection law does have the power to decide what the ‘limits of desire’ must be for this underage woman, legally drawing the line between love and abuse, innocence and guilt, and sentencing her once again to a ghostly existence: ‘But what are the limits of desire? The edges beyond which love must not cross? Those were questions she had

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heard others discuss in these last few days. Discuss as if she was a mere ghost in their presence. Called this thing between Derek and her wrong. How could it be?’ (BA, 79). The text makes clear that lines, markers, and borders are not enough to trace the contours of Abigail and understand who she is, because ‘A line is a lie. Who can tell what it will open onto?’ (BA, 115). Significantly, the refrain ‘mind the gap’ (BA, 80) – the first words Abigail hears when she gets off the underground train in London after her arrival at Heathrow – is more than a catchphrase for the interstitial theme of the novel. ‘Abigail hesitate[s] at the gap between the door and the platform’ (BA, 80), confronted with a borderline that needs to be crossed. Defined by her transient status, she finds herself again in a liminal position: between Africa and Europe, the South and the North, the past in her family birthplace and an uncertain future in the UK. The invitation to ‘mind the gap’, in the impersonal tone of the recorded voice of the underground train, can be read figuratively as an invitation to look into the gap, as Giulia D’Agostini claims;34 a gap that is assumed to be empty, a void or a black hole, but is in fact full of the lives of those human beings who, like Abigail, are trapped for ever between opposites. The novella is thus not only a meditation on the unseen, or what escapes vision, but also an injunction to pay attention to the interstices of contemporary societies and to see the precarious lives of non-people, who are invisible because they have no place within the political, as Giorgio Agamben argues in Homo Sacer (1998), and that international human rights discourse is unable to address.  Becoming Abigail demands that new geographies of the human, and of the world, be developed, by constructing alternative border imaginaries which challenge the arbitrariness of moral opposites as well as traditional cartography and modern geopolitical imaginaries. Accepting this ethical challenge might help us to recognise the diffuse ‘biopolitical border’ along which the right to life of many human beings is decided.35 Liminality also regards the setting of the ‘Now’ chapters of the novella, which foreground questions about neocolonial relations between Nigeria and England. Abigail sits on the back of one of the two bronze sphinxes (Victorian reproductions of the half-human, half-lion funerary monuments from ancient Egypt) flanking the

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obelisk erected on the north bank of the Thames in the nineteenth century, commonly called ‘Cleopatra’s Needle’. It appears that the monument has little connection with the historical Cleopatra, its name being a vague Victorian evocation of ‘Egyptianness’. According to the authors of Obelisk: A History (2009), two obelisks (four-sided columns, pyramid-shaped at the top) were erected about 1450 BCE by Pharaoh Thutmose III at the entrance to the temple of Heliopolis; they were later moved to Alexandria under the orders of the Roman Emperor Augustus in 13 BCE.36 With Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt in 1799, the British destruction of the French fleet in 1801, and the brief British Protectorate in Egypt until 1803, there developed an interest in transporting obelisks to European capitals. Upon Egypt’s restoration to the Ottoman Empire, Constantinople appointed as governor Mehmed Ali, a politician who consolidated his hold over the province and courted both the French and the English. He eventually made gifts of three obelisks to London, Paris, and New York.37 Although the British government accepted the gift, the obelisk was transported to London only in the late 1870s. It was erected on the newly built Embankment, together with the two sphinxes, which were mounted facing the obelisk instead of outwards. The wrong installation was never set right, as Queen Victoria rejected further expenses for their repositioning. It has been observed that Cleopatra’s Needle is not just one of the many Victorian monuments in central London. Situated on the Embankment, it marks a liminal area between land and water and it is a space where British modernism often staged the conflict of class and difference.38 As a favourite setting of Joseph Conrad’s fictions, it was also a theatre for the long-distance conflicts between the empire and its others, particularly Africa in his Heart of Darkness. The location further draws attention to the centrality of the river in a story that ends with the protagonist’s death by water. Rivers have been metaphors for flowing and changing from the Ancient Greeks onwards. The famous fragment of Heraclitus (Ephesus, c. 550 – c. 480 BCE), according to which ‘we cannot bathe twice in the same river’ (panta rei – everything flows), has triggered many reflections on the transient status and the impermanence of life. In Hans-Georg Gadamer’s interpretation, everything that exists

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is subject to the law of becoming and transformation, despite its constant tendency to harmony and the recomposition of opposites. In reality, says the German philosopher, Heraclitus teaches the paradox according to which the always different water that flows in the river bed is always one and the same current.39 The Thames, into which Abigail throws herself one crepuscular autumn evening (the time of the day and the season quite appropriate for the suicide of ‘a lonely self in dialogue with the dead’ [BA, 84]), preserves and at the same time erases all the ‘becomings’ of nature, history, and humankind, including Abigail’s. The dark waters receive the abuses and the struggles to become free of her enslaved body as she definitely crosses the limen between life and death, and ideally connect them to the ongoing and past struggles of old and new slaves that the current of the river has witnessed and contains. Seated on the back of the male Egyptian sphinx, a figuration of African power, Abigail finds the courage to tell her ‘marginal’ story from within a Western metropolitan space. What she knows about the monument is very little and incorrect: ‘The obelisk’, she reflects, ‘had been a gift from Mohammed Ali. She wasn’t sure who he was, but she was pretty sure he wasn’t the boxer’ (BA, 27). The inaccurate spelling of the name of Mehmed Ali leads her to an empowering evocation of the black American champion, a global symbol of political engagement for social transformation and a role model for generations of human and civil rights advocates. Abigail responds to the compelling power of the space, to the point that she identifies with the ‘cold smiles of the sphinxes’,40 which she interprets as ironically critical of ‘the ridiculous impotence of the phallus they stared at’ (BA, 28): the sphinxes’ mockery of male power and sexual desire convey her implicit critique of the forces that are responsible for her sufferings.41

The shape of desire is a white bird Abani rarely speaks of race. His gaze falls on people who suffer or make others suffer, and traces forms of persistent violence in a global context that should strive to be a better place for everyone. At the same time he believes that there exist countless invisible ways for people to be brave and face inhospitable or unfavourable



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circumstances. In his poetry collection Sanctificum he devotes poem 9 of the ‘Pilgrimage’ section to them: Courage is often invisible: Old women who buy their own groceries. Mothers who become shadow. Women who speak and speak and are not heard until a man says, Of course, of course. Children walking through minefields. Palestinians who don’t throw stones, wanting only food and life for their children. Palestinians who throw stones, wanting only food and life for their children. […] People who suffer pain with a smile. People who suffer pain loudly. People who speak up for their beliefs. Children who protect other children. Homeless children who smile. People who have to navigate worlds designed, Consciously or not, to keep them out. Being black anywhere in the twenty-first century. (S, 66)

The poet keeps ‘being black’ last, thus giving it special resonance, inscribing blackness as a widespread category of wretchedness that is transversal to the experiences, desires, genders, ages, and geopolitical locations of the people listed before and that, in this day and age, requires specific courage. Being black in the twentyfirst-century neoliberal globalised world, Abani implies, is to be threatened by widespread racism, in an atmosphere that is evoked as ‘the time of the skin’ in the novel Burrow (2004) by the Bangladeshi-British author Manzu Islam, written more or less at the same time as Becoming Abigail, or ‘a sociality of the skin’, as in David T. Goldberg’s The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism.42 ‘Black’ registers the racial structuring of the world through colour – ‘the colour line’, as W. E. B. Du Bois would call it, made visible as race on non-white skin. Abigail is Nigerian. In the novella there is only one indication concerning her skin colour, which is a pale shade of black because

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of the ‘intervention’ of a Portuguese man in the past of her mother’s family. The textual reference to the Portuguese presence in western Africa does not carry overt racist connotations, but hints at a long history of colonialism and the early, often violent intercourse of peoples or races on the ‘dark’ continent. Thus the story of Abigail finds its genealogical roots in a past of conquest, rape, and slavery – which we may read as anticipations of her fate – but by stressing her ‘pale’ complexion hardly makes us aware of her being black. Although it often zooms in on the girl’s body and skin, race seems to become an issue only in relation to British racism, when the trafficked girl becomes the responsibility of the country’s protection law. Yet one of the sometimes enigmatic ‘Now’ sections (XVI) gives symbolic expression to the girl’s desire of identification with a white bird fighting the darkness of night: And this was the shape of Abigail’s desire: To be a white bird beating its wings against night. Beating until that was all. To be. Yet not the bird. Or the night. Or the air. Or the beating. To be a white bird. (BA, 75)

The composite dynamic image that gives shape to Abigail’s desire, as soon as it is proposed, is immediately stripped of its qualifying elements and surrounding context – the bird, the night, the air, the beating – and it zooms in on the girl’s ontological yearning to identify with a white being. Colour is the only relevant trait remaining in the description, and one is left wondering, as always with symbols, what that longing for whiteness might mean. We have already seen Elvis in whiteface in GraceLand. His mimicking of Presley by way of a white powder mask may be read in many different ways, as discussed in Chapter 2, but it surely expresses his need to move out of his subaltern position of invisibility and ghostliness in an urban Nigerian slum and into a larger world of music, singing, dancing, and performing possibilities. The Fanonian black skin / white mask is an irresistible reference here. For Abigail we could think of all the conventional meanings of white, according to colour psychology: purity, innocence, simplicity, cleanliness, openness, equality, new beginnings, and a better future, particularly as the white bird

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(a dove?) is involved in a fight against ‘darkness’. The interplay of light and darkness, whiteness and blackness, visibility and invisibility in the spectral world Abigail inhabits is a limbo from which she is ready to escape. But is it possible to sever this desire for whiteness from its colonial or racial matrix? And what about her black body? Throughout the novel Abigail is obsessed by ‘skin’ – her own, her mother’s, Derek’s, and the skin of people in the UK. On her arrival in England her attention is caught by ‘the colour’ of the passengers on the London underground, which sparks a reflection on the ‘shades of white’ of their skin: White as translucent as snow, making visible the veins running like green rivers just underneath the skin. Others that were denser, pinker, blood vessels spreading like tentacles of light. Others that seemed unsure whether to be a dirty ivory or a rich cream. And brown ones, tanned deep like the happy flow of a tropical river down a mountainside. (BA, 78–9)

Abani deconstructs the perception and the meanings of ‘white’ skin through the eyes and imagination of a Nigerian girl who creates a new, dislocated ‘skin geography’ for the underground travellers and identifies a wide spectrum of shades of white: from snow-white and ivory to pink and tropical brown. As Abigail wonders ‘what her mother had made of all these shades’ (BA, 79), she opens up an inferential textual space where it is possible to disconnect the concept of ‘white skin’ from the colour white, and where whiteness is no longer a descriptive term but a metaphor for something else, such as the West or the global north, power, money, privilege. Black Abigail will never inhabit the shape of her desire, she will not become the white bird that beats darkness, and not only because the ‘hospitable’ colour white can include all colours but black. In England she experiences forms of illegality, exploitation, and racism, quite different from her parents’ in 1950 London, when her father and mother could not rent a room from white landlords, who put up signs that read ‘No Blacks. No Irish. No Dogs’ (BA, 58). Years later, in a different world order, their undocumented underage black daughter is totally invisible and even deprived of her human status without anyone noticing. The experience of animalisation and forced sex make Abigail wonder whether ‘some of

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us are just here to feed others’ (BA, 119). When for a brief moment she becomes visible, ‘the time of the skin’ catches up with her, and her being black combines with the predicament of illegality. The invisibility of Abigail’s plentiful courage is one of the tragedies of our times that comes to light thanks to the author’s writing gesture, subtly including racism in the cluster of conditions that oppress and exploit people in situations like that of his character.

From Africa to Europe: illegality, rights, and love43 Abigail’s journey into abjection starts in an inhospitable Nigerian home and ends in fortress Europe. As a victim of a dysfunctional family and of illegal practices, she tries to oppose the biopolitical hierarchies of the contexts in which she moves. She is sensible enough to distrust Peter’s promises of a new life in London but, after the death of her father, mobility for a moment appears as a route to a better life, so she unknowingly enters the underworld of trafficking. According to this plot trajectory, Abani’s novella may be considered an example of what Dave Gunning has termed ‘narratives of illegality’, which offer figurations of the illegal in the context of global migration.44 By imagining and reinventing the life of trafficked Abigail, Abani invites an exploration of the very meanings of ‘illegality’ as a signifier. His book traces a girl’s attempt to escape forms of gendered subordination in current frameworks of legal citizenship and thereby ‘offers a tacit injunction for the transformation of belonging on both a symbolic and a juridical level’.45 Abigail is neither passive nor totally deprived of willpower, either in Nigeria or in England, although her range of action is limited by family context, cultural practices, and the illegal transnational trade. Yet, as a human being who can be abused and potentially killed ‘with impunity’, she is the female counterpart of Agamben’s homo sacer; Abigail is indeed a mulier sacra. As a female child she is one of the most fragile subaltern inhabitants of a sexist world, and thus infinitely ‘vulnerable’. In Nigeria her vulnerability is inscribed in family relations that allow sexual abuse of younger women by older male relatives, and she is vulnerable also as a ­second-class citizen of a nation which, as Wale Adebanwi explains, is c­ haracterised by a

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chronic absence of a state–society compact, and where women experience citizenship in a different way from their male counterparts. Nigerian women are often the disadvantaged object of gender-based discriminatory practices, rooted in a number of religious, cultural, and legal norms, as well as in a Constitution that is ‘gender-insensitive, even in its language’, and sanctions and maintains gender-based invisibilities.46 The gendered perspective adopted by Abani creates a space for women citizens(ship) as Abigail (following her mother’s example) resists her disenfranchisement by fighting different forms of invisibility – a condition that Adebanwi refers to as women’s living on a ‘marginal matrix of citizenship’ resulting in ‘both formal and informal discrimination’.47 In so doing the author problematises notions of inevitable victimhood, recalling that human life can hardly be contained within the boundaries of the law, and emphasising the gap between the human subject and the legal person, whose legal claims are recognisable. As the Nigerian girl leaves Nigeria and lands in Europe, crossing borders illegally and living illegally on British soil, the question of rights and citizenship, as handled in the postcolony, becomes the question of the limits and deficiencies of human rights protection and national laws in the context of ‘illegal’ immigration, where the stateless and the undocumented migrants are ‘subjects’ whose ‘right to have rights’ is decidedly in doubt, as Hannah Arendt famously stated in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).48 Abigail’s misfortunes largely conform to the definition of trafficking provided by the so-called ‘Trafficking Protocol’, the legal instrument adopted by the UN General Assembly in Palermo, Italy, in November 2000, which established an internationally agreed, if much criticised, definition of the phenomenon. The Trafficking Protocol, alongside two other additional Protocols supplementing the UN Convention against Transnational Organised Crime, and dealing respectively with Smuggling of Migrants and Trafficking in Firearms,49 cannot be considered a human rights instrument, in that it has the purpose of promoting international co-operation in the fight against organised crime. The legal scholar Anne Gallagher points out that the failure of the Palermo Protocols to include mandatory protections for trafficked and smuggled persons ‘provides a strong indication that, for many governments, trafficking and smuggling are issues of

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crime and border control, not human rights’.50 It is thus the state security imperative that has determined the increased relevance of the issues of trafficking and smuggling in the international policy agenda, particularly after the fall of the Berlin wall and the global war on terrorism, which have reinforced immigration controls at the ‘porous’ borders of Western countries, perceived as too vulnerable to migratory ‘invasions’. The definition of trafficking in persons, according to Art. 3 of the Palermo Protocol, consists of three elements: first of all, trafficking is considered an action, ‘the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons’. The Protocol then defines the means through which this action is carried out: ‘the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person’. Finally it specifies that the action must occur ‘for the purpose of exploitation’, which ‘shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labour or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs’. Scholars such as Jo Doezema, Kamala Kempadoo, Julia O’Connell Davidson and Julietta Hua, among others, are fiercely critical of mainstream trafficking discourse and policy.51 They emphasise their neo-colonial agenda, the difficulties placed on migrants by increasingly restrictive border policing, and the debilitating and sometimes racist depictions of female trafficking victims.52 Their wide-ranging research makes clear that trafficking policy and discourse are tied to two main related political concerns: border politics and sexuality, particularly the regulation of women’s sexuality. There is no doubt that, transported to the UK for the purpose of exploitation, Abigail has been deceived as to her destiny there, and terribly abused in order to be made completely subservient. She thus seems to conform to the very restrictive fiction of the victim of trafficking. Still, it is essential that Abani does not consign her to the stereotype of the virginal, naive girl ‘suitable for public s­ ympathy […] because  of her youth and innocence’, who has historically been the core of accounts on trafficking provided by human rights and

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religious groups, as well as ‘neo-abolitionist’ feminists.53 This mythic discourse, Doezema shows, reinforces and is reinforced by ‘fears and anxieties about women’s sexuality and independence, and of “foreigners” and migrants’, and it is problematic because it authorises a sanitised, paternalistic, and disempowered view of the trafficked woman as absolutely helpless.54 Because Abigail does not conform to the dominant paradigms, the novella suggests that a response other than the mainstream trafficking position is needed. Abani comments on the neo-colonial and moralistic foundations of trafficking discourse and policy in scenes appearing in the second half of the novel, which stage Abigail’s treatment in the UK welfare and legal institutions. After the police pick up Abigail on the street as she is fleeing from Peter and Mary’s house, she finds herself in a hospital that ‘[feels] more like a correctional facility’ (BA, 111). In the meantime ‘the search for her parents turned up nothing. Even the name she gave, Abigail Tansi, drew a blank. It was like she didn’t exist. And she didn’t, because Peter had used a fake passport and a forged visa to bring her into the country and she was registered everywhere under that fake name, a name she had forgotten. She was a ghost’ (BA, 112). Abigail’s ghostliness in London is therefore linked to a few basic facts: she is an orphan girl, she has no home, she belongs to no state. The enigma that is Abigail is then placed in the hands of the British protection and welfare system, and assigned to a social worker, Derek, who initially is kind and supportive, but soon forsakes his role and gives in to sexual attraction. Early in their relationship, Derek gives Abigail a book, Fragments (1970) by the Ghanaian novelist Ayi Kwei Armah, inscribed with the following message: ‘Gentle Abigail, This book will show you that even though you come from a dark continent place, you can escape your fate. Derek’ (BA, 95). The strikethrough of the word ‘continent’ catches our attention because of its ­ambiguity,55 but the inscription also leads us back to the question of agency versus fate, boldly implying that now Abigail can choose for herself. What Abigail ‘willingly’ chooses in the novella is her right to love and be loved, and to start a relationship with the only man who has shown kindness to her: ‘they made love on the sofa. And Abigail was giving. For the first time, she wasn’t taken’ (BA, 54). The tragic consequences of this ‘choice’ are hard to accept for Abigail: the

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relationship is condemned; Derek is dismissed from work, tried, and sent to prison; she is cast again in the position of the victim of male abuse. No one listens to the girl’s representation of their ‘forbidden’ relationship as ‘consensual’, and she interprets this closure as a denial not only of her agency but also of her identity.56 The female police officers refuse to hear, understand, or sympathise with Abigail when she states she loves Derek: ‘Her letter saying it was her fault. Her choice. But they said they were doing this to protect her. That she didn’t know what choice was. But she did. She who had been taken and taken and taken. And now the one time she took for herself, the one time she had choice in the matter, it was taken away. Maybe, she thought, maybe some of us are just here to feed others’ (BA, 119). Abigail’s status as a black child trafficked from Africa does not give credit to her voice. She must remain confined to the role of the passive victim who can receive protection only if she remains such – a passive object of intervention, a child, even if she feels herself becoming a woman. This is one of the greatest contradictions inherent in the human rights project: through infantilisation and victimisation, ‘protection’ protocols produce new forms of spectralisation. The female social worker who speaks to her in the hallway of the court, as she watches Derek being dragged away, is another example of the diffused sociocultural misunderstanding of Abigail’s experience and feelings: Thin-lipped and angry, the woman bumped into her, and looking from Abigail to Derek and back, and mistaking the anguished look on Abigail’s face, said to her: Don’t you worry, sister, that monster is going away for a long time. And then the anguished look on the social worker’s face as Abigail’s not inconsiderable right hook connected with her nose. Looking down at the terrified woman, she licked the blood on her knuckles. (BA, 120)

In this case Abigail is ‘interpreted’ by a woman who does not know her, but catalogues her as an abused victim who needs to be defended from a monster. Instead, by hitting the white woman social worker, the girl symbolically knocks down the system that has deprived her of her right to be, to be seen, and to love.57

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Whether her self-sacrifice at the end of the novel is one more way to show that she can indeed choose is uncertain, as her ‘fate’ comes to coincide with that of a sacrificial victim. For Abigail her suicide is the necessary sacrifice to rescue Derek and their love affair: ‘The realization that she could not live without Derek was not as sudden and surprising as her difficulty in the face of this task. Here she was trying to find the strength to save him’ (BA, 121). Reflecting on the ‘necessity’ of her choice (which to the reader seems rather misguided or hyperbolic in relation to the questionable behaviour of a middle-aged social worker who fails to ‘protect’ his underage charge), and weighing the actual cost of one’s desires and actions in light of the economy of ritual that her existence has followed, the girl finds comfort in Igbo beliefs: ‘It was just like the Igbo said. The sacrifice is always commensurate to the thing wished for. Sometimes a lizard will do, sometimes a goat, or a dog, sometimes a cow or a buffalo. Sometimes, a human being’ (BA, 118). In the name of love and against the system that has deprived her of voice and meaning, Abigail becomes both sacrificial victim and sacrificial priestess. Although her suicide frustrates the reader’s need for a comforting closure, and appears to call into question the novella’s feminist agenda, it forcefully calls attention to the failure of the British legal and welfare system to respond adequately to the crisis presented by the trafficked girl. By departing so drastically from the familiar sex trafficking narrative of helpless and naive victimisation, Abani’s text demands both a different reaction in his reader and different interventions concerning dominant trafficking and migration policies. More generally, Becoming Abigail’s powerful aesthetic and ethical imprint has the merit of tracing for us the contours of emerging subjectivities that might constitute a starting point for the challenging, ongoing task of reimagining what it means to be a free human being and what it means to be a woman and a citizen. About the need for happy endings, Abani will have the last words in this chapter: ‘happy endings aren’t pretty endings’, he says, ‘they’re beautiful endings, they’re inevitable endings, the way in which the death of a character can actually be a beautiful ending, because it’s a resolution, and there’s a release’.58 To this effect he purposely takes a traditional idea, ‘like the somehow received narrative idea of suicide being weakness, or being a negative thing’, and

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turns it around, ‘making it an act of courage or an act of love’.59 Becoming Abigail’s conclusion does involve both courage and love, and well exemplifies the workings of the author’s aesthetics: ‘For forgiveness to occur, for transformation to occur, the darkness cannot be erased. The light has to come out from within.’ The ending of the book, just as the death of the character, is inevitable, but ‘there’s also inevitable forgiveness and transformation’.60

Notes   1 See GraceLand, Song for Night, or The Secret History of Las Vegas.   2 Abani in interview with C. Tóibín, ‘Chris Abani by  Colm Tóibín’, BOMB Magazine, 96 (1 July 2006). https://bombmagazine.org/articles/ chris-abani/. All websites last accessed 7 April 2011.   3 See Abani’s slightly divergent accounts in ‘Abigail and my becoming’, Truthdig (19 April 2006). www.truthdig.com/articles/chris-abaniabigail-and-my-becoming/; and in Z. Kaufman, ‘In conversation with author Chris Abani’, Truthdig (19 April 2006). www.truthdig.com/ report/item/20060418_chris_abani_truthdig_interview/?/interview/ item/20060418_chris_abani_truthdig_interview/.   4 Abani in Kaufman, ‘In conversation’.   5 Abani in Kaufman, ‘In conversation’.   6 Abigail first appeared as Jasmine in a short story called ‘Jazz petals’, in the anthology Burning Words: Flaming Images, while ‘Becoming Abigail’ was published in IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain.   7 Abani, ‘Abigail and my becoming’.   8 Abani in Kaufman, ‘In conversation’.   9 In 2006 Becoming Abigail was a selection of the Black Expressions Book Club and of the Essence Magazine Book Club, a New York Times Editor’s Choice and a Chicago Reader Critic’s Choice. In 2007 it was Finalist for the PEN Beyond the Margins Award and a New York Libraries Books for Teens Selection. 10 A. Schultheis Moore and E. Swanson Goldberg, ‘“Let us begin with a smaller gesture”: an ethos of human rights and the possibilities of form in Chris Abani’s Song for Night and Becoming Abigail’, ARIEL, 45:4 (2014), p. 68. 11 J. Weaver, ‘Chris Abani – Becoming Abigail’, Spike Magazine (10 March 2008). https://spikemagazine.com/chris-abani-becoming-abigail/.

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12 ‘Lay it as it plays’ may be a variation of ‘Play it as it lays’, an expression connected to the game of golf, where a golfer must play his ball from wherever it landed on the previous drive. The game does not allow for a ball to be moved to a more favourable position. The golfer is expected to deal with the situation as it is, without adjustments. By extension the idiomatic expression means, ‘accept the existing conditions when acting on a problem’, take what you get and figure it out and make the best of it so that you can move forward. Abani turns it round to ‘Lay it as it plays’, which may suggest that the final result is not in the hands of ‘the player’, that the ball and the way it travels is never entirely in one’s control. 13 Weaver, ‘Chris Abani’. 14 D. Tunca, ‘“Bi-textual” poetics: investigating form in Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail’, in Stylistic Approaches to Nigerian Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 144–5. 15 Tunca, ‘“Bi-textual” poetics’, p. 145. 16 Tunca, ‘“Bi-textual” poetics’, p. 144. In the poetry collection Dog Woman (2004) we find a poem titled ‘CHANT’ that exemplifies, through semantic and stylistic echoes, the formal work Abani does in Becoming Abigail: It was the hornbill that spoke it.

In the nothing, becoming nothing, begetting nothing; this is everything.



The world is old, the world is new



How does the darkness hide? In the nothing, becoming nothing, begetting nothing; this is everything.



The world is old, the world is new […] The blood sign is red; burning like fire. In the nothing, becoming nothing, begetting nothing; this is everything.



The world is old, the world is new



It has no name; silence is its name. In the nothing, becoming nothing, begetting nothing; this is everything.



The world is old, the world is new. (DW, 31)

17 J. Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004), p. 44.

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18 P. McCallum, ‘Between life and death: representing trafficked persons in Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail and Justin Chadwick’s Stolen’, Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, 48:2 (2015), p. 33. 19 Abani undertakes a similar process of revision in his The Face: Cartography of the Void. See Chapter 1. 20 P. Deandrea, New Slaveries in Contemporary British Literature and Visual Arts: The Ghost and the Camp (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), p. 65. 21 Deandrea, New Slaveries. 22 A. Dawson, ‘Cargo culture: literature in an age of mass displacement’, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, 38:1–2 (2010), p. 188. 23 Dawson, ‘Cargo culture’, p. 180. 24 Dawson, ‘Cargo culture’, p. 181. 25 S. Hall, ‘The uncanny sacrifice: sex trafficking in Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 56:1 (2015), p. 43. 26 Hall, ‘The uncanny sacrifice’, p. 59. 27 Hall, ‘The uncanny sacrifice’, p. 59. 28 McCallum, ‘Between life and death’, p. 32. 29 E. Peeren, ‘Everyday ghosts and the ghostly everyday in Amos Tutuola, Ben Okri, and Achille Mbembe’, in María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren (eds), Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture (New York: Continuum, 2010), pp. 106–17. 30 Peeren, ‘Everyday ghosts’, p. 114. 31 B. Okri, The Famished Road (San Francisco: Anchor, 1993), p. 22. In Yoruba culture and other major cultures in Nigeria and Africa in general, an Àbíkú is a child who is born to die shortly after birth. In Yoruba, the term Àbíkú literally means ‘Born to die’ or ‘Predestined to die’. 32 A. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, translated by A. M. Berrett et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 173–211. 33 A. Mbembe, ‘Life, sovereignty, and terror in the fiction of Amos Tutuola’, trans. R. H. Mitsch, Research in African Literatures, 34:4 (2003), p. 15. 34 G. D’Agostini, ‘War-scapes: The Nigerian Postcolony and the Boundaries of the Human’, PhD thesis, Doctoral School of Linguistic, Philological and Literary Sciences, University of Padua, 2013, p. 271. 35 D’Agostini, ‘War-scapes’, p. 272. 36 B. A. Curran, A. Grafton, P. O. Long, and B. Weiss, Obelisk: A History (Cambridge: Burndy Library, 2009), pp. 36–7. 37 Curran et al., Obelisk, pp. 242–3. 38 McCallum, ‘Between life and death’, p. 35.

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39 H. G. Gadamer, Eraclito. Ermeneutica e mondo antico, ed. A. Mecacci. (Rome: Donzelli, 2004). 40 In an attractive psychoanalytical reading of the motif of the sphinx, Hall refers to the off-stage presence of a sphinx in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. The Sphinx and its connection to the Greek play recalls Freud’s theorisation of the Oedipus complex, which is fundamental to his discoveries about eroticism, gender identity, and the psyche. In Hall’s view Abani foreshadows Abigail’s end ‘as readers are reminded of the fate of the Sphinx’, who commits suicide by throwing herself into the sea (‘The uncanny sacrifice’, p. 45). 41 The criticism may also convey, as Cédric Courtois suggests, a vision of empowerment for women, while men, in turn, are ‘reduced to a synecdoche pointing to their failing masculinity, indicating their diminishing power’. In ‘The travelling bodies of African prostitutes in the transnational space in Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail (2006) and Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street (2009)’, in Silvia Pellicer-Ortín and Julia Tofantšhuk (eds), Women on the Move: Body, Memory and Femininity in Present-Day Transnational Diasporic Writing (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), p. 37. 42 D. T. Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), pp. 289–90. 43 What follows owes much to the work done over the years with MA and PhD students and post-docs at the University of Padua. See also A. Oboe, ‘In transito: scritture postcoloniali, migrazioni e biopolitica’, in A. Oboe and A. Scacchi (eds), A Garland of True Plain Words (Padua: Unipress, 2012), pp. 381–97. 44 D. Gunning, ‘Infrahuman rights, silence, and the possibility of communication in recent narratives of illegality in Britain’, in A. Oboe and S. Bassi (eds), Experiences of Freedom in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 141. Gunning uses the phrase to refer to texts portraying the predicaments of asylum seekers in Great Britain, such as Manzu Islam’s Burrow, Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore, and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea. 45 Dawson, ‘Cargo culture’, pp. 180–1. 46 W. Adebanwi, ‘Contesting exclusion: the dilemmas of citizenship in Nigeria’, African Anthropologist: Journal of the Pan African Anthropological Association, 12:1 (2005), p. 41. 47 Adebanwi, ‘Contesting exclusion’. 48 For an analysis of the difference between the refugee and the victim of trafficking see S. Kneebone, ‘The refugee-trafficking nexus: making good (the) connections’, Refugee Survey Quarterly, 29:1 (2010), 137–60.

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49 The ‘Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children’, entered into force in Palermo on 25 December 2003. The ‘Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air’, was adopted and entered into force alongside the Trafficking Protocol, while the ‘Protocol against the Illicit manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, Their Parts and Components and Ammunition’ was adopted on 31 May 2001 and entered into force on 3 July 2005. 50 A. Gallagher, ‘Trafficking, smuggling and human rights: tricks and treaties’, Forced Migration Review, 12 (2002), p. 12. 51 J. O’Connell Davidson interestingly contends that the ‘dominant discourse on “trafficking as modern slavery” revitalizes the liberal understandings of freedom and unfreedom that historically allowed vigorous moral condemnation of slavery to co-exist with the continued imposition of extensive, forcible restrictions on individuals deemed to be “free”’. In ‘New slavery, old binaries: human trafficking and the borders of “freedom”’, Global Networks, 10:2 (2010), p. 245. It follows that, in addition to a depoliticisation of the human trafficking discourse, with the knocking down of its potential insertion into a migrants’ rights discourse and activism, ‘“trafficking as modern slavery” discourse inspires and legitimates efforts to divide a small number of “deserving victims” from the masses that remain “undeserving” of rights and freedoms’. Along with the definitional imprecision, this is made evident by and partly explains the gap between the great numbers of victims of trafficking in many international reports, media discussion, and political rhetoric, as well as the small numbers of actually identified and assisted ones (p. 252). 52 See the following publications: J. Doezema, ‘Loose women or lost women? The re-emergence of the myth of “white slavery” in contemporary discourses of “trafficking in Women”’, Gender Issues, 18:1 (1999), 23–50, and Sex Slaves and Discourse Masters: The Construction of Trafficking (London and New York: Zed Books, 2010); J. Doezema and K. Kempadoo (eds), Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition (New York: Routledge, 1998); J. Hua, Trafficking Women’s Human Rights (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); K. Kempadoo, J. Sanghera, and B. Pattanaik, Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered: New Perspectives on Migration, Sex Work, and Human Rights (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2012); J. O’Connell Davidson, Children in the Global Sex Trade (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity, 2005) and ‘New slavery, old binaries’. 53 Doezema, ‘Loose women or lost women?’, p. 34.

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54 Doezema, ‘Loose women or lost women?’, p. 39. 55 See Hall, ‘The uncanny sacrifice’, p. 54. 56 See Deandrea, New Slaveries; Dawson, ‘Cargo culture’; Hall, ‘The uncanny sacrifice’. 57 Abani strictly connects love to seeing: ‘What I mean by love is the act of seeing. Why is seeing an act of love? It is perhaps the only true act of love. Seeing slows the world down, bringing it into focus, even for a moment, the object/subject of sight, imbuing it with worth and value, while also actively resisting its erasure. But more than that, seeing  requires not turning away from difficulty to the safety of comfort.’ In ‘Painting a body of loss and love in the proximity of an aesthetic’, The Millions (25 November 2013). https://themillions. com/2013/11/painting-a-body-of-loss-and-love-in-the-proximity-ofan-aesthetic.html. 58 Abani in P. Paine, ‘A conversation with Chris Abani’, Blackbird: An Online Journal of Literature and the Arts, 8:1 (2009). https://blackbird. vcu.edu/v8n1/features/abani_c/conversation_page.shtml. 59 Abani in P. Paine, ‘A conversation with Chris Abani’. 60 Abani in P. Paine, ‘A conversation with Chris Abani’.

References Abani, Chris. ‘Abigail and my becoming’, Truthdig (19 April 2006). www. truthdig.com/articles/chris-abani-abigail-and-my-becoming/. All websites accessed 7 April 2021. ———. ‘Becoming Abigail’, in Courttia Newland and Kadija Sesay (eds), IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain (London: Hamilton, 2000), pp. 247–53. ———. Becoming Abigail (New York: Akashic Books, 2006). ———. Dog Woman (Los Angeles: Red Hen, 2004). ———. GraceLand (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004). ———. ‘Jazz petals’, in Kadija Sesay (ed.), Burning Words Flaming Images: Poems and Short Stories by Writers of African Descent (London: Saks, 1996), pp. 22–7. ———. ‘Painting a body of loss and love in the proximity of an aesthetic’, The Millions (25 November 2013). https://themillions.com/2013/11/ painting-a-body-of-loss-and-love-in-the-proximity-of-an-aesthetic.html. ———. Sanctificum (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2010). ———. Song for Night (New York: Akashic, 2007).

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Adebanwi, Wale. ‘Contesting exclusion: the dilemmas of citizenship in Nigeria’, African Anthropologist: Journal of the Pan African Anthropological Association, 12:1 (2005), 11–45. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1968 [1951]). Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004). Courtois, Cédric. ‘The travelling bodies of African prostitutes in the transnational space in Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail (2006) and Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street (2009)’, in Silvia Pellicer-Ortín and Julia Tofantšhuk (eds), Women on the Move: Body, Memory and Femininity in Present-Day Transnational Diasporic Writing (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), pp. 25–45. Curran, Brian A., Anthony Grafton, Pamela O. Long, and Benjamin Weiss. Obelisk: A History (Cambridge: Burndy Library, 2009). D’Agostini, Giulia. ‘War-scapes: The Nigerian Postcolony and the Boundaries of the Human’, PhD thesis, Doctoral School of Linguistic, Philological and Literary Sciences, University of Padua, 2013. Dal Lago, Alessandro. Non-persone. L’esclusione dei migranti in una società globale (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2004). Dawson, Ashley. ‘Cargo culture: literature in an age of mass displacement’, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, 38:1–2 (2010), 178–93. Deandrea, Pietro. ‘Contemporary slavery in the UK and its categories’, in Annalisa Oboe and Francesca Giommi (eds), Black Arts in Britain: Literary Visual Performative (Rome: Aracne, 2011), pp. 167–85. ———. New Slaveries in Contemporary British Literature and Visual Arts: The Ghost and the Camp (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015). Doezema, Jo. ‘Loose women or lost women? The re-emergence of the myth of “white slavery” in contemporary discourses of “trafficking in women”’, Gender Issues, 18:1 (1999), 23–50. ———. Sex Slaves and Discourse Masters: The Construction of Trafficking (London and New York: Zed Books, 2010). Doezema, Jo, and Kamala Kempadoo (eds). Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition (New York: Routledge, 1998). Gadamer, Hans Georg. Eraclito. Ermeneutica e mondo antico, ed. A. Mecacci (Rome: Donzelli, 2004). Gallagher, Anne. ‘Trafficking, smuggling and human rights: tricks and treaties’, Forced Migration Review, 12 (2002), 25–8. Goldberg, David Theo. The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008).

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Gunning, Dave. ‘Infrahuman rights, silence, and the possibility of communication in recent narratives of illegality in Britain’, in Annalisa Oboe and Shaul Bassi (eds), Experiences of Freedom in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 141–50. Hall, Susan L. ‘The uncanny sacrifice: sex trafficking in Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 56:1 (2015), 42–60. Hua, Julietta. Trafficking Women’s Human Rights (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). Kaufman, Zuade. ‘In conversation with author Chris Abani’, Truthdig (19 April 2006). www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060418_chris_abani_ truthdig_interview/?/interview/item/20060418_chris_abani_truthdig_ interview/. Kempadoo, Kamala, Jyoti Sanghera, and Bandana Pattanaik. Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered: New Perspectives on Migration, Sex Work, and Human Rights (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2012). Kneebone, Susan. ‘The refugee-trafficking nexus: making good (the) connections’, Refugee Survey Quarterly, 29:1 (2010), 137–60. Mbembe, Achille. ‘Life, sovereignty, and terror in the fiction of Amos Tutuola’, trans. R. H. Mitsch, Research in African Literatures, 34:4 (2003), 1–26. ———. On the Postcolony, trans. A. M. Berrett et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). McCallum, Pamela. ‘Between life and death: representing trafficked persons in Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail and Justin Chadwick’s Stolen’, Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, 48:2 (2015), 29–44. O’Connell Davidson, Julia. Children in the Global Sex Trade (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity, 2005). ———. ‘New slavery, old binaries: human trafficking and the borders of “freedom”’, Global Networks, 10:2 (2010), 244–61. Oboe, Annalisa. ‘In transito: scritture postcoloniali, migrazioni e biopoli­ tica’, in Annalisa Oboe and Anna Scacchi (eds), A Garland of True Plain Words (Padua: Unipress, 2012), pp. 381–97. Okri, Ben. The Famished Road (San Francisco: Anchor, 1993). Paine, Patty. ‘A conversation with Chris Abani’, Blackbird: An Online Journal of Literature and the Arts, 8:1 (2009). https://blackbird.vcu.edu/ v8n1/features/abani_c/conversation_page.shtml. Peeren, Esther. ‘Everyday ghosts and the ghostly everyday in Amos Tutuola, Ben Okri, and Achille Mbembe’, in María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren (eds), Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture (New York: Continuum, 2010), pp. 106–17. Schultheis Moore, Alexandra, and Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg. ‘“Let us begin with a smaller gesture”: an ethos of human rights and the

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­ ossibilities of form in Chris Abani’s Song for Night and Becoming p Abigail’, ARIEL, 45:4 (2014), 59–87. Tóibín, Colm. ‘Chris Abani by Colm Tóibín’, BOMB Magazine, 96 (1 July 2006). https://bombmagazine.org/articles/chris-abani/. Tunca, Daria. ‘“Bi-textual’ poetics”: investigating form in Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail’, in Stylistic Approaches to Nigerian Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 122–45. UN General Assembly. Protocol against the Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, Their Parts and Components and Ammunition, Supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime. Adopted 31 May 2001. https://treaties.un.org/Pages/ ViewDetails.aspx?src=TREATY&mtdsg_no=XVIII-12-c&chapter=18& clang=_en. UN General Assembly. Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air, Supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime. Adopted 15 November 2000. https://trea ties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=TREATY&mtdsg_no=XVIII12-b&chapter=18. UN General Assembly. Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, Supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime. Adopted 15 November 2000. www.ohchr.org/Documents/ProfessionalInterest/ ProtocolonTrafficking.pdf. Unigwe, Chika. On Black Sisters’ Street (London: Cape, 2009). Weaver, Jason. ‘Chris Abani – Becoming Abigail’, Spike Magazine (10 March 2008). https://spikemagazine.com/chris-abani-becoming-abigail/. Weitzer, Ronald. ‘Human trafficking and contemporary slavery’, The Annual Review of Sociology, 41 (2015), 223–42.

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No words for violence? Song for Night

I don’t know how long I die. But I think I die for very very long time. Ken Saro-Wiwa, Sozaboy Narratives are the bastard children of war – the indirect and ­necessary products of violence. Dinaw Mengestu, ‘Children of war’

In the early 2000s a number of narratives centred on child-soldier figures involved in African civil conflicts began to be published by writers from Africa and the African diaspora.1 Chris Abani’s Song for Night (2007) is one of these ‘bastard children of war’, as the Ethiopian-American novelist Dinaw Mengestu calls them: stories that are ‘long overdue and desperately needed’ because, in the absence of narrative voice, ‘we are left only with anecdotes, body counts and haunting images that we can never fully explain. Africa has had enough of these.’2 In his second novella3 Abani intervenes critically in the process of giving ‘voice’ to the experience of boys and girls in civil wars, and takes on a similar challenge to the one posed by sex workers in human trafficking, to which he responded by telling the story of Abigail (Chapter 3). Eschewing numbers and media-like representations, the author focuses on a single boy’s experience and his own coming to terms with killing and life loss (including his own). His representation of the child soldier as a killer and, at the same time, as a moral subject in the making is aimed at countering images of child soldiers in Africa that are powerful but have problematic effects in the West: although they are useful in order to focus attention on the violence of the numerous conflicts of the continent, these images also echo the colonial

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perception of Africa as a dark place populated by innocents who are not responsible for their own action or destiny. Abani works against this view, posing a disturbing question about human nature. As his child soldier observes: ‘If we are the great innocents in this war, then where did we learn all the evil we practice? I have seen rebel scouts cut off their enemies’ ears or fingers or toes and keep them in tin cans as souvenirs. Some collect teeth, which they thread painstakingly into necklaces. Who taught us this? Who taught me to enjoy killing, a singular joy that is perhaps rivaled only by an orgasm?’ (SN, 133). To tackle such harrowing questions, the novella challenges the rules of mimesis and the conventions of literary realism in favour of experimental modes of expression and representation. Perhaps the most relevant trait of Abani’s writing about child soldiers is his innovative take on the question of ‘narrative voice’ put by Mengestu: he does give a speaking platform to his young character, who can thus narrate war from his own personal viewpoint, but at the same time he severs his vocal cords. The complexity of this choice is reflected in a narrative that forces the limits of spoken and written communication across different languages (English/Igbo), and requires the reader to ‘hear’ and take in, through an act of telepathic attunement, the ghostly voice of a boy who joins a fighting platoon at twelve and, when he starts to tell his story three years later, is already dead. The initial address to the reader or listener problematises the question of communication as speech, and is key to one of the main themes of the text, drawing attention to ‘relationality’, specifically during and after the violence of war. My Luck, the first-person narrator of the story, is a shell-shocked child soldier wandering in a surreal landscape after being separated from his platoon during a mine blast. His search for lost comrades constitutes the basic storyline of the text which, however, presents a highly fragmented non-linear structure, in tune with the fragmentation caused by the explosion of the landmine and its severe impact on the memory of the concussed child leader of the military unit. The first narrative line is frequently interrupted by flashbacks referring to the character’s childhood before the onset of hostilities and in the early stages of the war, and it is in these temporal digressions, which disclose My Luck’s personal experiences and

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inner life, that the narrative increasingly finds its main focus and raison d’être. As My Luck wanders through the war-ridden wilderness of an unnamed African country, both the reader and the child narrator gradually come to realise that this is a mythical and metaphysical journey of self-discovery, forcing him to face the desires, fears, shame, and guilt he has experienced as a boy soldier. Unlike child-soldier stories such as Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation or Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, which end with the possibility for the no-longer-innocent child to go back to the social world after the end of the war – thus turning the narrative into a fictional process of Bildung and development into social citizenship4  – Song for Night does not contemplate this way out. It is rather a failed coming-of-age story or, as My Luck realises, a grotesque parody of coming-of-age: ‘I have never been a boy. That was stolen from me and I will never be a man – not this way. I am some kind of chimera who knows only the dreadful intimacy of killing’ (SN, 133). My Luck is given no possibility of rejoining his lost platoon, and his journey ends when he is reunited with his mother in death. As an early reviewer observes, the child is a disposable human being, having been trained as a minesweeper and ‘specifically in the art of dying as quietly and anonymously as possible’.5 He dies on the battlefield without even realising it at first, and it is no wonder that, while searching for his lost platoon, he is often mistaken for a spirit. As the story unfolds, he encounters other ghosts and figures of the living dead: ‘Here we believe that when a person dies in a sudden and hard way, their spirit wanders confused looking for its body. Confused because they don’t realize they are dead. I know this. Traditionally a shaman would ease such a spirit across to the other world. Now, well, the land is crowded with confused spirits and all the shamans are soldiers’ (SN, 99). Hit by the explosion of a mine, My Luck dies in such a ‘sudden and hard way’ and he is in fact one of these confused spirits. Eventually he finds his own shaman, an old man called Peter who appears ‘like a lifeboat’ (SN, 101) to help him on his journey – not back to ‘life’, but to recover a sense of cultural belonging, of connection to and responsibility for others (according to a vision of responsible connectedness to all that lives and to what lives on in memory) before he acknowledges his own

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death. To do this he has to start a backward-moving journey: ‘I am retracing my steps through places we passed. Something is off about it though, and yet as much as it is nagging at me, I cannot pinpoint what it is exactly, but I know it has something to do with the chronology of my memories’ (SN, 46–7). At one point of this journey he realises that ‘something is keeping me here’ (SN, 55) and that he is ‘mostly moving from one scene of past trauma to another, the distances between them, though vast, have collapsed the span of a thought, and my platoon is ever elusive. I am thoroughly c­ onfused’ (SN, 137).

The sound of silence ‘What you hear is not my voice’, My Luck says at the beginning of Song for Night. ‘I have not spoken in three years: not since I left boot camp’ (SN, 9). Part of the practices concerning mine defusers in the army he has joined is to take away the child soldiers’ voices, so that they may not scare each other with their death screams and avoid any risky distraction from their job. Bereft of language, the children experience the horror around them as an inner sound blast: ‘in the silence of our heads, the screams of those dying around us were louder than if they still had their voices’ (SN, 25). To replace lost speech they invent a sign language – a highly meaningful metalanguage which, as Francesca Giommi points out, becomes ‘a tool of resistance and self-assertion […] more powerful than any human verbal language’.6 The children’s sign language in fact structures the text itself. It can be said that what we hear in the opening section is actually the sound of ‘silence’, speech having been replaced by bodily gestures. The title of the section, ‘Silence is a steady hand, palm flat’, seems to be an injunction for the reader to stop and listen, while silencio, the Spanish word for silence the soldiers use in situations of real danger, encourages an even ‘deeper silence’ and, therefore, deeper listening (SN, 10). Having created silence around and within the reader or listener, so that she or he may meet the maimed child soldier on the same ground, the story may begin. The words in the titles of the thirty-six sections of the novella repeatedly foreground parts of the body (hands, eyes, fingers,

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­ ngertips, cheeks, ears, palms, nose, thumbs, head, face, forearms, fi arms, chin, heart) and signal that the children’s sign code is connected pragmatically to their physical survival: ‘Our job is too intense for idle chatter’ (SN, 10). At the same time the linguistic use of the body and its performativity in the titles, as they accumulate in My Luck’s narration, shapes the narrative and is mostly responsible for the poetic creativity of Song for Night. Abani employs lyric and hybridises the prose narrative, because multiple forms of expression are needed to begin to ‘say’ the unspeakable horrors of war. The musicality of the headings of the sections – ‘Memory is a pattern cut into an arm’, ‘Dawn is two hands parting before a face’, ‘Love is a backhanded stroke to the cheek’ – divide the narrative flow via a deliberate poetics, employing classical techniques of parallelism and chiasmus that call attention to the lyrical elements within the prose. The titles, Alexandra Schultheis Moore and Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg point out, are one manifestation of the deeper human syntax for which Abani searches in his literary and ethical exploration, ‘a language desperately inscribed on and expressed through the body after the voice has literally been cut off’.7 The ‘translation’ of the children’s sign language into poetic words is a product of the ‘interior monologue’ that erupts from ‘the interiority of the head’ of the child soldier, as ‘there is something about the mind’s interiority no less that opens up your view of the world. It is a curious place to live and makes you deep beyond your years and familiar with death’ (SN, 11). Far from being basic or limited to military actions, it is a highly sophisticated expressive means and resembles one of the ‘languages of life’ that Mbembe talks about in On the Postcolony: languages that contain a whole ‘life world’ which ‘is not only the field where individuals’ existence unfolds in practice; it is where they exercise existence – that is, live their lives out and confront the very forms of their death’.8 The communicative strategy by which we can hear the child soldier’s language of life is the challenge of ‘gain[ing] access’ to his head (SN, 11). This complicates the status of the written text as well as of the sign language, which are somehow asked to ‘disappear’ or move into the background when a different – psychic or spiritual – form of communication between the child soldier and his ‘listeners’ starts. From the point of view of narrative efficacy,

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this seems an unlikely strategy, but, alongside invoking the close attention and proximity of the reader or listener, it addresses the question of the author’s presence in the text, pointing to Abani’s desire not to ‘ventriloquize’ the child soldier’s state of abjection, as he explains in an interview: I chose to give him no voice because children, and particularly children like him, always have others speaking for them. I chose to take away his voice to force the reader into a visceral journey with him rather than the spectacle of watching his suffering. I chose to take away his voice to force myself to not be able to take credit for speaking for him, or others in such situations. I took away his voice because it has been a practice in certain wars. I took away his voice so the readers couldn’t speak for him and thus distance themselves.9

The writer expresses his desire to move away from a long-standing novel tradition, initiated by Daniel Defoe at the beginning of the eighteenth century, in which the master-I-narrator Robinson ventriloquises his black servant Friday, to produce the acceptable image of the ‘good’ native, servant, or subaltern. A similar critique informs the South African author J. M. Coetzee’s rewriting of Robinson Crusoe, one of the most enduring master narratives of colonial Europe’s taking possession of the world during and after the age of great discoveries. His Foe (1986) is a ‘novella’ about the complexities of imposing one’s own story and one’s own assumptions upon a radical other that ultimately not only remains inaccessible but also refuses to be written about. Coetzee’s Friday does not speak and will never speak because his tongue appears to have been cut off by his capturers – an amputation that, similarly to My Luck’s severed vocal cords, prevents ‘voice’ and oral communication. He is thus a question mark, a black hole in the narrative, which the woman who takes him to London to have his story written is unable to fill and that Daniel Foe, the writer figure, will turn (not in Coetzee’s fiction but historically) into a properly domesticated voice. However, if speechless Friday and speechless My Luck share a life of silence and subalternity, Abani tackles the problem of representation in a way that moves contrary to the (white) South African author’s. He takes on the risk of giving justice to the boy soldier, he is ready to face the ‘impossibility of representation’ that he poses,

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by refusing to mimic a character who is far beyond mimesis, and by giving him a distinctive voice. Connected to this risky project is the highly worldly and literary English of his character’s interior monologue, which actually goes on in Igbo in the child’s head. Unlike what happens in Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy or Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation, where the boy soldiers speak in ‘rotten English’ (Saro-Wiwa) or a kind of experimental literary pidgin (Iweala), My Luck, as a wandering spirit, freely uses an artificial and adult dreamlike language, so capacious as to include literary and historical references, as well as a nonchalant comparison to Robinson Crusoe (SN, 55). As the result of a series of acts of translation and transmission, the speech that we finally hear reaches out to a global readership, in tune with Abani’s intention of unmooring the narrative and letting its critical message loose upon the world.10 My Luck regains his speaking voice at the very end of the novel when he is reunited with his mother. This post-mortem embrace closes the narrative arc of the boy’s odyssey and opens to a number of inspired critical readings. Among them I would like to single out the interpretations which see My Luck’s completed journey and monologue as Abani’s critique of a politics of wholeness, authenticity, and purity, which dovetails neatly with the text’s formal features and representation strategies, and allows an analysis of the stigma connected to sexuality and gender in relation to the child soldier.11 Of particular interest are also interventions that highlight the text’s creative engagement with a postcolonial discourse about (African) life after necropolitics and its attempt to reduce the human to bare life.12 Arguing that ‘the discourse of biopolitics misses a whole dimension of both postcolonial resistance as well as its aftermaths’, critics appropriately ask what comes after the nightmare of colonial domination and postcolonial conflicts: ‘What is the after? The after is full of emotions, affects, and modes of being not credited in the analytics of power, violence, biopolitics, and devastation. From the perspective of the colonized, one cannot afford to stop hoping or believing.’13 This is a perspective that Song for Night invites us to think about and build on. Wandering through a desolate dark forest devastated by war (registering the impact of violence on the environment), My Luck sadly considers that much of the generation surviving the war will

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not be able to rebuild their communities because many of the parts won’t add up. Wherever he turns, he encounters disfigured creatures, madmen, ruined children with ‘bulbous heads pendulous over hunger-distended bellies with eyes washed out like the earth here’ (SN, 80), and women missing body parts. Unbelievably however, all of them are holding on to life and hope, all of them want to survive beyond the aftermath of war. The ‘after’, for Abani, includes the life force of irrepressible childhood that claims its future, and the power of young (female) bodies disabled by war that relearn how to dance with others. A passage from the novella gestures towards the emergence of postwar, post-traumatic identities through the image of a little girl: There were a bunch of disabled children dancing in a circle. A young girl with one leg standing off to the side leaning on a stick made fun of the dancers. Challenged to do better, she laughed, threw the stick away, and jumped into the circle. She stood still for a moment as though she was getting her bearings, and then she began to move. Still balanced on one leg, her waist began a fierce gyration and her upper body moved the opposite way. Then like a crazy heron, she began to hop around, her waist and torso still shaking. She was an elemental force of nature. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. I have never seen anything like it before or since – a small fire sprite shaking the world and reducing grown war-hardened onlookers to tears. (SN, 40–1)

Abani seems to imply that histories of trauma, whether individual or national, must shake the world, and cannot be repressed or recuperated through normalisation; ‘they must become the source of transformation, and a new politics, a new dance’ in which, Brenna Munro stresses, ‘damage is honored rather than stigmatized’.14 This new dance and new politics will honour bodily damage, gender damage, and the psychic damage coming from the violent interruption of childhood and intergenerational caesuras. There is always hope, My Luck says, even in the middle of war: ‘I remember a group I saw once. Children without arms or legs or both, men with only half a face, women with shrapnel-chewed scars for breasts – all of them holding onto life and hope with a fire that burned feverishly in their eyes. If any light comes from this war, it will come from eyes such as those’ (SN, 40).



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More specifically, hope in Song for Night comes from the persistence of love – mother love, erotic love – and from fragmented, foggy memories of one’s own cultural identity, such as the ‘tall tale’ or ‘legend’ about the ‘lake in the middle of the world’ which, My Luck’s grandfather explains, is the heart of the Igbo people. ‘This lake is love. If you find it […] you can climb it into the very heart of God,’ he said. ‘Where is this lake, Grandfather?’ He tapped me on the breastbone. ‘Here. It is at the center of you, because you are the world.’ ‘How will I find it?’ He taught me a song. We sang it over and over, together, for the rest of the night until I couldn’t tell where his voice ended and mine began, and where mine ended and the river began and where the river ended and my blood began. But I have forgotten that song. (SN, 63–4)

The prewar culture stresses a communion between generations, between the souls of human beings, of nature and the cosmos that, as we gather from My Luck’s forgetting the song, has gone lost during the war. Still, the narrative suggests that some (other) vision of community is necessary for future healing. That is why My Luck’s forgotten song and the crazy-heron little girl and ‘fire sprite’ inspire Sam Durrant’s ‘Mbembean’ reading of Song for Night as an exemplary instance of ‘spirit-writing’ – a writing that ‘reancestralizes’ the world through multiple acts of association or accompaniment of creatures inhabiting the same damaged planet, across different times and physical or spiritual states: it is not simply that nonhuman animals have souls too, but that they might have our souls. Not that we all have identical souls, but that, as My Luck discovers afloat on the River Cross, we cannot say where ‘our’ souls end and ‘theirs’ begin. Our soulfulness, our resistance to the deanimating forces of necropolitical modernity, depends on the remembrance of our relationality, our crossing, or what Herman Melville once termed our ‘mortal inter-indebtedness’.15

For Durrant the possibility of life beyond necropolitics depends on the ability to acknowledge an expanded idea of ‘ancestry or filiation’.16

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I will go back to this point and also to other outstanding critical readings in the following sections of this chapter. For now I would just like to note that the reception of Song for Night has been remarkably insightful right from its publication, and that interest on the part of literary scholars has given rise to a suggestive body of criticism, which includes discussions of its genre and formal features, its connections to other child soldiers narratives, allegorical postcolonial readings, trauma and gender studies readings, psychological and ethical analyses, assessments of the role of the child in literature, as well as the novella’s position in relation to current debates over human-rights-oriented approaches to literature and child soldiers in human rights discourse.17

Fucked watches, hybrid spaces, river crossings Song for Night, which an early review defines as ‘part Inferno, part Paradise Lost and part Sundiata Epic’,18 troubles conventional expectations concerning the categories of space and time that, as this study shows, are central to Abani’s work. All the physical and temporal settings of his fiction – slumping Lagos, peripheral London, fighting Igboland, suburban Los Angeles, Apartheid Johannesburg, the radiating Nevada desert – influence the characters’ understandings of their present and their possibilities for the future. But temporal and spatial dimensions are mostly conveyed, with varying degrees of abstraction, through the protagonists’ sense of their own ambiguous positionings. In Song for Night both time and space are very loose co-ordinates, and My Luck is in fact lost. The unnamed death-ridden war zones he traverses are fictional battlefields of an ongoing struggle for survival, which at first ­ appear to be outside any recognisable history and location. This is certainly because My Luck reconstructs them in his head and with a silent voice that gives an otherworldly quality to his perceptions of where and when his experiences occur. Moreover, abstraction from reality  is part of Abani’s aims of foregrounding this story about children involved in killing, raping, looting as an expression of the extreme insanity of any (African) war. He confirms that the setting ‘is meant to be non nation-specific. It is region-specific. It’s

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West Africa.’19 Distance from the specifics of a recognisable conflict has the power to transcend the local while encompassing it at the same time; by presenting war as a potential pandemic, it brings attention  to the global relevance of the issues addressed. Finally, abstraction is also motivated by Abani’s attempt to re-enchant life after war, which turns My Luck’s silent narrative into a song that illuminates the darkness of night. The author never mentions the name of the country in which his novella takes place, although its setting is clearly a Nigerian one, nor does he erase the historicity of the events he fictionalises, but rather reinvents contexts that are historically and socially recognisable. Eleni Coundouriotis correctly states that the lack of historical specifics in the novella suggests ‘the kind of flattening out of time that occurs in memory where the past is part of the present consciousness’.20 However, Song for Night is not as temporally or geographically unspecific as she suggests. The text refers clearly to an Igbo geographical and cultural setting and to events connected to the Nigerian Civil War of 1967–70. An entire section of the novella revolves around a legend of the Igbo (SN, 59–64); there are allusions to ‘progroms against the Igbos’ (SN, 83); a racist joke involving Igbo, Yoruba, and Hausa construction workers (SN, 81); a reference to a new area in the Muslim north of Nigeria called ‘Sabon Gari’, meaning the infidel’s quarter (SN, 86); and to the River Cross, the main  watercourse  in south-eastern  Nigeria. The fact that Abani also includes ‘references to Lexus cars’ or Star Wars does not constitute sufficient evidence to claim that ‘it cannot be Biafra in 1967’.21 Song for Night remains a loose artistic reinvention of a Nigerian historical moment, which the reader is invited to move beyond and extend both temporally and spatially. Abani’s song thus resonates locally and globally, historically and ­allegorically, physically and metaphysically.22

Fucked watches My Luck has a difficult relationship with time. It slips away and he is obsessed by his inability to keep it. At the beginning of the story he provides information about the time of his fighting in the war, his age, Ijeoma’s age, and her death ‘a year ago’ – but these

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t­emporal references are not anchored chronologically and fail to communicate a clear timeline of the events. I have not spoken in three years: not since I left boot camp. It has been three years of a senseless war […]. It is a strange place to be at fifteen, bereft of hope and very nearly of your humanity […] I joined up at twelve […] If you are anything like Ijeoma you will say that I sound too old for my age. She always said that: said, because although her name in Igbo means Good Life, she died young, a year ago, aged fourteen. (SN, 9–10)

Though temporal phrases multiply, the positioning of characters and events in time remains vague and, as observed in a critical contribution on Song for Night’s ‘trauma aesthetics’, the intrusive yet ambiguous temporal markers ‘betray anxiety’ and prelude to a growing detachment of the character/narrator from shared conventions of time-keeping.23 Early in the text we find My Luck’s own explanation of this temporal disorientation, which he ascribes to his muteness: ‘I am better versed at the interior monologue that is really the measure of age, of the passage of time’ (SN, 11). Lack of speech turns temporality into a purely subjective dimension, disconnected from conventional (and social) ways of ‘measuring’ time. The violent severance of his  vocal cords is the trauma of voicelessness that My Luck, in his sign language, equates to death in the section describing the violent  surgery the child soldiers undergo at the training camp: ‘Death is two fingers sliding across the throat’ (SN, 21). The silencing of the organ of speech – that permits ‘voice’ as individual expression and agency within social forms of ­interaction – is a mutilation also of his sense of time and severs him from temporal organisation and the linear progression of past, present, and future. He is aware that time eludes him, and thinks ‘some kind of calendar’ may be useful to keep track of the passing days (SN, 27). Though at a later stage of the narrative he invokes Robinson Crusoe as a reference for his isolation and fear in the tropical forest, he will never follow Defoe’s character’s example of marking time, consequently losing ‘all sense of time’ (SN, 104). Psychologically the child soldier turns inward and time stands still, just like his ‘fucked’ Timex wristwatch.

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The symbolic presence in the narrative of My Luck’s ‘most treasured possession’ (SN, 44) elaborates on the question of inner and outer temporal frames. The boy is deeply attached to the once golden-plated watch that belonged to his father and that his Uncle let him inherit, presumably because it was ‘already broken’ (SN, 43). The value of the object, denoting the connection between father and son, is clearly affective, while its time-keeping function is irrelevant: The watch has one of those expanding bracelets made of a metal that was painted gold once, and its face is a mottled brown. Since I’ve had it, the second and hour hands have fallen off, both nestling like tired armatures in the bottom of the cracked glass case. My life it turns out is a series of minutes. I glance and guess it’s about noon now. (SN, 43, my emphasis)

The useless watch reveals nothing about time: it leaves My Luck ‘guessing’ the time of day, and its progressive deterioration parallels the distancing of the boy from the time of the living. His perplexing subjective temporality is reflected in episodes that unhinge the narrative itself, because sometimes time stops and other times it runs too fast, as when My Luck tries to catch up with his platoon by riding a train, but when he gets off years have passed in what felt like seconds: When I turn back to look at the station, by some trick of the light the train has rusted over, the station fallen into ruin, and the bombed-out track coiled in on itself like spaghetti and covered in vegetation that crawls everywhere in a rush of green. I know it can’t be true though, I just came from there. Mirages are common here, I think, shaking it off. (SN, 139)

Such hallucinatory experiences, Hamish Dalley comments, undermine ‘the hope that a universal dating system could contain My Luck’s memories. Song for Night is thus “coiled in on itself” like the ruined railway line, refusing to project an integrating temporality that would mediate its contradictory sociocultural spaces’.24 The time of the mind does not obey any rules and reminds us that My Luck is a ghost moving through liminal temporal and spatial dimensions in search for much more than his fellow mine defusers.

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In his interior monologue the collapse of temporality as a collective exercise coincides with the manifestation of unruly and individual psychic or spiritual states that also transform outer perceptions of ‘the real’. At the same time it is the precondition for renewed kinds of connections with the spiritual/magical dimensions that the ­narrative foregrounds.

Hybrid spaces Any analysis of the category of space apart from the category of time may appear nonsensical, but what follows is closely connected to the previous section and is a necessary step in order to come to see the innovative chronotopic image of the man/child Abani offers in the novella. As Mikhail Bakhtin reminds us, the intersection of temporal and spatial axes and indicators is a formally constitutive category of literature, to the point that it defines genre and generic distinctions because, he says, ‘the chronotope as a formally constitutive category determines to a significant degree the image of man in literature as well. The image of man is always intrinsically chronotopic.’25 Song for Night explores and exploits to the full the possible narrative intersections of time and space, and from a distanced critical position from any rational, enlightenment-derived vision or form of representation. Durrant notices that in Song for Night ‘there is not even the illusion of progress’, and I agree that ‘this suspension of time is paradoxically the condition for radical spiritual renewal, insofar as it allows My Luck the time to inherit himself’.26 The novella’s two interweaving narrative lines – of the child soldier acting and moving through time and space in the first, and of the lost soul migrating from the body of a casualty on the battlefield in the second – contain different but intersecting temporal and spatial indicators, with varying degrees of realism and abstraction that finally border on the surreal. Both in the past that My Luck tries to remember and in his spiritual journey towards accepting death he is presented as standing on the threshold (limen) between many incompatible worlds. He is part of them all, and yet does not fully belong to any. I will focus just on one paradigmatic example of a liminal space in the novella. Before joining the army My Luck lived in a northern Sabon Gari, a



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strangers’ quarters inhabited by the Christian Igbos who, like him, resided in the predominantly Muslim north of the country. This is because he is the son of an Igbo imam, a ‘gentle man’ (SN, 53) who decided at a very young age to embrace Islam. My Luck’s father is repeatedly punished for daring to challenge established sociocultural boundaries: he is excluded from both religious communities and, finally, killed. My Luck reflects that it was a terrible thing in this divided nation, even in its infancy, for an Igbo man to be a Muslim […] Everyone hated the mosque, sitting as it did by decree of the Saraduana in the midst of the Christian enclave. Everyone hated my father […] For a long time I hated my father too, but since he died, I have been trying to love him. (SN, 82)

The imam is murdered, as the Igbo press says, by ‘other Muslims because he married a Catholic’ (SN, 100, emphasis in the original). He meets a violent death while in a trance that has put him in ‘communion with angels and jinn’ (SN, 145), in a place – his deserted mosque – that is a quintessential liminal hybrid site, a locus twice excluded from the city, a space whose sacredness is not a sufficient deterrent against homicide. The ‘unacceptable’ hybridity that causes My Luck’s father’s death will nevertheless prove a safety net for the boy during the anti-Igbo riots he is involved in, recalling the massacres that took place in Nigeria from 1966 onwards and triggered the onset of the civil war. Abani draws on stories from the conflict, telling how the victims of violence were often asked to prove their belonging to a specific ethnic or religious group by speaking a certain language or reciting a certain prayer. The writer’s revision of these moments of intercultural tension, played out in inflamed and deeply divided urban spaces, becomes visible when My Luck, trying to escape the incensed mob chasing the Igbo ‘infidels’, flees in the direction of the city’s railway station. The Igbo boy, who speaks fluent Hausa, is stopped and asked to sing the Muslim call to prayer. It is by virtue of having lived in cultural and physical hybrid spaces and by being his ‘hybrid’ father’s son that he survives: In my best voice I began the call to prayer. A hush descended on the crowd as my voice went from a childish soprano to a cracked and

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smoky alto and then back again. The cracks teased some with memories of loves lost and dreams turned rancid. To others it was a caress that burned. Finally, unable to stand it any longer, a man screamed: ‘Stop! Somebody tell him to stop!’ (SN, 87)

The ‘cracks’ in My Luck’s voice signal that the boy is singing from a space that is inherently liminal and, in this specific instance, decidedly ‘queer’: the space of the child who is becoming a man. And these ‘cracks’, the passage suggests, have the power to speak to and revive a common humanity of loves, dreams, and caresses. Hybridity, as ‘the in-between space’ that carries the burden of a culture,27 is at the same time a space of death and renewal, of pain and creativity in Abani’s representation. In Song for Night hybridity is a threat to the maintenance of a given social order, but it is also survival, linked to the creative potential that comes from moving across different states and ways of being. Having lived in often violent and sorrowfully divided third spaces of ­confrontation–negotiation–transformation, My Luck embodies the chronotopic image of the human being on the border, a liminal spatial category that is difficult to embrace and that is constantly shifting, but may also guarantee the continuation of life by other means.

River crossings The last threshold My Luck has to negotiate on his journey to the otherworld is the one between the world of the living and the world of the ancestors, an in-between space par excellence. For most of the narrative he is stuck in a sort of limbo, an interval ‘of living on the edge of death’ (SN, 108), which coincides with the time of dying, or the agonising process of his soul relinquishing life before it may finally rest. The final step before reaching the spiritual world is the negotiation of the River Cross. ‘We all have to cross it someday’ (SN, 103), says Peter the African shaman figure, who is also the fisher of men, the guardian of the Gates of Heaven, and the keeper of its keys in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The River Cross is one of the many watercourses that appear in Abani’s works. It is described as

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No words for violence? Song for Night 131 a breathtaking river over two miles wide, in many places etched out of the horizon only by the line of palm trees on the opposite bank […] There are many tales about how the Cross got its name. There are always many tales here, Grandfather said. Don’t trust any of them, he always cautioned. Trust all of them, he warned. Some say it got its name because the Igbos are Hebrews who wandered down to West Africa from Judea and some of them brought fragments of Christ’s Cross with them. Some say it is because in the past the Igbo used to crucify thieves and murderers on its bank. Some say it was named after the frustrated British engineer who worked for the Colonial Service Works Department. Not that he was named Cross. Just that he refused to make sacrifices to placate the water spirits, so the mother of them, the mami-wata, pushed down every bridge the man tried to build across it to link the first colonial capital of Calabar with the hinterlands. (SN, 60)

Like the Thames in Becoming Abigail or the Los Angeles River in The Virgin of Flames,28 the River Cross is a figure of liminality and the transience of all that exists. As Grandfather says, its mythical status and power in West Africa is the product of ‘local’ tales that are also ‘global’, none of which is true, but all of which are if taken together. My Luck cannot escape the magnetism of the river, which gradually takes on a greater significance than simply a geographical marker. When he reaches it, however, he is not ready for the crossing. To enter the spiritual world he first has to undergo purification or, as Peter suggests, he has to find within himself the light the old man sees in him: ‘You have all the light you need inside you’ (SN, 104). The light may only come from retrieving and reliving memories that will allow My Luck to face his awful deeds and guilt. His monologue thus becomes a cleansing ritual that washes away the dirt that ‘will not wash off with water’ (SN, 129), and, when he realises that ‘if water won’t wash me clean, hope might’ (SN, 130), his search for redemption moves from the physical to the spiritual level, and the light he is looking for starts to pour from within his own body. The darkness/light metaphysical dynamics is one of the most important unifying motifs in the text. The metaphorical night that engulfs My Luck at the outbreak of the hostilities should not be confused with that ‘one long night of savagery’ that Achebe sees in colonialist discourses on Africa.29 On the contrary it is a darkness

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that may, and must, be confronted in order to move on, as Ijeoma explains to My Luck: ‘These are memories. Before we can move from here, we have to relive and release our darkness’ (SN, 94). It is for this reason that My Luck’s night is still ‘full of stars’ (SN, 79), of tiny dots of light that, like beacons, will hopefully lead him to the path he has lost. Understanding ‘how far into darkness’ human beings can go ‘and still find their way back to light’ and, even more importantly, ‘how much [it is] necessary for there to be darkness for the concept of light to exist’ is a central question posed in Song for Night.30 The predicament of the child character shows that guilt and redemption are two sides of the same coin, or that redemption is inextricably connected to the darkness of My Luck’s guilt. At the beginning of his journey into the good and bad memories of his life My Luck gropes in the dark. ‘Night blends into day blends into night, seamlessly’ (SN, 55), but ‘even in daylight [… he is] plagued by vivid nightmares’ (SN, 56, my emphasis). Although he manages to sleep, rest eludes him, because he cannot forget the day when he saw a group of old women’s cannibalistic feast, and ‘the little face, maybe a few months old’ of the baby they were eating (SN, 18–19). My Luck, however, slowly comes to realise that even sins can be ‘luminous’ (SN, 147), thus learning to forgive his weaknesses and to proceed towards redemption: This morning, unaccountably, I am filled with an almost unbearable lightness. This light comes not from a sudden wholeness on my part, but from the very wounds I carry on my body and in my soul. Each wound, in its particular way, giving off a particular and peculiar light. (SN, 141)

Darkness and light are inseparable from the exertion of memory, or rather ‘rememory’, in My Luck’s monologue. What Toni Morrison calls rememory may be seen at work in Abani’s novella as well: ‘Rememory as in recollecting and remembering as in reassembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past’; rememory as a sort of traumatic memory, that is ‘the struggle, the pitched battle between remembering and forgetting’, which constitutes the narrative strategy in her novel Beloved.31 Like Morrison, Abani stresses ‘remembering, its inevitability, the chances for ­liberation that lie within the process’.32

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“Embodied” memories are part of this same process in Song for Night. ‘Memory is a pattern cut into an arm’, the title of the fourth section of the novella declares (SN, 27). Just like the trafficked girl in Becoming Abigail, My Luck resorts to scarification to inscribe memories of the dead on his body, carving crosses and Xs into his left and right forearms. The crosses are for his grandfather, father, mother, friends, and comrades-in-arms, ‘twenty in total. Eighteen are friends or relatives, as I said, but two were strangers. One was for the seven-year-old girl I shot by accident, the other for the baby whose head haunts my dreams’ (SN, 29). On his right forearm there are six carved Xs, for the people he ‘enjoyed killing’: his Uncle, the old women eating a baby, and John Wayne (SN, 29; see below for the soldier John Wayne). My Luck keeps touching and rubbing and troubling his ‘Braille cemetery’ as a way of grounding himself in a story that he may finally acknowledge as his own, whether he has suffered violence or perpetrated it, whether it was his responsibility or someone else’s, whether he is innocent or guilty or both. These tiny acts of self-harm are ‘ways of remaining embodied’ or ‘a mnemonic device for reestablishing bodily connection’,33 but they are also ‘like a map of my consciousness, something that brings me back from the brink of war madness’ (SN, 15). This embodied map of Xs and crosses contributes to keep him in touch with the dead, to face his fear of the dark waters of the River Cross and embark on a vessel, which is actually a coffin, when the final moment of releasing his darkness comes. My Luck has no control of the coffin: ‘it spins around like a leaf turning in the eddy’ (SN, 155). It is only when he gives up his attempts to direct the course of the vessel, of his existence and of a senseless war – giving up the effort of rejoining his lost platoon, acknowledging his tiredness and letting everything else go – ‘Fuck this war’ and ‘Fuck it all’ – that he finally reaches the other shore.

Boys, girls, and love among the ruins ‘Love is a backhanded stroke to the cheek’, the title of the ninth section of My Luck’s monologue asserts; it is a gentle gesture you choose to make, to show that you desire and care for the other.

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Remembering in a dream the first time he made love, the boy muses: ‘I dream of Ijeoma and the night I lost my virginity to her. It is true that I had already had sex by then: John Wayne had forced me to rape someone, but that didn’t count. That was sex, rape, this was love: this was choice’ (SN, 49). The idea of love being a conscious acting out of one’s feelings, in contrast to forced sex or rape, is described in the rest of the section, in which My Luck tries to reconstruct what happened after his involvement in the rape episode that, even more than killing, determines the loss of his innocence. In the evening, while the rest of the platoon are roasting a goat, Ijeoma takes him to the river and washes his feet and his face. This cleansing ritual resembling a baptism is followed by Ijeoma’s inviting him to join her in the river. My Luck is scared of the dark waters, resists the girl’s invitation, and sits on the shore, feeling strangely relieved and unconcerned: although he no longer knows what innocence is, in that ‘sensual but childlike’ moment ‘it seems attainable’ again (SN, 50). Then Ijeoma gets out of the water, kneels by the boy, kisses him, and initiates their lovemaking. The passivity of My Luck in this episode, which inverts the rape scene, comments on the question of choice and consent as defining features of love, as well as on gender roles. Here the boy does not choose or impose himself on Ijeoma, but ‘is chosen’ by the girl, who cleanses his body, repairs his broken soul, and teaches him a kind of love that is the opposite of war: ‘You should stop fighting now’, she enjoins (SN, 50). Ijeoma is an active agent of survival and peace: though involved in a senseless war that will kill her, she performs those small acts of compassion and love that Abani believes may save us. What’s more, she ‘chooses’ whom to love, whose side to stand on, to withstand the violence surrounding them, and My Luck ‘freely consents’ to her irresistible saving power. The relationship between the two critiques the grammar of imposed gender roles, redistributing agency and queering gender conventions to resist the necropolitical power that destroys their lives and devastates the local communities. This is not the only experience of love in My Luck’s short life, or the only moment in which he seamlessly shifts from his ‘manly’ adherence to the logic of fighting and killing to his embrace of behaviours and perspectives exemplified by the women in his life, as well as ‘eccentric’ male figures like his father.

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My Luck moves in and experiences the full impact of the suspension of codes of social and moral conduct in the state of exception that is war, when men and women and children find themselves behaving and acting in unexpected ways, some rules are exacerbated and others exploded, violence and death reign, and everything gets unmoored. ‘War is another queer thing’, Ken Saro-Wiwa says in Sozaboy,34 his extraordinary prototypical example of an anti-war child soldier narrative, and in Song for Night the traumatic experience of war in fact seems to work as a ‘queering’ agent, where ‘queer’ broadly signifies the destabilising of identity categories designed to produce stereotypical behaviours, and a critical standpoint that acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm. Abani questions conventional ideas of the sexed or gendered subject, as well as the innocence/experience and power/ powerlessness dichotomies, and observes how war dismantles any fantasy of purity, whether cultural, national, or sexual. As a positionality vis-à-vis the normative – a positionality that is available to anyone who responds ‘differently’ to ‘normal’ sexual practices – in Song for Night ‘queer’ may include the rituals of thirteen-yearold children such as My Luck and Ijeoma, making desperate love among the ruins of war. Abani does not stigmatise unconventional behaviours as perversions: he is more interested in the eccentric position occupied by the queer subject, for its potential to review the relations among power, desire, and survival. I am not sure whether we can say, with the critic Brenna Munro, that this is part of ‘the queer project’ of the African writers who have engaged with the child soldier narrative,35 but the author’s oeuvre is definitely intent on dismantling stereotypical behaviours and thinking, as well as representations of life that cover its complex hybridity and constant transformation. To understand the transformative power of his writing, readers need to suspend their disbelief and prejudices and let the shaman lead them to often uncomfortable levels of vision. The novella is full of references to patriarchy and hegemonic masculinity in the prewar society and during the civil conflict, which My Luck suffers, observes, and analyses a posteriori.36 Abani’s literary texts often present Oedipal struggles between main characters and paternal figures embodying and upholding compulsory gender

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roles. In GraceLand, for example, Elvis deconstructs masculinity through performance, a manner that pits him against fatherhood and all it represents – origins, authority, legitimacy – and against his own father, who stands for a world defined by ‘biological inheritance, maleness, which is an a priori signifier of specific goals and attitudes of socialization’.37 Abani’s troubled relationship with his own father may represent a biographical source of reference for this reflection on the question of gender expectations in the Nigerian or West African context. As discussed in Chapter 1, he suffered his father’s violence for his i­nability to meet traditional standards of maleness from a very young age. He embodied a different kind of m ­ asculinity – which included writing poetry and reading about love in the texts of a homosexual writer who became his ‘guru’ – and this was ­incompatible with the patriarch’s normative ideas of gender propriety. As implied in his more autobiographical texts and as clearly stated in interviews,38 the father’s violence had nothing to do with the son’s sexual ­orientation: ‘I’m not gay so he couldn’t beat me up for that. So my version of masculinity was something he couldn’t accept. And he totally hated the idea of my writing. He burnt my first draft of my first book, we had a lot of domestic violence. He really kicked the crap out of us.’39 The author’s writing thrives on this early struggle against normativity, which is mirrored in the ambiguity of all his characters: ‘I play with sexuality in all my books’, he tells Colm Tóibín. ‘In  The Virgin of Flames, the protagonist wants to be a woman. I write my characters from the inside out. There’s no spectacle to it, so of course the first question is, Where is your body in relationship to this text? That always fascinates me.’40 Song for Night does not go that far, but it features both extreme patriarchal figures and less stereotypically defined male human beings. Inside My Luck’s family, male violence and social pressure for gender normativity find expression through the figure of the ‘Uncle’, who beats My Luck for loving crocheting and not wanting to ‘play the rough games like other boys’ (SN, 53), without anyone criticising or stopping his violent behaviour. This same violence he extends to the boy’s mother, whom he has claimed as his wife after the death of her husband – his brother – ‘in the name of some old

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custom’ (SN, 53). In Igbo customary law the practice of ‘­inheriting’ one’s brother’s wife is based on the belief that a woman is the property of her husband, and it supposedly aims at ‘protecting’ the widow (widowhood corresponding to a severe form of female social marginalisation) and exploiting her reproductive capacities to the fullest.41 In the experience of My Luck and his mother this practice does not socially ‘rescue’ them; instead they experience violence and subalternity (as well as marginalisation inside the family) as the victims of the Uncle’s callousness and of self-perpetuating sexist social norms. In the novella we see again the patterns of the dysfunctional patriarchal family reproduced in the workings of society, in this case inside the military structure that rules in times of war, where the perpetrator/victim binary affects relationships both inside the army and between the army and the civilians. Sexual violence is seen as an integral part of becoming a soldier, and My Luck operates under the control of a perverse black male adult figure of military authority who inducts him into it. However, the text takes an important stand against sexual assault and the equation of masculinity with dominance. In the war that My Luck has joined, Major Essein alias John Wayne is a compelling representation of necropower and an example of what Carrigan, Connell, and Lee call ‘hegemonic masculinity’, that is ‘a variety of masculinity’ which invariably subordinates others, not just women and children but ‘young and effeminate as well as homosexual men’ too.42 Song for Night interrogates the complexity of gender relations in the conflictual Nigerian context by focusing on the impact of war on gender formation and performance. The text is not only far from implying that all men are violent oppressors and that all women are victims, but definitely rejects the basic male/female dichotomy to point out that ­patriarchy  – as a  social system  in which men  hold  power and  control political leadership,  moral authority,  social privilege,  and p ­ roperty  – victimises both women and men. During childhood Abani’s boy soldier is exposed to different ways of being a man offered by his father and grandfather and, thanks to his mother, grows up protected from the gender expectations of patriarchy. He is thus bound to collide with them when the outside reality enters his family in the guise of his Uncle’s hegemonic ­masculinity and, later, when John Wayne

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defines his experience in the army. The Uncle and the commander use physical violence to induce boys to perform in a ‘manly’ way, and punish them when they do not. In military life, in particular, masculinity becomes hyper-masculinity, and ‘war provides the social space for its validation’.43 Song for Night’s John Wayne is presented as a caricature of a father figure: John Wayne bent down, arms spread, a father home from work, except he didn’t look like a father, more like a bird of prey. He picked up the seven year old girl and held her to his side. Something about him in that moment must have terrified her though, because she began to cry. ‘What is your name?’ he asked her. ‘Faith,’ she said,  still crying. John Wayne touched her face tenderly, and then when she smiled tentatively through her tears, he threw his head back and laughed. ‘This one is ripe. I will enjoy her,’ he said, looking right at me, as though he expected me to challenge him, like I did the first time he had forced me at gunpoint to rape someone. (SN, 30–1)

The commander has voracious and wide-ranging sexual appetites. He rapes grown women as well as children of both sexes and is a parody of the ‘real’ John Wayne, if we think of the famous actor as the icon of restrained masculinity in American cinema.44 The boys in his platoon perform the gender role assigned to them, enjoying the ensuing gratifications. During their raids in towns or villages they rape ‘the women and sometimes the men’ (SN, 76), ostensibly to assert control over their ‘enemies’. This form of male sexual violence that targets both women and men undermines and ‘queers’ the model of masculinity enforced by the commander, while the text points to the unforeseen transformations of sex and gender behaviours created by war. My Luck at first refuses to consider this destructive form of violation of innocent people as ‘warfare’. Therefore John Wayne, who disapproves of resistance on the part of ‘the only one who hasn’t raped anyone yet’ (SN, 75), forces him to rape a woman his mother’s age. The boy’s hesitation, also connected to his wondering what raping has to do with his mission to defuse mines, is interpreted as insubordination by the commander, who points a gun at his head: ‘Rape or die’ he orders. My Luck thus obeys and, as he climbs on to



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the woman, he is surprised by his erection and the sexual pleasure he feels. Having performed as expected of him and having enjoyed it, he unexpectedly finds himself in the uncomfortable position of being both a victim and a perpetrator of extreme male violence. The horror of the situation and of having responded physically is reinforced by the incest-like relation between the adult woman and the boy: I wondered how it was that I had an erection. Some part of me was enjoying it and that perhaps hurt me the most. I entered the woman and strangely she smiled. I moved, and as much as I wanted to pretend, I couldn’t lie, I enjoyed it. The woman’s eyes were tender, as if all they saw was a boy lost. She stroked my hair tenderly, whispering as I sobbed: ‘It’s all right son, it’s all right. Better the ones like you live.’ When I came, John Wayne laughed and put two rounds into the woman’s head, spraying my face with her blood. The woman died with that look of absolute tenderness in her eyes. (SN, 75–6)

The child soldier’s confession of enjoyment complicates the ‘innocence’ of the child forced to rape, but the woman’s miraculous forgiveness and insistence on his child status somewhat absolves him from his responsibility. After this traumatic event My Luck finds consolation in Ijeoma, who ‘saves’ him by becoming his girlfriend. So the not-yet-adult couple begin to have sex to avoid sexual violence: ‘whenever we raided a town or a village, whenever the others were raping the women and sometimes the men, Ijeoma and I made desperate love, crying as we came, but we did it to make sure that amongst all this horror, there was still love’ (SN, 76). As Munro observes, ‘this heterosexuality keeps My Luck at a distance, literally, from queer sexual violence, but it does not quite normalize him; a response to trauma, their adult heterosexuality is still temporally queer because of their age’.45 Trauma eventually leads My Luck to kill his superior and the necropower exhaling from his every gesture, seemingly staging a rebellion against John Wayne’s instructions about how to perform and use masculinity and sexuality in war. However, the gesture does not escape the perverse mechanism of the Oedipal relation, and My Luck takes the commander’s place as the platoon leader. In his new role he relies on Ijeoma’s support and does not emulate his

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torturer, although being in this position at thirteen for him implies a problematic management of his emotions, of his still fluid identity and traumatic experiences. But the novella hints at the possibility of embracing this queer subject who has come into being through trauma.46 Munro interestingly argues that, rather than reasserting normative masculinity in relation to the perverse commander by rescuing the boy soldier’s innocence, as happens in other childsoldier narratives, ‘Abani’s boy soldier is a sign of alternate ways of being that do not rely on the perversity/respectability axis for legitimacy’.47 The convention according to which war is not a woman’s business is mirrored in Song for Night’s representation of female characters as doubly subaltern victims. Submitted to domestic violence in times of peace, as in the experience of My Luck’s aunt ‘all bruised from a beating from her husband’ (SN, 70), in times of war they undergo what Mbembe would call the necropolitical violence of the phallus. The only girl who in the novella exceeds this pattern is the female soldier in the commander’s platoon. Ijeoma symbolically means ‘good life’, not so much with reference to the quality of her own short and troubled existence ended by war, but, I believe, as an invitation to recognise in her the qualities that may transform a warring society into a peaceful and respectful community. From My Luck’s descriptions we understand how different she is from the rest of her companions, and that she possesses far superior skills. ‘We all relied on Ijeoma to guide us. She always knew the right thing to do and the right time to do it’, My Luck reminisces (SN, 16). The girl soldier is considered smarter than all of the mine defusers and she is the only one who has the guts to challenge John Wayne’s power by asking him to see the military manual – ‘the same manual they use in West Point, the same one they use in Sandhurst’ (SN, 23): a book he keeps referring to in order to prop up his power, but that no one has ever seen. Her act of courage has no practical effect, but points to the survival of freedom of expression and critical thinking, and therefore of the human, in extreme situations such as war. These are indeed the qualities of a leader. Unfortunately they do not help Ijeoma to survive the conflict, but they productively haunt a narrative that contemplates the possibility of new gender roles for women, as well as for men, during and following the upheaval

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of war. This, alongside her guiding love, is a further step towards Abani’s ‘queering’ of the child-soldier narrative. Described at the beginning of this section as gentleness and care for the other, love features as an antidote to violence and as what allows the characters’ humanness to survive. My Luck moves between the desire for maternal love and adolescent love for a platoon girl; neither can erase the horrors of war, but both speak of the inner core of beauty and affect that survives and allows the already dead boy soldier to stay human in spite of it all. My Luck has experienced different kinds of love in his short life, in the form of a deep bond with his mother, who protects him from his Uncle’s violence; and in the act of forgiveness from the woman he raped soon after joining the war. He has performed acts of kindness himself, which seem unbelievable when compared to his acts of cruelty. While looking for his lost platoon, the boy meets an old man who feeds on bananas because he is too old to hunt, and he responds immediately to his state of need by hunting an antelope for him. His spontaneous generosity moves the old man, who reciprocates by playing a song for him. Thus, an act of love establishes a human bond between the young and the old, even during a conflict in the middle of nowhere. On a different stage of his journey, he decides to bury a skeleton drifting downriver in a canoe, because ‘what is important is that this person be buried. Be mourned. Be remembered. Even for a minute. [… I] lift the skeleton with ease, careful not to shake any bones loose. To come back complete, it is important to leave complete’ (SN, 67). My Luck performs an original burial rite so that even that skeleton, at the end of time, may resurrect and become whole again. The circle of life and death and return to life is sustained by the pervading belief in the novel that there is hope and there must be community again – a community that includes the living and the dead, bodies and spirits, totemic animals and all sorts of hybrid creatures. In a 2007 interview for National Public Radio,48 Abani commented on love as one of the most sublime things that ‘coexist with the most devastating things in every context, in every culture, in every situation’. What transforms the world is not the denial of those things, but ‘the recuperation of them, literally, through

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love’. The love he is referring to is a force that ‘ensures obligation. It’s almost a primordial human nature, this compelling thing that makes us want to be better, that want to connect with other people.’ Love transfigures ‘things that seem dead or ugly into things that can become beautiful and sublime’ and ensures that ‘there is never despair. There’s always only the subtle movements of hope through our lives.’49 The author here espouses love as an emblem of the relationship with alterity and the figure of moral responsibility, as an inner force enabling moral decisions.50 I see his discursive, figurative and bodily endorsement of love as a very powerful and demanding proposal: an invitation to see the world differently, through connectedness, imaginative sympathy, and proximity, through care and the caressing attention of the self in love with the other. This does not make the horror of war disappear, but forces us to reflect on the related question of whether we may mobilise the degree of utopianism and hope that is embedded in the notion of love and move from a desire, concern, or responsibility for the other to societal coexistence and a wider engagement with a good and just community, which is indeed a political matter and requires something like a ‘macro’ ethics for public life.51

Something rich and strange In the second half of the narrative the landscape around My Luck suffers a fantastic sea-change, an enchanted transformation, as momentarily happens in Shakespeare’s The Tempest after the shipwreck that kills Ferdinand’s father.52 Just as Ariel’s magical song turns parts of the King of Naples’s dead body into corals and pearls, Song for Night mixes horror and beauty and transforms the damage wreaked by war into ‘something rich and strange’.53 The land itself becomes a place of the imagination, losing its materiality after witnessing an apocalypse, and its inhabitants begin to shed their specificities and morph into something else. In the burial episode referred to above, where the last day of reckoning is clearly evoked, ‘the skeleton sways back and forth with the boat’s motion and it makes me think of an elaborate decoration on a Swiss clock. There is a cobweb between the bony arm and the empty chest. It

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is ­beautiful and shimmers in the fading light’ (SN, 66). This same cobweb evokes the shape of his monologue, spun by a narrator morphed into a spider, a well-known character in the African cultural and narrative tradition, as well as in Black Atlantic cultures. West Africa is the home of Anansi, a folk hero, who is both spider and man, a trickster, a provider of wisdom and a keeper of stories. He embodies a multiplicity of roles, both light-hearted and profound, often providing the link between people and divinity. In African folklore the spider is sometimes considered to be a god of all knowledge and stories. The boy soldier as an Anansi figure is supported by retrieved images of his younger self, hidden and crocheting in the narrow space at the top of his mother’s house: ‘Like a spider busy spinning a web, my mind weaves the night into terror’ (SN, 33). From that secluded space, where his beautiful crocheting equals re-memoring, he witnesses his mother’s murder, the butchering of his father, the genocide of the Igbos up north, the killing of the seven-year-old girl whom his commander wanted to rape, the gorgons eating the boiled new-born-baby parts, the explosion that killed Ijeoma and even himself, and all the atrocities he saw and could not say aloud (SN, 33). With unspeakable acts now recalled and evoked, My Luck’s crocheted tale may definitely abandon the rational tradition of art as mimesis and embrace transformation or, as Durrant puts it, ‘the more spiritual understanding of art as transformative rite’.54 This enables a vision of planetary connectedness that My Luck retrieves through the forgotten memory of his grandfather and his teachings. The enchanted web of a tale that shimmers in the fading light includes residual animistic knowledge from his ‘tall tales’ – coming from stories such as that of ‘the lake in the middle of the world and the fish that live there’ that are the custodians of the souls of human beings – and from his memories of the old man’s understanding of life on earth (and beyond) as a network of shared and reciprocal responsibilities, as in the episode of the ‘benediction’ from a dolphin, which takes My Luck’s soul for safekeeping (SN, 62). Resurfacings of this knowledge are balanced by the child soldier’s witty remarks, as when he relates them to his down-toearth experience of physical survival in the war: ‘Oh well, I think, eating the last of the fish, wondering whose soul I can taste smoking

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down to my stomach, and if anyone has eaten mine yet’ (SN, 64). The boy cannot entirely trust either his memories or those stories, nor does Song for Night unproblematically suggest that My Luck should embrace Igbo cosmology, which to him is mostly lost.55 It rather suggests that his redemption, or his joining the world of the ancestors, depends on his staying open to a world of connectedness and proximity, in which one cannot tell where one voice or body ends and another begins. He should learn how to read ancient wisdom as inscribed in all that exists, including the stars that form a ‘wonderful song for night’ (SN, 69). Like the dolphin they are repositories of souls: ‘Every star, he says, is a soul, and every soul is a destiny meant to be lived out’ (SN, 69). As Durrant perceptively argues, Abani invokes the capability ‘of accommodating modernity within its sense of the sacred, scepticism within wisdom, the novelist within the storyteller’.56 I see this inclusive stance as a development of Abani’s persistent idea of ‘becoming’ as a transcultural process, and of ‘transformation’ as a collective rather than an individual necessity, which involves a larger ‘planetary’ perspective. Gayatri Spivak, who coined the term ‘planetarity’ as part of a critique of the negative aspects of globalisation, asks us to consider ourselves first and foremost as planetary beings, and to embrace the many differences that have the potential to separate us: ‘I propose the planet to overwrite the globe […] The globe is on our computers. No one lives there. It allows us to think that we can aim to control it. The planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit on loan.’57 In a response to Spivak’s ‘overwriting’ proposal, Emily Apter comments that ‘planetarity engages with world politics and an ethical vigilance against environmental catastrophism in an age of remote responsibility; it understands the subject as a provisional place-holder on this earth’.58 This impermanent, decentred position of the human takes a further step in Mbembe’s vision of planetarity from a post-nativist African and diasporic perspective, which resonates with Abani’s. He argues that ‘to reopen the future of our planet to all who inhabit it, we will have to learn how to share it again, amongst but also between its humans and nonhumans inhabitants, between the multiple species that populate our planet’.59 In what he calls our age of ‘planetary entanglement’,

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openness to other archives, other memories, languages, epistemologies, faiths, and to other ‘creatures’ is crucial, as it may lead to alternative ways of seeing and being in the world that show us out of the dark night, like the tall tales of My Luck’s grandfather or the stars in the sky over Biafra. Mbembe sees literature and the arts as central to this view of transformative planetarity. ‘The magic of the arts of Africa and its diaspora has always derived from its power of dematerialisation, its capacity to inhabit the commonplace and sensible, precisely with the aim of transforming it into an idea and an event.’60 Giving form, he adds, is ‘to inhabit a space of essential fragility and vulnerability’ because, particularly in African cultures, the attempt to put the infinite in sensible form is ‘a forming that consists in constantly doing, undoing, and redoing; assembling, dis-assembling and reassembling’.61 There is no claim to wholeness, universalism, exclusivity, purity, or fixity in this. The arts in Africa ‘come straight out of a fluctuating imaginary’62 born out of overlapping genealogies, at the intersections of multiple encounters with multiple elsewhere, including the ancient animistic knowledge that used to keep together the world of the living, the world of the dead, and the planet. Song for Night evokes this dizzy openness and connectedness and gives us a magical tale of ethical and spiritual responsibility that fosters hope and a re-enchantment of the world.

Notes  1 Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation, Dave Egger’s What Is the What?, Ishmael Beah’s memoir A Long Way Gone, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, Biyi Bandele’s Burma Boy.   2 D. Mengestu, ‘Children of war’, New Stateman (14 June 2007). www. newstatesman.com/books/2007/06/africa-war-burma-beah-sudan. All websites last accessed 20 January 2021.   3 About critical interpretations of Song for Night’s generic features see the analysis concerning Becoming Abigail in Chapter 3.   4 On this point see J. Slaughter, ‘Clef à roman: some uses of human rights and the Bildungsroman’, Politics and Culture, 3 (2003). https://poli ticsandculture.org/issue/2003-issue-3/, and Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007).

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 5 J. Vening, ‘Fiction: Song for Night by Chris Abani’, M/C Journal (28 June 2008).  6 F. Giommi, ‘Negotiating freedom on scarred bodies: Chris Abani’s novellas’, in A. Oboe and S. Bassi (eds), Experiences of Freedom in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 180.  7 A. Schultheis Moore and E. Swanson Goldberg, ‘“Let us begin with a smaller gesture”: an ethos of human rights and the possibilities of form in Chris Abani’s Song for Night and Becoming Abigail’, ARIEL, 45:4 (2014), p. 68.  8 A. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, trans. A. M. Berrett et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 15.  9 Abani in Y. Goyal, ‘A deep humanness, a deep grace: interview with Chris Abani’, Research in African Literatures, 45:3 (2014), p. 236. 10 See B. Munro, ‘Locating “queer” in contemporary writing of love and war in Nigeria’, Research in African Literatures, 47:2 (2016), 121–38. 11 Munro, ‘Locating “queer”’. 12 For recent biopolitical analyses of the postcolonial see M. Griffiths (ed.), Biopolitics and Memory in Postcolonial Literature and Culture (London: Routledge, 2016). 13 A. Varadharajan and T. Wyman-McCarthy, ‘“The world is spoilt in the white man’s time”: imagining postcolonial temporalities’, in M. Griffiths (ed.), Biopolitics and Memory in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2016), p. 115. 14 Munro, ‘Locating “queer”’, p. 134. 15 S. Durrant, ‘Creaturely mimesis: life after necropolitics in Chris Abani’s Song for Night’, Research in African Literatures, 49:3 (2018), p. 201. 16 Durrant, ‘Creaturely mimesis’, p. 179. 17 These interventions are discussed in the critical overview in Chapter 7. 18 See the review extracts: www.goodreads.com/book/show/960213.So ng_for_Night. 19 C. Abani, ‘Song for Night highlights hope, despair’, Tell Me More, NPR (4 October 2007). www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?sto ryId=14982742. 20 E. Coundouriotis, ‘The child soldier narrative and the problem of arrested historicization’, Journal of Human Rights, 9:2 (2010), p. 195. 21 Coundouriotis, ‘The child soldier narrative’. For a critical reading of what Coundouriotis calls ‘arrested historicization’ see D. Tunca, ‘“Children at war”: language and representation in Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation and Chris Abani’s Song for Night’, in Stylistic Approaches to Nigerian Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 146–74.

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22 A. Schultheis Moore, ‘Global specters: child soldiers in the post-national fiction of Uzodinma Iweala and Chris Abani’, in W. P. Collins (ed.), Emerging African Voices: A Study of Contemporary African Literature (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2010), p. 41. 23 H. Dalley, ‘Trauma theory and Nigerian civil war literature: speaking “something that was never in words” in Chris Abani’s Song for Night’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 49:4 (2013), p. 450. 24 Dalley, ‘Trauma theory and Nigerian civil war literature’, p. 451. 25 M. Bakhtin, ‘Forms of time and of the chronotope in the novel: notes toward a historical poetics’, in M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. M. Holquist, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990 [1981]), pp. 84–5. 26 Durrant, ‘Creaturely mimesis’, p. 191 (emphasis in the original). 27 H. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (Oxford: Routledge, 1994), p. 38. 28 See Chapters 3 and 5. 29 C. Achebe, ‘Novelist as teacher’, in Hopes and Impediments (London: Heinemann, 1981), p. 45. 30 Abani in Kaufman, ‘In conversation’. 31 T. Morrison, ‘“I wanted to carve out a world both culture specific and race-free”: an essay by Toni Morrison’, The Guardian (8 August 2019). www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/08/toni-morrison-rememoryessay. 32 Morrison, ‘“I wanted to carve out a world”’. 33 Durrant, ‘Creaturely mimesis’, p. 195. 34 Quoted in Munro, ‘Locating “queer”’, p. 121. 35 Munro, ‘Locating “queer”’, p. 123. 36 As regards notions of gender in precolonial West African cultures, the Nigerian scholars Ifi Amadiume and Oyèrónké. Oyěwùmí argue that gender was imposed by European settlers in Igbo and Yoruba societies and was conceived differently before colonialism. In her Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society (London: Zed Books, 1987), Amadiume emphasises that in Igboland the flexibility of gender construction meant that gender was ‘separate from biological sex’. Therefore daughters could become sons and consequently male. ‘Daughters and women in general could be husbands to wives and consequently males in relation to their wives, etc.’ (Amadiume, Male Daughters, p. 15). The Igbo ‘dual sex-system’ is the polar opposite of the Western ‘single-sex system’, which carries instead strong sex and class inequalities. As soon as Westerners imposed their gender system in Igboland the roles of men and women started to be masculinised and feminised, and women took a secondary position in several

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e­ ducational, religious, political, and economic fields (Amadiume, Male Daughters, p. 16). Similarly, Oyěwùmí’s The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) points out that, before colonialism, gender did not exist in Yorùbáland. She underscores that ‘Yorùbá genderlessness [was] not to be read as androgyny or ambiguity of gender. It [was] not genderless in terms of a presence of both male and female attributes. Instead it [was] genderless because human attributes [were] not gender-specific. Bioanatomical differences [were] a source of neither distinction nor identity in Yorùbáland […] Anasex differences [were] incidental and [did] not define much’ (Oyěwùmí, The Invention, p. 174; emphasis in the original). Seniority was rather the variable or ‘principle that determined social organization’, based ‘on chronological age’. It was ‘the foundation of Yorùbá social intercourse’ and, ‘unlike gender, [it was] not focused on the body’ (Oyěwùmí, The Invention, pp. 13–14). 37 C. E. W. Ouma, ‘“In the name of the son”: fatherhood’s critical legitimacy, sonhood and masculinities in Chris Abani’s GraceLand and The Virgin of Flames’, English in Africa, 38:2 (2011), p. 89. 38 T. Jones, ‘An interview with Chris Abani’, The Believer Magazine 12 (1  April 2004). https://believermag.com/an-interview-with-chrisabani/; C. Tóibín, ‘Chris Abani by Colm Tóibín’, BOMB Magazine, 96 (1 July 2006). https://bombmagazine.org/articles/chris-abani/. 39 Jones, ‘An interview with Chris Abani’. 40 Abani in Tóibín, ‘Chris Abani’. 41 See O. Bamgbose, ‘Customary law practices and violence against women: the position under the Nigerian legal system’ (Kampala: Department of Women and Gender Studies, 2006), 86–113. 42 T. Carrigan, B. Connell, and J. Lee, ‘Towards a new sociology of masculinity’, Theory and Society, 14:5 (1985), p. 587. 43 Cook in A. Honwana, Child Soldiers in Africa (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), p. 53. 44 The John Wayne figure appears also in Abani’s recollection of his own early experience of cinema in Nigeria, narrated in ‘Omar Sharif comes to Nollywood’. 45 Munro, ‘Locating “queer”’, p. 129. 46 Harrow also refers to My Luck as ‘queer, queered’: a ‘fifteen-year-old child soldier who does not sound like either child or soldier […] enjoys in some part of himself being forced by John Wayne to commit rape, feels guilty over his pleasure, and ultimately takes a journey through a desolate unreal landscape of that state of exception outside of all

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l­ocations, where souls of no value, of no use even for sacrifice, like homo sacer, pass through on their way to their final death’. K. Harrow, ‘The Amalek factor: child soldiers and the impossibility of representation’, Postcolonial Text, 8:2 (2013), p. 17. 47 Munro, ‘Locating “queer”’, p. 125. 48 Abani, ‘Song for Night highlights hope, despair’. 49 Abani, ‘Song for Night highlights hope, despair’. 50 See Z. Bauman’s discussion of Emmanuel Lévinas’s ethics, in Z. Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 82–109. In her influential work The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), the philosopher Sara Ahmed also describes love as ‘a way of bonding with others’ and shows how often the pull of love towards another person, who becomes an object of love, ‘can be transferred towards a collective, expressed as an ideal or object’. Thus the feeling of love shifts from the love that a subject feels for a specific person to the love that she or he feels for more than one person. To love and to be loved by someone means ‘fulfilling one’s fantasy image of “who one would like to be”’ (pp. 124–9). 51 A reflection on this issue is provided by Bauman in a 1998 issue of Theory Culture & Society devoted to ethics for the new millennium, in which he argues, in ways that recall Abani’s position, that, instead of joining forces with power-holders, sages, and legislators, contemporary moral philosophers should ‘bring us back to where our humanity resides, not able to reside anywhere else: to the incurable uncertainty and ambivalence of the human condition laid bare by the postmodern transformations – to that necessity and impossibility of being moral which is rooted already in the original encounter with the Other’. Z. Bauman, ‘What prospects of morality in times of uncertainty?’, Theory Culture & Society, 15:1 (1998), p. 15, emphasis in the original. 52 A reference to Shakespeare’s The Tempest can be found in Trilling’s review of Song for Night ‘You’re never too young to kill’, The Guardian (7 September 2008). www.theguardian.com/books/2008/sep/07/fiction. 53 ‘Full fathom five thy father lies; / Of his bones are corals made; / Those are pearls that were his eyes; / Nothing of him that doth fade, / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.’ The Tempest, Act 1.2. 54 Durrant, ‘Creaturely mimesis’, p. 191. 55 This is how Abani describes it: ‘Igbo culture is comprised of a cosmology, philosophy of self and the world, environmental awareness, symbiotic relationship to the earth and the natural and supernatural world,

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ritual, social contracts and conduct and so much more, all woven into a language of being that is only nominally transactional, but which instead performs a profound reach into the ineffable. Everything in Igbo is inferential and malleable and ever evolving. In Igbo we call this Omenala and it is transmitted in its entirety in the language.’ C. Abani, ‘Chinua Achebe: my complicated literary father’, The Wall Street Journal (25 March 2013). www.wsj.com/articles/BL-SEB-74061. 56 Durrant, ‘Creaturely mimesis’, p. 199. 57 G. Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 72. 58 E. Apter, ‘Responding to the Death of a Discipline: An ACLA Forum’, Comparative Literature, 57:3 (2005), p. 203. Planetarity indeed offers an approach that resists ‘erasing the African’, and asks if and how, from the vantage point of the continent and its diasporas, we can extend our conceptual and theoretical imagination and produce alternative images of thought and representations that can hopefully help us live a different life in common. This question is taken on by the contributors of an issue of the journal From the European South (4, 2019) titled ‘Africa’s planetary futures’, edited by Annalisa Oboe. It is conceived as a forum of voices sparked by the work of Achille Mbembe, and collects contributions from the humanities, the social sciences, and the science and technology sectors. 59 A. Mbembe, ‘Africa in the new century’, The Massachusetts Review, 57:1 (2016), 91–104. Online version available at https://africasacoun try.com/2016/06/africa-in-the-new-century. 60 Mbembe, ‘Africa in the new century’ 61 Mbembe, ‘Africa in the new century’. 62 Mbembe, ‘Africa in the new century’.

References Abani, Chris. ‘Chinua Achebe: my complicated literary father’, The Wall Street Journal (25 March 2013). www.wsj.com/articles/BL-SEB-74061. All websites last accessed 11 April 2021. ———. Song for Night (New York: Akashic Books, 2007). ———. ‘Song for Night highlights hope, despair’, Tell Me More, NPR (4 October 2007). www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=149 82742. Achebe, Chinua. ‘The novelist as teacher’, in Hopes and Impediments (London: Heinemann, 1981), pp. 40–6.

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Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Half of a Yellow Sun (London: Harper Perennial, 2006). Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004). Amadiume, Ifi. Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in African Society (London: Zed Books, 1987). Apter, Emily. ‘Responding to the Death of a Discipline: An ACLA Forum’, Comparative Literature, 57:3 (2005), 201–6. Bakhtin, Mikhail. ‘Forms of time and of the chronotope in the novel: notes toward a historical poetics’, in Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990 [1981]), pp. 84–258. Bamgbose, Oluyemisi. ‘Customary law practices and violence against women: the position under the Nigerian legal system’ (Kampala: Department of Women and Gender Studies, 2006), 86–113. Bandele, Biyi. Burma Boy (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007). Bauman, Zygmunt. Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). ———. ‘What prospects of morality in times of uncertainty?’, Theory Culture & Society, 15:1 (1998), 11–22. Beah, Ishmael. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (London: Fourth Estate, 2007). Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture (Oxford: Routledge, 1994). Carrigan, Tim, Bob Connell, and John Lee. ‘Toward a new sociology of masculinity’, Theory and Society, 14:5 (1985), 551–604. Coetzee, J. M. Foe (London: Penguin, 1988). Coundouriotis, Eleni. ‘The child soldier narrative and the problem of arrested historicization’, Journal of Human Rights, 9:2 (2010), 191–206. Dalley, Hamish. ‘Trauma theory and Nigerian civil war literature: speaking “something that was never in words” in Chris Abani’s Song for Night’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 49:4 (2013), 445–57. Durrant, Sam. ‘Creaturely mimesis: life after necropolitics in Chris Abani’s Song for Night’, Research in African Literatures, 49:3 (2018), 178–206. Giommi, Francesca. ‘Negotiating freedom on scarred bodies: Chris Abani’s novellas’, in Annalisa Oboe and Shaul Bassi (eds), Experiences of Freedom in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 176–84. Goyal, Yogita. ‘A deep humanness, a deep grace: interview with Chris Abani’, Research in African Literatures, 45:3 (2014), 227–40. Griffiths, Michael (ed.). Biopolitics and Memory in Postcolonial Literature and Culture (London: Routledge, 2016). Harrow, Kenneth W. ‘The Amalek factor: child soldiers and the i­ mpossibility of representation’, Postcolonial Text, 8:2 (2013), 1–20.

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Honwana, Alcinda. Child Soldiers in Africa (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). Iweala, Uzodinma. Beasts of No Nation (London: John Murray, 2005). Jones, Tayari. ‘An interview with Chris Abani’, The Believer Magazine, 12 (1 April 2004). https://believermag.com/an-interview-with-chris-abani/. Kaufman, Zuade. ‘In conversation with Chris Abani’, Truthdig (19 April 2006). www.truthdig.com/articles/in-conversation-​w​ith​-​a​u​t​h​or-​c​h​ r​is-abani/. Mbembe, Achille. ‘Africa in the new century’, The Massachusetts Review, 57:1 (2016), 91–104. Online version available at https://africasacountry. com/2016/06/africa-in-the-new-century. ———. On the Postcolony, trans. A. M. Berrett et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Mengestu, Dinaw. ‘Children of war’, NewStateman (14 June 2007). www. newstatesman.com/books/2007/06/africa-war-burma-beah-sudan. Morrison, Toni. ‘“I wanted to carve out a world both culture specific and racefree”: an essay by Toni Morrison’, The Guardian (8 August 2019). www. theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/08/toni-morrison-rememory-essay. Munro, Brenna. ‘Locating “queer” in contemporary writing of love and  war in Nigeria’, Research in African Literatures, 47:2 (2016), 121–38. Oboe, Annalisa (ed). Africa’s Planetary Futures. From the European South: A Transdisciplinary Journal of Postcolonial Humanities, 4 (2019). http:// europeansouth.postcolonialitalia.it/journal/2019–4/FES_4.pdf. Ouma, C. E. W. ‘“In the name of the son”: fatherhood’s critical legitimacy, sonhood and masculinities in Chris Abani’s GraceLand and The Virgin of Flames’, English in Africa, 38:2 (2011), 77–93. Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónké.. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). Saro-Wiwa, Ken. Sozaboy (London, Lagos, and Port Harcourt: Saros International Publishers, 1985). Schultheis Moore, Alexandra. ‘Global specters: child soldiers in the post-national fiction of Uzodinma Iweala and Chris Abani’, in Walter P. Collins (ed.), Emerging African Voices: A Study of Contemporary African Literature (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2010), pp. 13–51. Schultheis Moore, Alexandra, and Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg. ‘“Let us begin with a smaller gesture”: an ethos of human rights and the ­possibilities of form in Chris Abani’s Song for Night and Becoming Abigail’, ARIEL, 45:4 (2014), 59–87. Slaughter, Joseph. ‘Clef à roman: some uses of human rights and the Bildungsroman’, Politics and Culture, 3 (2003). https://politicsandcul ture.org/issue/2003-issue-3/.

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———. Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007). Spivak, Gayatri C. Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). Tóibín, Colm. ‘Chris Abani by Colm Tóibín’, BOMB Magazine, 96 (1 July 2006). https://bombmagazine.org/articles/chris-abani/. Trilling, Daniel. ‘You’re never too young to kill’, The Guardian (7 September 2008). www.theguardian.com/books/2008/sep/07/fiction. Tunca, Daria. ‘“Children at war”: language and representation in Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation and Chris Abani’s Song for Night’, in Stylistic Approaches to Nigerian Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 146–74. ———. ‘“We die only once, and for such a long time”: approaching trauma through translocation in Chris Abani’s Song for Night’, in Marga Munkelt, Markus Schmitz, Mark Stein, and Silke Stroh (eds), Postcolonial Translocations: Cultural Representation and Critical Spatial Thinking (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2013), pp. 127–43. Varadharajan, Asha, and Timothy Wyman-McCarthy. ‘“The world is spoilt in the white man’s time”: imagining postcolonial temporalities’, in Michael Griffiths (ed.), Biopolitics and Memory in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2016), pp. 103–19. Vening, Jack. ‘Fiction: Song for Night by Chris Abani’, M/C Journal (28 June 2008).

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For Los Angeles, with love: The Virgin of Flames

The mistake they make, most of them, is to attempt to determine and calculate, with the finest instruments, the source of the wound. Harold Pinter in A Note on Shakespeare

Los Angeles stands beside Lagos as a central city in Abani’s life as well as writing. After leaving his home country and a stay in London, where he obtained an MA in Gender and Culture, Abani moved to California and enrolled in the PhD programme at the University of Southern California, eventually becoming a Professor of Creative Writing at University of California, Riverside. He lived in Los Angeles for more than ten years before moving to Northwestern University of Chicago, where he now resides and works. Los Angeles is also the setting of his second novel, The Virgin of Flames. The book opens with the African-Salvadorian protagonist Black in whiteface. A thirty-six-year-old Angelino painter with no money to hire a model, Black tries to become his own poser through makeup. This performative act, however, betrays a deeper identity crisis he tries to solve by going back to memories of his childhood, by dating a transsexual Mexican stripper, and by ‘performing’ as a Virgin Mary of sorts, the supposed Virgin of Flames of the title. Black’s roaming around the streets of Los Angeles crosses the lives of other transnational or subaltern inhabitants of the city: Sweet Girl, Black’s Mexican transsexual sweetheart; Black’s best friend Bomboy, an illegal African immigrant and the boss of an abattoir;1

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Iggy, Black’s landlady and owner of the Ugly Store, a ‘fakir-psychic’ Jewish tattoo artist with shaved head, a green and a purple eye, and metallic rings on her back (VF, 31–2); the drug-addicted dwarf RayRay. The book closes with Black on fire, dressed as a woman, on top of the spaceship he has created with his own hands above Iggy’s Ugly Store and tattoo parlour.2 In such attire he eventually becomes the Virgin of Flames for the crowd of people gathered there and waiting for a religious sign. Unlike GraceLand, Becoming Abigail, and Song for Night, The Virgin of Flames was received mildly by critics when it came out in 2007. The book was perceived as a break – if not a stumble – in Abani’s narrative career. This is due to a number of reasons, the most important being the critics’ difficulties at labelling the novel, variously addressed as a Bildungsroman (even though the protagonist is thirty-six) or a Künstlerroman (a novel about a young man as an artist) because of Black’s occupation.3 It is true that the book presents certain weak points, such as its ‘character – rather than plot-driven’ storyline or its convoluted style, which has made reviewers describe The Virgin of Flames as a ‘baroque novel of excess’.4 However, other reasons may explain the critics’ reticence, which tackles the thorny issue of Abani’s identity as a writer, his position in the global literary panorama, and what kind of creative imaginative background may inform the work of non-mainstream writers. Loosely connected to Africa through its main protagonist’s family genealogy, The Virgin of Flames uncovers Abani’s desire to move beyond strict labels of ‘Africanity’ or ‘Africanness’ and claim a wider and transnational literary space of representation, in line with the definition he gives of himself as a ‘global Igbo’ author. Instead of a text talking about the writer’s ‘authenticity’, The Virgin of Flames is a novel that speaks of the imaginative freedom of its author, of elected narrative legacies that are not restricted by national or ethnic belonging, and of the fluidity of both characters and writer. The book has paid the price of such ‘novelty’, with an inferior circulation and lukewarm appreciation by some scholars, unable to include it in the ‘readily identifiable and attractive category’ of ‘African’ or ‘postcolonial’ literature usually applied in the case of writers of the Nigerian diaspora like Abani.5

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For this reason, for example, in his book about Nigerian diaspora literature,6 Maximilian Felder includes Abani but explicitly leaves out The Virgin of Flames and the following The Secret History of Las Vegas, because of the books’ content, which does not match the works of other diasporic Nigerians – thus making clear how much the term ‘diaspora’ is becoming more and more an issue of markets and tastes rather than a spatio-temporal definition. Among critics only some have tackled the novel with seriousness and openness, describing The Virgin of Flames as ‘a new domain of African fiction that gestures towards namelessness. It does not wish to be named or fixed to one national spot, or claimed by one conscious identity: it wishes to be self-consciously ambivalent and universal.’7 Despite the new geographical locality of the novel, set entirely in the USA, the short synopsis provided above shows that The Virgin of Flames continues Abani’s investigation on topics which proved central in his previous aesthetic trajectory, such as an interest in liminal city spaces permeated by different degrees of subalternity,8 a search for spirituality, and a fascination for the potential of body mimicry and performance. What is more, the book engages racial and gender explorations in the figure of the protagonist Black, thus matching the subjects of GraceLand and Becoming Abigail, while emphasising questions of cross-dressing and cross-raciality. The novel also announces some of the themes that are central in the following The Secret History of Las Vegas, such as the attention to ‘freakishness’ in the character of Iggy and her employee RayRay. In spite of these connections, proving the centrality of The Virgin of Flames in Abani’s literary career, critics have perceived it as unrelated to his preceding works. What is missing is the possibility  of reading the novel as a Nigerian or African text, thus dislodging the expected match between themes and an author’s credentials. Rather than ‘African’, The Virgin of Flames reads as a typical Los Angeles story, whose protagonist happens to be of some African ancestry. This is not to say that Black’s African ancestry has no relevance in the story; however, it is hard to contextualise the novel within what is considered ‘African literature’. Its dialoguing constituents are more easily found within the American literary tradition, as the copious references to the US authors Raymond

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Chandler,9 Wallace Stevens, or Langston Hughes, among others, prove. The number of commonalities with themes and motifs of the literature of and about Los Angeles is also so strong that I dare suggest a reading of The Virgin of Flames as a piece of regional Californian writing, among other more ‘global’ or ‘African’ readings such as Krishnan’s.10 This is especially meaningful if Black is read as a character mirroring the spirit of the city, whose centrality in the book’s economy is testified by the initial epigraph on LA by the poet Bob Kaufman: ‘I want to prove that Los Angeles is a practical joke / played on us by superior beings / on a humorous planet.’11 The Virgin of Flames thus leaves behind the doubleness of talking simultaneously to both the African and the American or Western tradition, or from a Black Atlantic perspective, to which Abani goes back in The Secret History of Las Vegas, and locates itself quite clearly on another ocean, the Pacific, and its most prominent US city, Los Angeles.12 As Crowley contends, the book reads ‘like a love song to the city’ of angels,13 so much so that we might ascribe it to what has been defined Los Angeles fiction, whose literary topoi – such as the car imperative, the pollution causing dirt and soot, the looming dust from the Santa Ana mountains and the Mojave Desert, and the unavoidable feeling of fakeness caused by the rampant Hollywood-centred city mythology – Abani evokes in this novel. This should not, however, be considered in contrast with Abani’s other literary production. In the words of one of the major scholars of Los Angeles fiction, David Fine, LA literature has always been ‘a migrant fiction, constructed essentially […] by men and women who left homes elsewhere’, as Abani and Black’s family did.14 The themes of such literary tradition, such as removal, displacement, ‘unreality, masquerade, and deception’, are the same The Virgin of Flames engages in.15 Among the different features of the discourse on LA that are also found in The Virgin of Flames is the ‘confusion between reality and illusion’, which erases identity but also spatial boundaries.16 Abani’s novel is about identitarian fluxes and performances, about  the ­suspension of the limits of reality and imagination, present and past, male and female, whiteness and blackness, being straight or gay, faith and disillusion. Those are the limits Black embodies and at the same time breaks, as his entrapment in ­memories of the

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past, his experimentations as a white drag, and his final sacrifice as a religious figure display. Black is, in this reading, a possible metaphor of the city he inhabits, which the urbanist Edward Soja has alternatively called ‘simcity’, ‘expolis’, and ‘cosmopolis’: a city that is simultaneously fragmented, expanding, hyperreal, imaginative, global, and different from the very idea of a city.17 Similar to the place where he lives, Black is a whirling figure of contrasting becoming, always on the threshold of what he is and what he would like to be, of imagined possibilities, of expansion of one’s self, and of the struggles to live that limitlessness through one’s body. His final appearance as a burning Virgin on top of his spaceship keeps the book suspended between the reality of Black’s deception as the Virgin and the devotees’ faith. Seen from below, from the crowd gathered waiting for the apparition, this African-Salvadoran Angelino symbolises the festivity, fascination, and happiness caused by faith and hope. But interpreted through the knowledge we have summoned by reading the book, Black’s embodiment of the Virgin of Flames is the curious representation of our human fragility and beauty, framed in an incredibly unusual ash-snowing Los Angeles.

Los Angeles as global south Los Angeles: A red sky and angels like palm trees, and garbage blown in the wind like cars and the gluttony of SUVs in an endless river of traffic. Through the dark, we say, through the dark: but do we ever really know? Abani, Sanctificum

As Abani himself confirmed, The Virgin of Flames is ‘a book about Los Angeles’.18 Place plays in fact a central role in the novel: the city is the setting of the plot but also the focus of many descriptions and a mirror of Black’s identity as well as of the narrative form of the book. The structure of the novel, with its loose ends and rattled-off episodes without a clear core, seems indeed to retrace the topography of Los Angeles and the traditional urban readings of the city

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as an indeterminate postmodern megalopolis without a centre. As it is impossible to define Los Angeles, whose borders escape definition, so Black’s parable of becoming cuts across definitions, be they gender-, race-, or sexuality-related.19 Impossible to summarise and quickly define, Black is a postmodern character in a postmodern novel that pulls together disparate actions and feelings to represent the identitarian chaos the protagonist is living. However, contrary to ideas of postmodernity traditionally associated with Los Angeles, which make of it the final expression of Western civilisation apocalyptically announcing its own disaggregation, Abani perceives Los Angeles as ‘a Third World city in the best possible sense’, for its ‘[d]irt, decay and this idea that’s held together by everyone’s dream of it’.20 This allows us to put The Virgin of Flames close to Abani’s previous prose production, and encourages us to think of Abani’s LA as an expression of the global south, that ‘metaphor for the human suffering caused by capitalism and colonialism on the global level’.21 Unlike common geographical concepts, such description of the South is more a tool for social analysis than a geographical indication, a lens aimed at the contemplation of the ‘excluded, silenced and marginalised populations, such as undocumented immigrants, the unemployed, ethnic or religious minorities, and victims of sexism, homophobia, racism and islamophobia’ which also live in the North of the world.22 The characters of The Virgin of Flames confirm such a reading of Los Angeles, a city that in Abani’s rendition loses any glam of Western whiteness and richness. The novel’s characters are indeed a heterogeneous group who share non-belonging and marginality because of their condition as illegal migrants (as in the case of Bomboy, from Rwanda) or religious minority (as Iggy, the only white character in the book but also a Jewish tattooed woman), on account of being sexually discriminated against (as in the case of Sweet Girl, the Mexican transsexual stripteaser Black falls in love with), or for assumed economic penury, like the protagonist Black, who ekes out a living by painting murals. This interest in forms of the global south translates into a demystifying vision of the city, which is not the media-distributed LA of television series or Hollywood. Black’s roaming lets the reader discover a Los Angeles that is not the city of ‘the Mulhollands and

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their water, nor the people everywhere with too perfect hair and smiles as fake as the teeth they framed. Nor was it San Marino and its pretend class, or even the Hollywood sign’ (VF, 99). What Abani narrates is the Los Angeles deprived of the glittering veil of stardom and richness; it is a city that ‘smelled like wet dog’, whose skyscrapers of the business and fashion districts shade ‘the usual homeless crowd’ (VF, 57). Abani’s Los Angeles is East LA, the city of the Latino community and the poorest among its municipalities. It is ‘a large garbage pile left to compost in the heat’ (VF, 153), reminiscent of the attention for decay Abani expressed in GraceLand but also of the Los Angeles described by traditional Angelino writers such as Louis Adamic, Nathanael West, or John Fante, whose works demystify the image of the city as an Eden-like place, Mediterranean oasis of perfumed oranges, sun, and relax.23 In The Virgin of Flames, Los Angeles is hot and layered in smog, ‘a rambling maze that didn’t apologize for what it was’ (VF, 177–8). It is ‘a city of joyful shallowness’ (VF, 177–8), but not without beauty. Its grace is unannounced yet visible in the angle of light caught in the trickle of the Los Angeles River as it curved under one of the beautiful old crumbling bridges of East LA. The way the painting of an angel wearing sandals and jeans, its once-white wings stained by exhaust soot and tag signs, smoking a cigarette on a support of the 10 East Freeway on Hoover […] In the occasional clip-clop of horses pulling a brilliant white bridal carriage that resisted the dust and dirt everywhere, and the line of cars following slowly in awe. (VF, 99)

The magic of the city rests on its manifest decadence, exhaust soot, and tag signs interpreted as marks of our modernity, whilst its architectural confusion (VF, 74) talks of the desire to reach unattainable dreams and revive forever-gone times. The postmodern collage of different municipalities that make up Los Angeles, voicing a history of forgotten urban segregation, still manages ‘to work as a single canvas of color and voices’ (VF, 88), with its weird river working as a sort of fil rouge connecting its scattered pieces. Among the various locales identifying the city, the Los Angeles River plays a central role in both the novel and Black’s life, because its flood bed retraces Black’s journey from a childhood in Pasadena

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and the rest of his life in East LA; because it represents a stable place for the protagonist where to return during the continual collapses of his life; and finally because it works as a symbol of resistant liquidity, in line with his fluid indentitarian stances. It is true that its concrete sleeves, the scarceness of its water, and its ‘flood bed scarred and zippered over with railway lines’ (VF, 16) make it a grotesque and eccentric river, which loses ‘faith with every inch traveled’ (VF, 2). The beauty and force usually associated with the image of running water are absent; yet the river is resilient, even against the concrete prison the city municipality has forced it into in the 1930s. If, ‘[f]rom above, it looked like one straight concrete line, […] up close, it was possible to see the slight variations. This River was alive, this River was here before anyone knew this was a River, before anyone saw it and said, River’ (VF, 135). The persistence of the watercourse, in contrast to the time-bound architectural expressions of human actions, constitutes its elastic vigour – the ­forcefulness of a non-perceptible yet enduring nature. As the description of the river suggests, the beauty of Los Angeles is in the eye of the beholder and their capacity of looking at things ‘up close’. This is most visible in Chapter Seventeen, built as a ‘rosary of the city’ as to remark the importance of religion in the novel and in the history of LA.24 In the lowest moment of his identity crisis, Black is on the verge of committing suicide, which he eventually does not. The archangel Gabriel appears to him in the form of a pigeon and accompanies him from Olvera to Cesar Chavez to East LA, to show Black what he showed the old prophets, that is, the beauty and ugliness of human life. What follows is a chapter that reads like a litany, in which each street, place, and image of Los Angeles constitutes the beads of a mysterious rosary, the typical Catholic prayer dedicated to the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ, with which Abani is familiar probably as a consequence of his training in a Roman Catholic seminary.25 As with the macro narrative structure reproducing Los Angeles’s postmodernity, Chapter Seventeen is similarly crafted to make form mirror content, with the list of enumerations reproducing the litany of a rosary. As a sort of Jacob Marley visiting Ebenezer Scrooge in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol,26 the pigeon-archangel Gabriel’s name recalls

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Los Angeles’s original inhabitants, the Gabrielino Indians, thus merging religion with the spirit of the place.27 Reproducing the idea of a Catholic ‘passion’,28 the moment when Christ is about to die just before Easter, Gabriel takes Black to visit the city and its ‘mysteries’ in different ‘stations’. In line with the new guidelines provided by Pope John Paul II in 2002, Abani’s ‘rosary’ of Los Angeles contains four groups of mysteries: ‘the joyful mysteries’, ‘the luminous mysteries’, ‘the sorrowful mysteries’, and ‘the glorious mysteries’. After a long introductory paragraph evoking, in the form of a long list, the places of downtown Los Angeles (Bunker Hill, Angel’s Flight, Pershing Square, the Million Dollar Theatre, etc.), the following pages alternate stops and steps; each stop (called ‘a station’ in the Way of the Cross, which is one of the most important Catholic devotions honouring the passion of Jesus) is an insight into the great variety of human life and is made up of a sequence of ‘steps’, images creating a meaningful mosaic about the ‘spirit of the place’. These seven pages, impossible to summarise properly here, offer a series of poetic snapshots of life in Los Angeles; each of them is linked to one of the four mysteries. The variety of images includes a stain of blood left after a murder (‘sorrowful mysteries’ [VF, 146]) and a man with no teeth calling ‘notes through gummy lips on an imaginary bass that his fingers plucked in the air, forgotten by the world, forgotten and forgetting everyone and everything but the music’ (‘joyful mysteries’ [VF, 144]). Or ‘a girl outside the public library on Fifth’ discovering the wonder of reading (VF, 144) and ‘a young man lounged with his compás, smoking weed, laughing loud and grabbing crotch in the swagger that was all the power of the young and yet his eyes said: Please, I just want to go home, please’ (VF, 147). What Abani achieves in these pages is a highly moving mix of poetry and photography: by adding a brief caption to every scene Black observes, Abani is able to capture the depth of an image and the richness of human life in all its good and bad expressions. The effect is that of an enlargement of life, of a meaning that is composite and unreducible. His images of the ‘plump Armenian matrons’, of a dog with fleas, of prostitutes, of the ‘missing María’ (VF, 148) oscillate between violence and beauty, rage and love, sadness and joy. The abundance of these pictures, pulled together in a long e­ numeration

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and made to progress by the word ‘step’, which functions as a sort of click of the camera, tells much more than the brevity of their presence on the page. These fast glimpses of a gesture, a flower, a colour, dilate the meaning of the sketches, expanding the locality of the image to the eternal and worldwide meaning of life, in a lyrical language more typical of poetry than of prose. For example, in this expansion achieved through repetition, the light of California becomes indistinguishable from a Hanoi sunset or a ‘sunrise over a stubbly hill in eastern Nigeria’, while Santa Monica could be Kenya (VF, 145) to the eyes of the new migrant population of Los Angeles. Through this evocative comparisons Los Angeles becomes a city of the global south, where any supposed hierarchy between a rich North and a poor South is demolished. As the rosary highlights, LA is a city of migrants, its population made up of the young Sierra Leonean (VF, 147) and the women from the Caspian Sea (VF, 148), and a number of other ‘migrated’ people, like the Chicano guards who have to act against fellow Chicanos, or the Mexican woman whose ancestry possessed the land of today’s Los Angeles Music Center (VF, 147). Black and Gabriel observe all this from Bunker Hill, the historic neighbourhood delimiting downtown Los Angeles, the secret centre of the city where the Catholic Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels stands. As Iggy tells Black, Los Angeles is in fact the place of the uprooted, the migrated, the exiled, and for this reason migration is of primary importance in both the architecture and the demography of the city. Even plants do not belong here: the bougainvillea was an alien. Like much of the flora of this city, it came from somewhere else: palm trees from the Canary Islands, eucalyptus from Australia, bougainvillea from Brazil, birds of paradise from South Africa. Nearly everything now native to Los Angeles came from somewhere else. That was perhaps its beauty, Black thought. That it never tired of reinventing itself, producing as many shades and nuances of being as a bougainvillea: pink, magenta, purple, red, orange, white and yellow. (VF, 177)

However, despite the beauty of the above-mentioned image, the idea of ‘reinventing oneself’, a key element of the mythology about LA, betrays fallacies. As the cradle of the cinematic industry, whose

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fortune has been the interplay of reality and dreams, Los Angeles is ‘a city constantly digesting its past and recycling itself into something new’ (VF, 153). This constant push towards the erasure of memory and self-reinvention may become a source of hollowness and idleness, of freedom yet of deracination.29 Los Angeles’s spirit of endless becoming is then ambivalent in The Virgin of Flames, because it offers ‘images of instability, fragility, unreality’, in line with the city’s literary tradition within which Abani’s novel can be placed.30 Such tragic absence of authenticity is germane to Black’s identity crisis, a quest he deals with by undergoing a series of bodily experimentations and transformations, as we will see in the following paragraph. In contrast to Lagos, which offered no alternatives to Elvis, Los Angeles’s apparent openness and constant ‘becoming’ should be redemptive for Black but, in reality, it produces only meteoritic lives, burning stars doomed to fall, as the image of Black on fire on top of his spaceship evokes.

Black’s drag It’s like what Homi Bhabha says, ‘Identity is a destination.’ It is, and that’s why all of my work is about becoming. Abani in interview with Aycock

If Los Angeles is ‘a city constantly digesting its past and recycling itself into something new’ (VF, 153), so is Black, a self-shaping character captured from the very first pages of the book in the transformative process that characterises his progress throughout the novel. As already advanced in GraceLand and Becoming Abigail, The Virgin of Flames continues to ponder over ideas of becoming, a central topic of the book which ferries Abani’s search on identitarian boundaries to new a new porous, in-flux dimension. There are two main transgressions Black operates and that I consider in this section: the infringement of racial and gender belonging, by way of a whiteface drag act which mixes sexual and religious desire. When the reader meets him, Black is in his room applying a white paste on his black skin in order to become the white Virgin he wants to portray (VF, 4). The image clearly brings to mind the whitening

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of Elvis Oke in GraceLand, and many are in fact the similarities between the two protagonists. For example, both experience traumatic sexual experiences in their youth, and in The Virgin of Flames there is a single but explicit reference to a Thai Elvis impersonator, with whom Black feels ‘real kinship’ (VF, 214). What is more, in both novels Elvis’s and Black’s performances of whiteness are connected to matters of artistic aspirations, be they the dancing career Elvis dreams of or the necessity of a model Black cannot afford. As it was true for Elvis, ‘going white’ is the only means Black has to get  access to artistic freedom, even though the novel complicates such assumption by positioning Black’s atelier in East LA, an area of Los Angeles that is knowingly non-white.31 It is there, in that neighbourhood forgotten by city planners (VF, 52), that Black can find a free space for his artistic expression in the form of graffiti paintings or of the spaceship, the futuristic structure he creates on top of his apartment above Iggy’s Ugly Store. The similarities between Black and Elvis are so numerous that some critics have read The Virgin of Flames as the American counterpart to GraceLand – that is, what would happen to Elvis were he born in or had he gone to the USA, as in certain passages of GraceLand the character desires. However, as Lindsey Green-Simms points out, ‘[i]f Black is Elvis’s future or even the American version of Elvis, this alternative does not prove to be very ­redeeming’.32 The passage from Lagos to Los Angeles is, in GreenSimms’s viewpoint, ‘not particularly celebratory’ for the main character, who is unable to achieve any artistic fame or, more simply, find self-expression. What GraceLand and The Virgin of Flames most significantly share is their protagonists’ queerness, understood as the ability to ‘create space for different expressions of gender and sexuality’, thus contributing to the abolition of limits and polarities.33 With regard to race, for example, Black’s artistic whiteface adds to a certain racial flexibility the protagonist plays with, despite the fact that his name clearly nails him to the sphere of blackness. Black isn’t just ‘black’: he was ‘dark enough to be black, yet light enough to be something else’ (VF, 30). As he admits to Iggy, his landlady and friend, ‘I’m a shape-shifter’ (VF, 37): he is Salvadorian on his mother’s side and African on his father’s side, but being born in the

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USA he also qualifies simply as American; he is definitely brown, if not black as his name suggests. What is more, he is a man but also a woman, at least in his drag experiments he tries throughout the novel. Identity, in Black’s perception, is fluid, so much so that he goes through several identities, taking on different ethnic and national affiliations as though they were seasonal changes in wardrobe, and discarding them just as easily. For a while, Black had been Navajo, the seed race: children of the sky people, descendants of visitors from a distant planet. That was when he built the spaceship. It was the ethnicity that best suited his personality, their language the most like his memory of Igbo. But he gave it up because he never mastered the steely-eyed and clenched jaw look he saw in films. Besides, he didn’t like being a sidekick and after a while it felt like every Indian on TV or in the movies was Tonto. (VF, 37)

The quotation ends with humour and a reference to mediated visions of racial or ethnic identity. It thus adds further layers of interpretation to Black’s racial vagueness and blurs even more the postmodern revision of monolithic polarities the novel offers. Because, if Black’s identity quest appears as a central and, above all, a serious matter, this instance of humour reviving the stoic Indian of dated Western movies shatters solemn identitarian stances. The same form of humour at the beginning of the book seems to elude any attempts at dealing with the novel as a voluntary dialogue with postcolonial issues. When in whiteface at the beginning of the book, Black ponders on the shade of white he has recreated. The tonality is ‘[a]n aging ivory that recalled the musty smell of empire in decline, a sad color really. Whose empire he had no idea. Probably something he had seen in a movie’ (VF, 4). As in the above quotation about a possible identification with Native Americans, the whole question of empire-power-coloniality is here dismissed with witticism and not investigated. Identity in The Virgin of Flames is so fluid that it becomes ambiguous; something sacred, yet to be joked about or easily dismissed, as the author also advances in his memoir ‘Coming to America – a remix’. In spite of a comic side to the matter, it cannot be denied that Black’s identitarian indeterminacy equates a feeling of inadequacy

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that never abandons him throughout the novel. As the protagonist admits, the transformation he is undergoing sprouts from a feeling of uneasiness: ‘[H]e didn’t want to be himself’, he muses, ‘Or maybe that he was looking for who he should be. But he had no idea who he wanted to, or should, be’ (VF, 39). In Obi Nwakanma’s words, Black’s identitarian chaos is the typical anxiety of the children of migrants, ‘rootless, ambivalent, unable to find the impossible node of identification with a past or a future, with a homeland’.34 Black feels split, divided between a chaotic present and an escaping idea of the past he interprets as enduring, true, safe, and, therefore, salvific. As he himself admits, he ‘was obsessed with origins, and he believed that in his case, origins held the key to self-discovery’ (VF, 123). His acts of cross-dressing are in fact an attempt at going back in time to his childhood, when, for his Nigerian father, he was Obinna, an African Igbo name meaning ‘his father’s heart’ (VF, 49). In compliance with his father’s beliefs, from birth until he was seven he was dressed up as a girl, in order to avoid a curse causing the death of every male newborn in the family. As a consequence of such a memory, in Black’s own perception his present crossdressing is but a repetition of the past, of his infancy. Nevertheless, being orphaned of both parents, he isn’t able to get access to more detail about his childhood, a period of his life which is ambivalent, even tragic, because of the troublesome relationship he has with both his parents, unable to offer protective love.35 Black is therefore stuck in between two motions: his present self, evolving towards an unknown future, and a desire to stop and retrieve the supposed safety of inherited past identities. As a way to help him out of this identitarian impasse – and implicitly reinforcing the vision of the protagonist’s parabola as a metaphor of the spirit of the city – Black’s friend Iggy explains that ‘[i]n LA we are always becoming, and any idea of a solid past, as an anchor, is soon lost here […] there is just you and what you see and imagine this place and your life in it to be, moment by moment. If you can’t change, if you don’t embrace it, you destroy yourself’ (VF, 207). Destruction is in fact what is in store for Black. Whereas in works like Becoming Abigail and Song for Night the action on the protagonist’s body through acts of scarification is a ‘mnemonic device’ (SN, 16), which tries to ‘write’ on the body

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the memory of who the protagonists are, in The Virgin of Flames the act of becoming is perverted. The explanation of Black’s crossdressing and ‘becoming’ body as a memorial act reviving his childhood is insufficient to explain the whirl of identitarian instabilities it triggers. Unlike Abani’s previous works, in The Virgin of Flames Black’s bodily modifications do not mean rooting and embedding but uncontrolled becoming, eradication from his own self, so much so that, in the end, Black transforms into a meaningful element for the others more than for himself, who literally burns up on top of his spaceship, that other ‘metaphor of the unfinished odyssey, of arrivals and departures, of the poet stuck in the muddle of history and experience’.36 Besides whiteface, the other identitarian category on which The Virgin of Flames ponders is the porosity of gender boundaries. The movement between genders is a theme that appears early in Abani’s work, since his first collection Kalakuta Republic (2000), in which ‘paper doll’ Christiana, ‘prison shorts torn into a skirt’, acts as a prostitute to the prisoners (KR, 47). Abani returns to this motif in the collection Hands Washing Water, in which a sort of reversal of Black’s cross-dressing is related. In the beautiful epistolary poem ‘Buffalo women’, the love letters between man and wife reveal the secret of a woman living as a man and, as a consequence, sent to the front during war. This, among other things, is an expression of gender sensitivity that confirms Abani’s attention to themes such as gender-passing and femininity, as he proves in Daphne’s Lot, Dog Woman, Becoming Abigail, and Song for Night. The idea of the queer that emerges in the latter, as explained in Chapter 4, recurs and is articulated in The Virgin of Flames by means of the drag, an expression of the gender limits that the book’s protagonist tries to transgress. Seemingly a ludic and job-oriented activity, the cross-dressing of the first pages gathers more and more consequential meaning as the novel develops. The initial whiteface is in fact the prelude to repeated and complex transformations, which progress from the artistic necessity to look like the Virgin for the absence of a real model, to the desire of wearing Iggy’s wedding dress, to the final image of Black as a drag, with his penis properly concealed by adhesive tape, blonde wig, and make-up.37 If the character of Sweet Girl

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would be per se an interesting insertion, presenting issues of sexual freedom and discrimination along the border separating the  USA and Mexico, Black is the character that, depicted in the same moment of ‘migrating’ from one gender to the other, offers the most elaborated meditation on the matter. Starting as something grotesque because of white plaster, rouge cheeks, and blue eye shadow (VF, 4), Black’s rendition of femininity becomes increasingly patent and detailed. In order to fully appear as a woman, he adds Iggy’s wedding dress and a wig to the make-up; in the end of the novel, thanks to Sweet Girl’s help, he also becomes a distorted version of the Virgin Mary, usually understood as an expression of ‘femininity in its most potent aspects, both in terms of social acceptability and in terms of religious significance’.38 Cheryl Stobie offers an interpretation of the novel focused on religious and spiritual motives and proposes to read Black’s performance as the Virgin positively, as ‘the Virgin with balls’.39 As a female religious subject that contains masculinity, Black is an impossible but finally free subject according to the critic, similar to Byzantium’s eunuchs of the past, whose third gender was deemed a source of social and spiritual power.40 Stressing possible connections to former expressions of spirituality, Stobie urges to read Black’s cross-dressing as a sort of pre-Christian ritual, ‘aimed at holism, uniting the attributes associated with each gender’ and partly tracing the same form of ancestral spirituality Durrant reads in Song for Night.41 Although I agree with Stobie in her reading of Black as the Virgin as a moment of fluidity and of erasure of ontological dichotomies, I also believe that the ambivalence with which Abani invests the text requires an open reading, able to dissect the multiplicity of meanings implied in Black and his performance as the Virgin. At thirty-six, in whiteface and women’s clothes, Black can in fact be considered an expression of the drag, the figure masterly illustrated by Judith Butler.42 In her Undoing Gender the philosopher argues that the rubric of the drag is ambivalent, because it perpetuates gender norms while denouncing their unnaturalness by showing them on the ‘wrong’ body. In this way the drag opens space for new articulations of what it means to be a man or a woman, questioning ideas of humanity by shattering the t­ raditional

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assumed order of sex/gender/desire.43 However, the deconstruction of the assumed consistency between body, gender, and desire does not create an immediate space for Black’s liberation. By cross-­dressing he accommodates femininity on his male body, but also creates a grotesque effect that, because of his search for confirmations, disrupts Black’s fragile self. As he admits to Iggy, he is unhappy with himself, he doesn’t know who he is, but he does not want to be a woman either. His is a play, or, better, a superficial attempt at experiencing difference on himself as a possible answer for his identitarian quest; yet the thrill of possibilities, in the end, precipitates him in an even deeper emotional chaos. What is potentially a liberating space (the drag) becomes a loss of balance in Black, who appears unable to understand what is genuine and what is artificial, and if those notions are of any use to him. According to R. W. Connell, the abolishment of the expected nexus between a male body and manhood, as unveiled by the drag, may denote the loss of one of the most pervasive organisational structures of both society and identity.44 This can result in a form of terror, a ‘gender vertigo’, which Abani himself admits experiencing while writing the book and which collapses Black’s ability to cope with reality.45 The novel indeed portrays Black’s inability to conceive and rationalise the drag as a space of possibilities. While the drag is desired, it is also somehow policed, as the pain Black feels while transgressing gender norms shows. Consider, for example, when he wears Iggy’s wedding dress in order to visually reinscribe femininity on to his body. This act is perceived as something criminal: such a feeling may be explained by the fact that Black literally stole Iggy’s dress, but also by the regulating force of the sex/gender/desire order. This policing violence is even more visible in one of the last scenes of The Virgin of Flames when, during the much-desired romantic rendezvous with Sweet Girl and after moments of tenderness and intimacy, Sweet Girl shows Black how she hides her small penis. Black’s final becoming seems at hand and he desires to reproduce the woman’s act. Sweet Girl thus hides Black’s penis with tape bandages; he wears Iggy’s wedding dress and a wig; Sweet Girl makes him up. But his craving for a new self vanishes when he sees himself in such attire and thinks of ‘a 1940s German whore from a bad B movie’ (VF, 285): he hates himself. He reacts to his

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g­ rotesqueness and, without explicit reasons apart from the violence of gender conforming, he punches Sweet Girl. Seeing himself as a woman, he feels in what Butler would define as extreme ‘gender trouble’: he perceives his own gender in danger and, as a result, reacts in a very masculine way by hitting Sweet Girl, whose only fault is showing him the way to his final becoming. As he admits to himself on this occasion, ‘he knew he would never find this thing, this becoming that he wanted. It was a grace far beyond anything he had in the face of it’ (VF, 285): his constant acts of becoming, or attempts at relocating within a different race or gender, question the boundaries of one’s identity, but offer no final solution or feeling of fulfilment. Black is more than a figure of doubleness – man and woman, black and white, native and alien at the same time. Black allegorises the ambivalence of multiple cracks and possibilities; he is the fluidity of constant becoming, the character replicating the ‘centrifugal’ identity of Los Angeles. Using the words with which Scott J. Bryson describes the city, Black is ‘an amorphous, centerless organism that  […] eschews all attempts to grasp it, to understand it’.46 He lives in a state of ‘permanent disorientation’, which, according to Mike Davis, is the very definition of being an Angelino.47 As a mirror of the spirit of Los Angeles, Black’s is an ‘ontological turmoil’: he represents ‘the instability of history and identity’, the loss of memory, the absence of stories, and the war against the future.48 His is the inability to preserve ‘be-coming’ as an idea of futurity, because in him transformation loses its regenerative power and meaning. In a final helping impulse, Iggy suggests that ‘There is no core to anything, Black. It’s like an onion; if you keep just peeling away, you will disappear. There is only the you you’re becoming or have become […] It’s everything, not one thing. Everything and the cracks in between; especially the cracks in between!’ (VF, 208). Those ‘cracks in between’ call to mind the cracks on Elvis’s talcumpowdered face (GL, 78), which mark his failure to become, but also confirm a willingness to take a challenge and expose the fragility of one’s own desires, dreams, aspiration, traumas even. A favourite of Abani’s, the poet Derek Walcott wrote in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, ‘Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragment is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for

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granted when it was whole’.49 Imperfection reveals humanity. It is in his poetic rendition of Black’s cracks and spoil that Abani shows humanity’s ugliness, its fractures yet beauty, because acknowledging those fractures is, in the end, restorative – maybe not for Black himself but for the people gathered under his spaceship, as the conclusion of the book and of this chapter contend.

A Marian inflamed redemption I am building a fire, a funeral pyre for the attavus. For the ritual. I am burning to ash in my desperate signaling. In the distance. A fire burning and a man. Abani, Sanctificum What was the point? Nothing ever resolved, he thought. It just changes. Abani, GraceLand

As much as the cycle of becoming is painful for Black, the novel ends with hope. Freakish in his misshapen woman attire, deprived of his dream of love with Sweet Girl and his desire to be a woman, which in the end gets him frustrated, Black experiences what is most likely the lowest moment of his life. After beating Sweet Girl, his dress soaked in turpentine as a consequence of the physical quarrel with her, he flees to the top of his spaceship. There, ‘[h]e smelled the burning and looking down realized that he’d dropped the still lit cigarette and it had caught on an edge of the turpentine-soaked dress. He stamped his feet trying to extinguish the fire, but the turpentine was an accelerant, and the flames enveloped him.’ On top of the spaceship50 he literally becomes ‘A woman on fire’ (VF, 290): the Virgin of Flames. The image of the fire, which the reader is introduced to by way of the title (‘flames’) and which comes circularly up again at the closing of the book, is a given in both Abani’s and Los Angeles’s literary production. In literature about LA, fire has an apocalyptic quality,51 as in the classic The Day of the Locust (1939) by Nathanael West, in which the protagonist’s painting The Burning

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of Los Angeles symbolises an incoherent, eccentric, and doomedto-fail city and population. In other examples of Los Angeles literature, fire similarly stands for the disaster affecting an area surrounded by desert. Fire is also a constant topos in Abani’s literary production, found again and again in novels and poems alike. Burning was an astonishing form of punishing in GraceLand, marking the brutality of man-on-man violence, whilst in Becoming Abigail it is one of the forms of Abigail’s self-inscription on her body. In Song for Night fire is ambiguous, both purifying and destructive at the same time, linked to the riots against the Igbo population perpetrated by the Hausa and associated with My Luck’s mother’s death. Fire is also an element of the poem collection Dog Woman (see section ‘Fire woman’); in the poem ‘Fire’, in Hands Washing Water, flames enlighten ‘dark streets’, while the sound of ‘burning ­firewood’ accompanies the writing of love: Lost, but for the flames we drag through dark streets; smoke and dust Aho je la, aho je la, aho jengeje, aho jengeje This chant is sky orotund with sun and the mirage: a pot smoldering against night’s face, startling last year’s spirits gathering in corners, holding on. And this: The crackle of burning firewood, a train of palm fronds like hungry tongues licking the street, parched from the intensity. Beyond the brood of dark hills the sea; salt and stone. This is not superstition. This is how we write love. (HWW, 54)

Fire comes up again in The Secret History of Las Vegas, in which the main protagonists, symbolically called Fire and Water, are fire wizards. Contrary to Black, who finds death by combustion, the protagonists of The Secret History of Las Vegas can manage this element, transforming a central feature of The Virgin of the Flames into a positive and even enchanting component, as in the number the twins perform in front of Sunil. In the episode, ‘Fire began a mesmerizing incantation, and as Sunil watched, Water opened his

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hands and the paper moth fluttered into flight for thirty seconds. It hovered over his palms for another ten seconds and then burst into flames, the ash falling into Water’s cupped hands’ (SHLV, 131).52 In The Virgin of Flames fire assumes a different meaning that twists the Los Angeles tradition by symbolising failure and hope at the same time: if on the one hand it stops Black’s cycle of becoming, on the other it seals the transformative climax by turning Black into a grotesque virgin. Whilst a clear symbol of defeat, because it implicitly indicates Black’s existential and absurd end, fire also grows into an indication of redemption, possibly connected to the figure of the phoenix and therefore to new birth. As Aycock suggests, once caught in-between manhood and womanhood, ‘Black cannot occupy either gender: he cannot let himself be a woman, but he’s no longer able to be a man. But he has to become something. He becomes this chimera, this bird of fire’, the mythic bird that is reborn from its own ashes, those same ashes that are falling from Los Angeles’s sky, similar to snow.53 The book’s epigraph, by the famous photographer Diane Arbus, is indicative in this regard, for it offers a reading key of Black as one of those ‘singular people who appear like metaphors […] so that we may wonder all over again what is veritable and inevitable and possible and what it is to become whoever we may be’ (VF, epigraph). A shapeless character focused on becoming, on the futurity offered by transformation although always reminiscent of his past, Black can indeed be read as a metaphor, a sign, not for himself but for those gathered below the spaceship in worship. Seen from below by the crowd of the faithful in the alley (VF, 288), Black’s grotesque Virgin is transformed by people’s belief into something sublime. His ‘burning’ failure becomes a moment of spiritual fulfilment for those regular working folks dressed in their best clothes which were faded, if clean, from repeated washes, their faces shining from the same grease slicking their hair down and polishing their shoes. Earnest folk with wide-open faces and hands calloused from the hardness of their labours. He should have guessed. They weren’t here for Iggy, these weren’t the kind of people who paid a psychic for a tattoo and a reading; they were here for him. Well, not him exactly, but him as the Virgin. (VF, 92)

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In a moment of self-combustion, of probable disappearance, Black experiences a final act of beautiful transformation, enacted from the outside by his fellow citizens. Although his aspiration of identitarian satisfaction concludes in vain, his failure transforms into optimistic confidence for the inhabitants of East LA, that Latino group who finally see their brown Virgin aflame, enlightening the Los Angeles night. In order to understand the importance of this final change, and how it can be redemptive, it is salient to fully understand the profound religious vision which informs the book, overindulging in images of altars, Virgins of different types, and improbable angels. Besides the narrative recourse to the rosary, the novel evokes religion formally even by way, for example, of its sections’ titles: The Annunciation, The Unconsoled, Idolatry, The Anointing, Benediction.54 As Abani admits in an interview, ‘[a]s much as I would like to pretend that they weren’t, most of my formative years were spent in religious training’, an education that enters into dialogue with Abani’s vision of humanity and the grotesque in this novel.55 Pervading its structure and figures, religion can indeed be considered a palimpsest to this ‘Marian’ novel, dedicated to the city of angels, one of its protagonists being a transfiguration of the archangel Gabriel, and whose subject is the Virgin in different forms – the Virgin of Guadalupe, Fatima as the Virgin whom Black paints, and the Virgin of Flames he eventually becomes. Because almost half of its population is of Hispanic origins, Los Angeles culture is in fact imbued with Catholicism and, specifically, Latin American Catholicism, a religious expression which gives primal importance to the figure of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Abani proves to be familiar with this syncretic culture and figure in several poems (see Hands Washing Water and Sanctificum, but also Dog Woman), and acknowledges the significance of the Virgin of Guadalupe at the beginning of The Virgin of Flames, when he relates the Virgin’s value to the people of East LA for spiritual but also political reasons – ‘because she was a brown virgin who had appeared to a brown saint, Juan Diego’ (VF, 41). She is, in this sense, not just the product of Catholic hagiography but a hybrid figure, a ‘melding of the Virgin Mary and the indigenous Mexican deity Tonantzin’.56 Because of this historical background,

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to Eastern Angelinos the Virgin of Guadalupe was ‘also a symbol of justice, of a political spirituality’ (VF, 41) at least from the 1930s, an important decade in Los Angeles’s development into its present ‘expolis’ form and its racial history.57 The significance of the Virgin in Los Angeles thus expands her religious relevance, because her figure highlights the hybridity of the Latino cultural front, which Black also pursues but is unable to live. The racial and cultural mestizaje the Virgin provides, to use a word dear to the Chicano community, is indeed what Black aims at experiencing, by means of his gender shiftings and racial and ethnic indeterminacy. Fatima, the Virgin whom Black paints as a mural, is another gripping example of successful hybridity, although he is forced to destroy the picture by state authorities.58 Distant from the versions of the Catholic Madonna for which he poses in whiteface, Fatima is a syncretic image that simultaneously refers to the Portuguese Our Lady of Fatima but also, as her name insinuates, to a Middle Eastern woman, as the brown skin and the veil in the painting indicate.59 The queer religiosity Black portrays in his work, highlighted also by the AK-47 rifle in the Madonna’s hands, is anticipated on the book cover, representing a work by the Mexican-born and lesbian artist Alma López. López’s Our Lady is a clear homage to the iconography of the Virgin of Guadalupe and was inspired by the novelist Sandra Cisneros’s essay ‘Guadalupe the sex goddess’ (1996), an example of how, for many Chicana writers and activists such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Guadalupe is a symbol of female (and also queer) power.60 However, the artist twists the classical iconography of the Virgin: her Lady is a brown Madonna inside a vagina-like shape, in a bikini of pastel roses, her blue mantle a low relief with preColumbian motifs; her hands are on her hips instead of in a praying pose. In López’s work, the Virgin has the face of the Chicana queer model Raquel Salinas, who was raped as a teenager but accused by her family for her supposed ‘criminally sexual’ behaviour.61 This attempt at queering the traditional vision of the Lady of Guadalupe, replacing the idea of a virgin with that of a supposed ‘whore’, is reinforced by other elements of the usual iconography, such as the angel sustaining the Virgin. Instead of Juan Diego, the indigenous man to whom Christ’s mother appeared in the sixteenth century, López depicts a butterfly, a symbol of fragility. The body of the

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butterfly is a woman, the Chicano queer performance artist Raquel Gutiérrez, famous for her butch femininity. This queered image of Chicano mestizaje on the book cover invites the reader to draw a parallelism between the local hybridity and Black’s transnational subjectivity, although the protagonist’s identitarian postmodern oscillations never appear as empowering as the tradition with which the novel dialogues. The Chicana form of religiosity, more hybrid and communitarian than the dogmatic rules imposed in his privacy by Black’s Catholic mother, is relevant above all when understood alongside the notion of becoming. As confirmed by both the book cover and the plot, religion and becoming are two deeply interlaced interpretative tools that contribute to understanding the importance of faith and, as a consequence, hope in Catholicism. In this version of Christianity transformation is a most important idea that explains the passage of the spirit into body, as happens during Mass in the sacramental bread Catholics eat – a process Abani shows he is aware of in the Section ‘Om’ in Sanctificum (6). The action of eating sacramental bread as if it were Christ’s body is not simply a matter of symbolism but, theologically, an expression of transubstantiation: the body and blood of Christ become bread and wine, to be eaten by the believers. The act of faith stands, therefore, in believing in the redemptive power of a particular form of becoming, in which Christ gives himself to others. This is, in a way, what happens at the end of The Virgin of Flames: Black becomes a Christlike or, better, a Madonna-like figure, who involuntarily gives his burning body to the worshippers gathered to wait for an apparition of the Virgin. His burning dress’s (even body’s?) ashes mix with the ash-rain that is covering the city and the worshippers alike, thus completing his act of donation to the others which gives final meaning to his otherwise haphazard life. Contrary to Crowley’s reading of Black’s final immolation as futile – because the Virgin of Flames ‘symbolically reinforces the troubled conditions of the ghetto. In the end, there is nothing transformative for the people or the city from all the Virgin sightings’62 – I read Black’s accidental gesture as an act of involuntary kindness. I say this remembering Abani’s 2008 TED Talk, in which the author expresses an aesthetic vision he would confirm in later narrative,

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prose, as well as public contributions. On that occasion Abani stressed the importance of gentleness – those ‘gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion’63 – as a source of redemption. As Elvis is saved by the unexpected gift of a visa by a young criminal, in The Virgin of Flames hope is saved by a failed artist. This is an act of both compassion and redemption, which Abani explains as the power of self-investigation and accomplishment by means of a relationship, that is, by means of the other. ‘When people feel things for you’, Abani says, ‘they’re not feeling things for you’. The faithful love for the Virgin is not really about the Virgin; the faithful reverence for Black isn’t really about Black as the Virgin. ‘They’re feeling things through your experience that allows them to access their own pain. So it’s an index of relationship. And that’s what redemption is about.’64 This is a form of hope that, with Ernst Bloch, is not just passive or naive, even though it may appear so, as in the reading by Crowley. Bloch explains that hope cannot be singular or personal, because ‘[t]he emotion of hope goes out of itself’.65 It is in this perspective of reciprocity that I understand Black-as-the-Virgin as a meaningful act, because it is only when Black’s body becomes significant for the others, soliciting hope, that his destiny is fulfilled and his meteoric becoming can stop. The significance of Black comes only through the other, to whom he gives back an emotion of active belonging. The work of hope, Bloch explains, ‘requires people who throw themselves actively into what is becoming, to which they themselves belong’.66 It is with these words in mind that I understand The Virgin of Flames’s finale as an act of performative explosion which acquires meaning in the ethical relationship with the other and for the other. As Abani has stated about GraceLand, ‘any kind of transformation or transubstantiation is never an erasure of the trauma’.67 In a similar way’ Black’s transformation does not obliterate his emotional stress; his dress on fire continues to be an image of defeat, despite the worshippers. Still it is not an image of disaster. It rather becomes a moment of revelation for those watching and, above all, for those reading, who are shown the shared vulnerability of our humanity. ‘Holy is the hope’, Abani writes in the poem ‘Renewal’. ‘Holy is the desire’ of becoming; ‘holy is the awe’ of those worshipping the Virgin of Flames (S, 102).



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There is a sense of ‘benediction’ in such shared vulnerability, as the title of the book’s very last page indicates in elegiac tone. The chapter opens with the word ‘leavened’ (VF, 291), a verb that, Stobie recalls, refers to bread, a Catholic religious symbol of Jesus Christ’s body, but in general to ‘something transformed for the better’.68 After Black’s disaster, at the dawn of a new day, perched on the lip of a bridge, hunched in the solitary sadness of a gargoyle, a woman picks petals from a flower, dropping each into that endless flow, her whispers holding it all like prayer: he loved me; he loved me not. In the river below, an angry dog barks as it swims for safety unaware of the petals falling like gossamer, like promises unkept. But there are no scriptures here in this city of angels where every moment is a life lived too fast, where the spines of freeways, like arteries, like blood, circle in hope. (VF, 291)

There are here Abani’s usual symbols of vulnerable grace, the woman and the dog, elsewhere in the book portrayed as symbols of compassion. Whilst the sadness of the woman and the swimming for survival of the dog may appear an ambivalent concluding note, their mutual vulnerability is framed by an image of beauty, those petals that fall like a gossamer, a cobweb, fragile yet imaginatively establishing a net between woman and dog. There is tenderness in this unaltered moment of life that circulates, unaltered by Black’s meteor. After the exceptionality of the previous night’s event there is a suspension of time, the category usually defining becoming. Past and history, future and transformation, eventually dissolve in this moment in which time is erased; what remains is an almost banal circulation – the ‘endless flow’ of life, in which arteries and blood circle in hope. ‘Permanence’ is, unexpectedly, one of the final words of this book about becoming: the permanent certainty of never being better nor worse than our predecessors or the future to come, never better or worse of our previous selves and fellow beings, the certainty of being so fragilely hopeful; the permanence of humanity unaltered and continuing, despite our deeds, miseries, and joys. Because, quoting Abani’s own words in the poem ‘Renewal’, This is not a lamentation, damn it. This is a love song.

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This is a love song. Like reggae – it all falls on the offbeat. (S, 102)

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Notes  1 In GraceLand Abani uses the names Sunday and Beatrice (Elvis’s parents), which can also be found in Chimamanda N. Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus. A similar intertextual reference can be found in The Virgin of Flames, in which the name Bomboy recalls Yewande Omotoso’s book Bom Boy (2011).   2 As is often the case in Abani’s prose, intertextual elements connect his novels and poems. The image of the spaceship, for example, so central in The Virgin of Flames, can be found again at the beginning of The Secret History of Las Vegas, the novel Abani published after The Virgin of Flames. In that 2014 novel the Hoover Dam, where the action starts, is described as ‘an alien ship anchored to the walls of the Black Canyon’ (SHLV, 14), whilst the town where the protagonists come from is called Gabriel in honour of the Catholic angel, one of the characters of The Virgin of Flames.   3 See A. Aycock, ‘Becoming black and Elvis: transnational and performative identity in the novels of Chris Abani’, Safundi, 10:1 (2009), 11–25, and C. Stobie, ‘Indecent theology, trans-theology, and the transgendered Madonna in Chris Abani’s The Virgin of Flames’, Research in African Literatures, 42:2 (2011), 170–83.   4 Stobie, ‘Indecent theology’, p. 171; C. Duboin, ‘New transatlantic passages: African immigrant writers and contemporary black literature in America’, in J. Misrahi-Barak and C. Raynaud (eds), Diasporas, Cultures of Mobilities, ‘Race’ Vol. 1: Diasporas and Cultures of  Migrations (Montpellier: University Paul Valéry, 2014), p. 189.   5 M. Feldner, Narrating the New African Diaspora: 21st Century Nigerian Literature in Context (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 25–7. The question is of course more complex than I can i­nvestigate here. Besides the already quoted Feldner see also G. Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001), and S. Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary  Marketplace (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).   6 See Feldner, Narrating the New African Diaspora.

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  7 O. Nwakanma, ‘O, Polyphemus: on poetry and alienation’, ARIEL, 39:4 (2008), p. 142. See also Stobie, ‘Indecent theology’; D. Crowley, Africa’s Narrative Geographies: Charting the Intersections of Geocriticism and Postcolonial Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); M. Krishnan, ‘Of masquerades and mimicry: performance, identity, and tradition in Chris Abani’s The Virgin of Flames’, ARIEL, 43:2 (2013), 45–68.   8 For example, Crowley notes that ‘Abani uses nearly identical phrasing when describing both Los Angeles and Lagos: in his essay “Lagos: A Pilgrimage in Notations”, he writes, “In the distance, a line of skyscrapers rise like the uneven heart of prayer” (1); and in The Virgin of Flames, we read of Los Angeles, “in the distance, a cluster of high-rises, like the spires of old Cathedrals, trace a jagged line against the sky, ever the uneven heart of prayer” (3)’ (Africa’s Narrative Geographies, p. 129).   9 Originally drafted as a noir, Abani’s initial project for The Virgin of Flames had to be modified because of editorial choices. Yet such fascination for the noir is visible in the game Black plays with Ray-Ray, the dwarf working for Iggy, in which the name of Raymond Chandler, the most prominent representative of the genre with his The Big Sleep (1939), comes up again and again. Abani goes back to the noir in The Secret History of Las Vegas, and his latest production, the anthology Lagos Noir (2018). 10 Krishnan, ‘Of masquerades and mimicry’. 11 The epigraph is from Kaufman’s poem ‘Unholy missions’. 12 As I will show in the following chapter, in The Secret History of Las Vegas Abani goes back to Africa as a relevant setting, even if in the form of the memories of one of the characters, the South African psychiatrist Sunil Singh. 13 Crowley, Africa’s Narrative Geographies, p. 154. 14 D. Fine, Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction (Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 2000), pp. ix–x; S. Bryson, ‘Los Angeles literature: exiles, natives, and (mis)representation’, American Literary History, 16:4 (2004), p. 707. 15 Fine, Imagining Los Angeles, pp. xi and 16. 16 Fine, Imagining Los Angeles, p. 173. 17 E. Soja, ‘Six discourses on the postmetropolis’, in S. Westwood and J. Williams (eds), Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memory (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 19–33. 18 S. Timberg, ‘Living the perfect metaphor’, Los Angeles Times (18 February 2007). www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-feb-18-ca-

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abani18-story.html. Accessed 21 April 2021. Los Angeles appears also in some poetic works by Abani, such as Sanctificum, which dedicates two poems to Los Angeles. One is in the section ‘Om’, of which a short extract is contained in the epigraph to this paragraph. The other is poem 1, section ‘Pilgrimage’ (S, 59):

Somewhere between care and cacophony Los Angeles is alive. The city stands outside of everything. We come to night. We come to light. The city is a liar. May I find my way. Los Angeles is a dream we cannot bear. I think of streets black as any river, and beer. Over loud music a woman calls to her lover. There is no truth here. The city is awash with lights. Even this sacrifice will not save us. […]

19 M. Davis, City of Quartz (New York: Verso, 1990); E. Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley, 2000), and ‘Six discourses on the postmetropolis’. 20 Timberg, ‘Living the perfect metaphor’. Writing in the same years of The Virgin of Flames, but from a social and urban analytical ­perspective, Mike Davis confirms the possibility of reading Los Angeles as an expression of the global south once poverty is taken into account. As he states, the city is ‘the First World capital of homelessness, with an estimated 100,000 homeless people, including an increasing number of families, camped on downtown streets or living furtively in parks and amongst freeway landscaping’. M. Davis, Planet of Slums (London and New York: Verso, 2006), p. 36. 21 B. Santos, ‘Epistemologies of the South’, From the European South, 1 (2016), p. 18. 22 Santos, ‘Epistemologies of the South’, p. 19. 23 For the different literary traditions depicting Los Angeles, see Davis’s classic City of Quartz. 24 Aycock, ‘Becoming black and Elvis’, p. 21; Stobie, ‘Indecent theology’. 25 Stobie, ‘Indecent theology’, p. 170. 26 My reference to Dickens recalls other possible intertextualities: Abani himself describes Black, in the final pages of the book, as a Miss Havisham (VL, 287), a character in Dickens’s Great Expectations. Dickens is also one of the many literary references in GraceLand.

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27 The name Gabriel is highly symbolical and not just for religious or regional reasons. Gabriel is also the name of the detective in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997), a key text in LA’s literary ­tradition – a plausible suggestion if we consider Abani’s reference to other writers such as Adichie and Omotoso already advanced in note 1 of this chapter, and his well-known love for noirs and detective stories, as explained in note 4. 28 The motif of the Catholic Passion had already been used by Abani in the poem ‘Stone woman’ (DW, 47). 29 N. Klein, The History of Forgetting (London: Verso, 1997). 30 Fine, Imagining Los Angeles, p. 16. 31 One wonders if Black’s process of whitening, read symbolically and considered alongside the critiques moved against The Virgin of Flames, may be an implicit reference to the distance of the novel from supposed African origins. In other words one may wonder if Black’s ‘going white’ in his artistic process, is an allegorical indication of a writer’s necessity of whiteness for achieving artistic freedom. This is a fascinating suggestion, especially if extended to GraceLand and its practices of artistry in whiteface, which we do not have time to investigate here. Let it suffice to remember that in The Virgin of Flames whiteness does not tally with artistic value in the end. The product of Black’s whiteness is indeed not white: the Madonna he paints, Fatima, is a brown woman, distant from the white Virgin of the Catholic tradition. 32 L. Green-Simms, ‘The emergent queer: homosexuality and Nigerian fiction in the 21st century’, Research in African Literatures, 47:2 (2016), p. 147. 33 Green-Simms, ‘The emergent queer’. 34 Nwakanma, ‘O, Polyphemus’, p. 142. 35 The complicated relationship with the father is at the centre of Abani’s whole production, as in GraceLand, Becoming Abigail, Daphne’s Lot, and Sanctificum. 36 Nwakanma, ‘O, Polyphemus’, p. 143. 37 On Abani’s real-life experiments with gender-crossing, see C. Tóibín, ‘Chris Abani by  Colm Tóibín’, BOMB Magazine 96 (1 July 2006). https://bombmagazine.org/articles/chris-abani/. Accessed 18 April 2021. 38 Stobie, ‘Indecent theology’, p. 175. Aycock reads Black’s gender-­ passing positively, as ‘a symbol, a metaphor for freedom from normative gender and identity prescriptions’ (‘Becoming black and Elvis’, p. 23). This is so, according to Aycock, because she interprets Black’s final cross-dressing as the realisation of Black’s childhood; when he was

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nine, in fact, Black set a plaster Virgin on fire, believing she was asking him to free her (VF, 134). 39 Stobie, ‘Indecent theology’, p. 181. 40 Stobie, ‘Indecent theology’, p. 176. 41 Stobie, ‘Indecent theology’, p. 175. Sam Durrant provides a compelling reading of Song for Night as an example of creaturely mimesis which expresses a form of spiritual animism distancing the novella from Abani’s previous narrative (‘Creaturely mimesis: life after necropolitics in Chris Abani’s Song for Night’, Research in African Literatures, 49:3 [2018], 178–206). Although fascinating, I consider Durrant’s reading incomplete, as it does not properly analyse The Virgin of Flames in Abani’s dealing with spirituality; in this novel, as I show in the following paragraphs, Abani’s contemplation of humanity passes from being a reflection on one’s self (as in GraceLand and Becoming Abigail) to a giving to the others, similar in this sense to Song for Night. 42 The drag is a figure also Aycock invokes for the analysis of Elvis’s performative identity in GraceLand (‘Becoming black and Elvis’). 43 See also J. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990, 1999). 44 R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995), p. 137. 45 Aycock, ‘Becoming black and Elvis’, p. 19. 46 Bryson, ‘Los Angeles literature’, p. 716. 47 M. Davis and D. N. Sawhney, ‘Sanbhashana: Los Angeles and the philosophy of disaster’, in D. N. Sawhney (ed.), Unmasking L.A.: Third Worlds and the City (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 28. 48 Davis and Sawhney, ‘Sanbhashana’, p. 29. 49 D. Walcott, ‘The Antilles: fragments of epic memory’ (7 December 1992). www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1992/walcott/lecture/. Accessed 26 February 2021. 50 The juxtaposition of a symbol of religiosity (as the Virgin) to a symbol of science (as the spaceship is, especially as a legacy of Black’s father’s job as a NASA spatial engineer) expresses once again the novel’s interest in dismantling binary oppositions by mingling them. 51 Fine, Imagining Los Angeles, p. 23. 52 Fire, flames, and, in general, the kind of light emanating from burning are recurring images in The Secret History of Las Vegas, a novel which shares certain imagery with The Virgin of Flames. The explosion of the nuclear bomb, for example, to which the beginning of The Secret History of Las Vegas is devoted, seems to continue The Virgin of Flames’s conclusion of Black’s combustion. Fire is also connected to

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other protagonists, such as Detective Salazar, who burns miniature boats for each unresolved case, or to the conclusion of the book, which ends with an explosion. Generally speaking, The Secret History of Las Vegas turns certain features of The Virgin of the Flames around, as in the case of Sunil’s parents’ love date, in which his mother is covered in colours while making love, a scene that recalls the end of Abani’s 2007 novel, but in more positive terms (SHLV, 151). Or, think of Gogo’s curio shop in South Africa, a possible double to Iggy’s The Ugly Store: both are indeed a space of and about ‘freaks’. 53 A. Aycock, ‘An interview with Chris Abani’, Safundi: The Journal of South Africa and American Studies, 10:1 (2009), p. 8. 54 The table of contents of Sanctificum outlines possible overlapping with The Virgin of Flames, in the structure as well as in the contents. For example the sections’ titles ‘Sacrament’, ‘Divination’, ‘Revenant’, ‘Descent’, ‘Pilgrimage’, ‘Benediction’ and ‘Renewal’ recall the titles of The Virgin of Flames’s chapters (‘The Annunciation’, ‘The Unconsoled’, ‘Idolatry’, ‘The Anointing’, ‘Benediction’) and in general let transpire the author’s interest in themes concerning religion and spirituality, as confirmed by the same title of the poem collection, Sanctificum, a Latin word referring to the action of sanctifying, making holy. An interest in religions is a typical feature of Abani’s work, above all poetical, in which the sacred is mixed with the profane such as in the poem ‘Urinal Virgin’, but also in The Virgin of Flames, in which religiosity mixes with sexual experimentation. Abani’s use of religion is never dogmatic, but rather irreverent and humorous, as we can read in the following lines, in which the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe is mixed with urination and San Juan Diego, the saint to whom the Virgin revealed, is invoked in similitude to the narrating voice’s penis:

In my friend’s bathroom the mystery – Why A urinal? And why Our Lady of Guadalupe Leaning back in the niche surrounded by rust That won’t wash away? A dried flower and a candle Burn with an uncertain flame. Instinctively, Without thinking, much like San Juan Diego I pull Myself from my boxers, my penis nodding To the serpent she tramples underfoot; familial. And She smiles. The one who spoke to Juan in Nahuatl Calling herself Coatlaxopeuh, she who crushes serpents. (DW, 71)

55 See Chapter 1 on the connection between the grotesque and the transcendental. Aycock, ‘An interview with Chris Abani’, p. 7. As Abani confirms in one of his poems in Sanctificum (62), his infatuation with

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things religious comes a long way from his childhood, when he was seduced

as a boy by frankincense and smoke and altar lights and Latin mass and robes and wafers and wine and wooden pews dark with sweat and confessionals musty with lies Then Buddha and the romance of Tibet.

56 Stobie, ‘Indecent theology’, p. 177. 57 Soja, ‘Six discourses on the postmetropolis’; Klein, The History of Forgetting. 58 Fatima is a religious figure present also in Daphne Lot, when Abani describes his mother’s arrival in Nigeria (DL, 26). 59 Stobie further investigates the possible reading of Fatima as a sign of intercultural belief. In her opinion Fatima is appropriately depicted by Black as a Muslim Virgin because ‘of connections between Islam and Christianity with regard to Fatima. The village of Fatima in Portugal was named after a princess, born Muslim and named Fatima, who later converted to Catholicism and died young. The name Fatima is honored by Muslims, as it is the name of the beloved daughter of the prophet Muhammed. Within Islam, Fatima is revered as a virgin, she is compared with Mary, and she is also known as Queen of Heaven’ (‘Indecent theology’, p. 179). 60 Stobie, ‘Indecent theology’, pp. 177–8. 61 L. Calvo, ‘Arts comes from the Archbishop: the semiotics of contemporary Chicana feminism and the work of Alma López’, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, 5:1 (2004), 201–24. For a more thorough interpretation of Our Lady by López, see L. Gutiérrez, Performing Mexicanidad: Vendidas y Cabareteras on the Transnational Stage (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010). 62 Crowley, Africa’s Narrative Geographies, p. 153. 63 C. Abani, ‘On humanity’, TED Talk (February 2008). Video. www.ted. com/talks/chris_abani_muses_on_humanity. Accessed 19 October 2020. 64 Abani, ‘On humanity’. 65 E. Bloch, ‘Introduction’ to The Principle of Hope (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995 [1954]). www.marxists.org/archive/bloch/hope/intro duction.htm. Accessed 18 April 2021.



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66 Bloch, ‘Introduction’. 67 Aycock, ‘An interview with Chris Abani’, p. 8. 68 Stobie, ‘Indecent theology’, p. 182.

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References Abani, Chris. Becoming Abigail (New York: Akashic Books, 2006). ———. ‘Coming to America – a remix’, in Annalisa Oboe and Shaul Bassi (eds), Experiences of Freedom in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 117–21. ———. Daphne’s Lot (Los Angeles: Red Hen Press, 2003). ———. Dog Woman (Los Angeles: Red Hen Press, 2004). ———. GraceLand (New York: Picador, 2004). ———. Hands Washing Water (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2006). ———. Kalakuta Republic (London: Saqi Books, 2000). ——— (ed.). Lagos Noir (New York: Akashic Books, 2018). ———. ‘On humanity’. TED Talk (February 2008). Video. http://www. ted.com/talks/chris_abani_muses_on_humanity. Accessed 19 October 2020. ———. Sanctificum (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2010). ———. Song for Night (New York: Akashic Books, 2007). ———. The Secret History of Las Vegas (New York: Penguin, 2014). ———. The Virgin of Flames (New York: Penguin, 2007). Aycock, Amanda. ‘An interview with Chris Abani’, Safundi: The Journal of South Africa and American Studies, 10:1 (2009), 1–10. ———. ‘Becoming black and Elvis: transnational and performative identity in the novels of Chris Abani’, Safundi, 10:1 (2009), 11–25. Bloch, Ernst. ‘Introduction’ to The Principle of Hope (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995 [1954]). www.marxists.org/archive/bloch/hope/intro duction.htm. Accessed 18 April 2021. Brouillette, Sarah. Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Bryson, Scott J. ‘Los Angeles literature: exiles, natives, and (mis)representation’, American Literary History, 16:4 (2004), 707–18. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990, 1999). ———. Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004). Calvo, Luz. ‘Arts comes from the archbishop: the semiotics of contemporary Chicana feminism and the work of Alma López’, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, 5:1 (2004), 201–24.

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Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep (New York: Vintage, 1998 [1939]). Cisneros, Sandra. ‘Guadalupe the sex goddess’, in Ana Castillo (ed.), Goddess of the Americas (La diosa de las Américas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe) (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), pp. 43–6. Connell, R. W. Masculinities (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995). Crowley, Dustin. Africa’s Narrative Geographies: Charting the Intersections of Geocriticism and Postcolonial Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Davis, Mike. City of Quartz (New York: Verso, 1990). ———. Planet of Slums (London, New York: Verso, 2006). Davis, Mike and Deepak Narang Sawhney. ‘Sanbhashana: Los Angeles and the philosophy of disaster’, in Deepak Narang Sawhney (ed.), Unmasking L.A.: Third Worlds and the City (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 21–45. Duboin, Corinne. ‘New transatlantic passages: African immigrant writers and contemporary black literature in America’, in Judith Misrahi-Barak and Claudine Raynaud (eds), Diasporas, Cultures of Mobilities, ‘Race’ Vol. 1: Diasporas and Cultures of  Migrations (Montpellier: University Paul Valéry, 2014), pp. 179–95. Durrant, Sam. ‘Creaturely mimesis: life after necropolitics in Chris Abani’s Song for Night’, Research in African Literatures, 49:3 (2018), 178–206. Feldner, Maximilian. Narrating the New African Diaspora: 21st Century Nigerian Literature in Context (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). E-book. Fine, David. Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction (Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 2000). Green-Simms, Lindsey. ‘The emergent queer: homosexuality and Nigerian fiction in the 21st century’, Research in African Literatures, 47:2 (2016), 139–61. Gutiérrez, Laura G. Performing Mexicanidad: Vendidas y Cabareteras on the Transnational Stage (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010). Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001). Klein, Norman. The History of Forgetting (London: Verso, 1997). Krishnan, Madhu. ‘Of masquerades and mimicry: performance, identity, and tradition in Chris Abani’s The Virgin of Flames’, ARIEL, 43:2 (2013), 45–68. Nwakanma, Obi. ‘O, Polyphemus: on poetry and alienation’, ARIEL, 39:4 (2008), 136–49. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. ‘Epistemologies of the South and the future’, From the European South, 1 (2016), 17–29. Soja, Edward. Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley, 2000).

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———. ‘Six discourses on the postmetropolis’, in Sallie Westwood and John Williams (eds), Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memory (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 19–33. Stobie, Cheryl. ‘Indecent theology, trans-theology, and the transgendered Madonna in Chris Abani’s The Virgin of Flames’, Research in African Literatures, 42:2 (2011), 170–83. Timberg, Scott. ‘Living the perfect metaphor’, Los Angeles Times (18 February 2007). www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-feb-18-ca-aba ni18-story.html. Accessed 21 April 2021. Tóibín, Colm. ‘Chris Abani by Colm Tóibín’, BOMB Magazine 96 (1 July 2006). https://bombmagazine.org/articles/chris-abani/. Accessed 18 April 2021. Walcott, Derek. ‘The Antilles: fragments of epic memory’ (7 December 1992). www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1992/walcott/lecture/. Accessed 26 February 2021. West, Nathanael. The Day of the Locust (New York: Penguin, 2018 [1939]). Yamashita, Karen Tei. Tropic of Orange (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1997).

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‘State’ violence: The Secret History of Las Vegas

That old woman who is pulling a goat on a rope is more necessary and more precious than the seven wonders of the world Whoever thinks and feels That she is not necessary He is guilt of genocide. Abani, Dog Woman

The Secret History of Las Vegas (2014) is the novelist’s elaboration of a short story Abani published in Callaloo in 2011. Those ‘four movements’, as the author entitled the short story, contain the themes and the two interlaced plots that constitute the axis of Abani’s latest novel, such as the power of story-telling, the intersection of history and identitarian processes, the institutionalised racism of South Africa, the queerness of certain bodies, and the ontological and political violence of human life. As the Callaloo short story anticipates, The Secret History of Las Vegas expands subject matters already present in Abani’s previous novels, such as an interest in the body as a meaningful, performative, and grotesque signifier, a fascination for the double,1 and a special attention to issues of violence and redemption. In GraceLand, for example, Aunt Felicia gives Elvis a postcard with a collage of four different pictures. Whilst the one with the Elvis impersonator is strictly connected to the contents of GraceLand itself, the other three – the word ‘Vegas’, a photo of the Strip (Las Vegas’s gambling venue), and an image of the Graceland chapel in that same city – winks

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at the location of The Secret History of Las Vegas. As Elvis comments in those pages, ‘This is an omen’ (GL, 167) of Abani’s future work. Despite such intertextual connections, from a literary viewpoint The Secret History of Las Vegas takes some distance from Abani’s previous works, as The Virgin of Flames also does. His 2014 novel in fact holds a rightful place within the formulaic detective genre. This is a type of fiction that has long fascinated Abani, who had also originally crafted The Virgin of Flames as a noir and who returned to the genre with the publication of the anthology Lagos Noir (2018), in which his short story ‘Ape killer’ relates the investigation of a gay detective on the homicide of a homosexual man in 1950s Lagos. As the writer states in an interview with Yogita Goyal, the noir is ‘the most interesting form to arise in the twentieth century’, because ‘[i]t is a form that the post-industrial revolution city generates’.2 The specificity of the genre allows a writer to ‘speak to hope and despair of the 20th and 21st centuries in ways that resist sentimentality […] and yet do not deny catharsis and hope’.3 These are also The Secret History of Las Vegas’s central themes. No city symbolises the post-industrial era better than Las Vegas, a place built on show, performance, and imagination that yet houses a growing number of homeless and poverty-stricken people. Replicating his interest in Maroko and East LA, Abani devotes once again his attention to the hidden part of the city, the one that does not reach circuits of glamour and fame. The writer’s attention is for the Las Vegas beyond the Strip, where homeless men, drunkards, and garbage pile against run-down walls and rusty motels (SHLV, 70). Like the Lagos of Elvis’s artistic dreams and the Los Angeles of Black’s masquerade, Las Vegas is the place of the precarious imbalance between hope and defeat, imagination and reality. As Sunil Singh, one of the protagonists, points out, Vegas is really an African city […] What other imagination would build such a grandiose tomb to itself? And just like every major city across Africa, from Cairo to his hometown of Johannesburg, the palatial exteriors of the city architecture barely screened the seething poverty, the homelessness, and the despair that spread in townships and shanty-towns as far as the eye could see. But just as there, here in

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Vegas the glamour beguiled and blinded all but those truly intent on seeing, and in this way the tinsel of it mocked the obsessive hope of those who flocked there. (SHLV, 30)

The ability of ‘seeing’ is one of the themes of the book, which, as is typical of detective stories, starts with a mysterious crime: some corpses are discovered near Lake Mead, in the desert outside Las Vegas. Around this crime the lives of the main characters entangle. When the black conjoined twins Fire and Water are found near the lake, the Cuban-American Detective Salazar detains them on allegations of murder. They are then put under the custody of Dr Sunil Singh, a South African psychiatrist of Indian ancestry who has moved to Vegas in order to forget his past. Sunil turns out to be a central character in the book: he is the point of connection between the Lake Mead murders and the novel’s subplot, that is, Eskia’s attempt to kill Dr Singh for his past involvement in the activities of the death camp of Vlakplaas during Apartheid. These two different storylines intertwine in the five days Detective Salazar has to solve the case, during which we come to know Sunil’s and the twins’ past, their connection with manifestations of state-produced violence in the form of environmental and human-rights violations, and the consequences of such violence on the protagonists’ physical, psychological, and emotional lives. Eventually, Fire and Water are revealed to be eco-terrorists, whose aim is to destroy the centre where Dr Singh works as a revenge against Nevada’s nuclear testing history. It would be a mistake, however, to consider The Secret History of Las Vegas merely as a noir in the traditional understanding of the genre. The novel in fact shares with most recent expressions of crime fiction the ability to describe the fragmentation of postmodernity, interrogating given knowledge and scratching assumed truth.4 The book is larger than the genealogy of the noir genre, as it couples narrative tension with historical investigation and presents a distinct global touch connecting the United States with South Africa.5 As the character of Dr Sunil Singh reveals, by way of his character’s development and insights, the two nation-states are comparable, their histories of racism sadly intimate and familiar. By striking not only the historical but also the visual and natural similarities between Nevada and South Africa (SHLV, 230), Sunil reads

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the USA alongside South Africa, and South Africa alongside the USA: his voice suggests parallelisms, dislocating the persistent links between the West and modernity on the one hand, and Africa and anti-modernity on the other. He rather positions the two Atlantic sides one in front of the other, watching their wrongs as through a looking-glass. Las Vegas, also known as ‘sin city’, is where the two countries’ immoralities converge. The title of this chapter indicates that violence is again a starting point for my analysis. ‘State’, intentionally in quotation marks, refers to two different aspects of violence. ‘State’ may refer to the American and South African nation-states, depicted in the book as the perpetrators of institutional violence – a theme Abani introduced in GraceLand, with Elvis being unjustly incarcerated and tortured by a corrupt military body. In The Secret History of Las Vegas, however, the idea of institutional violence enlarges; no more one of the many episodes of brutality the characters are subjected to, in this work state violence is engaged as a form of necropolitics, a politics of death that disciplines bodies and their life or death. In South Africa institutional violence is expressed in the tragically wellknown history of Apartheid. The lesser-known US state violence affects the land, as in the case of the Nevada atomic testing, and its citizens, as the conjoined twins Fire and Water’s body evidences. Their disability is, senso strictu, the evidence of the state’s violation of environmental rights, which thus convert into human rights. But ‘state’ is also employed as a verb: violence can be a form of reaction against the necropolitics of state-nations, an assertive act used problematically to maintain rights. Fire and Water’s actions as ecoterrorists are read in this light as an affirmative exercise of violence, as a reaction to the Nevada nuclear tests whose consequences they bodily inhabit. As this brief introduction highlights, the body is a dominant issue in the novel. In its narrative economy, Water and Fire’s unusual bodily appearance is relevant as it triggers discussion on other interlacing matters, such as the history of Las Vegas’s environmental abuse, the role of science in the discursive production of monstrosity/­ humanity, the historical role of the freak show, and the claiming of rights on the part of disabled people. Such attention for extraordinary bodies follows a concern already present in GraceLand,

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where the body of Elvis performed as Presley, in Becoming Abigail and Song for Night through the two protagonists’ acts of self-­ determinations, and in The Virgin of Flames, in which the possibility of modifying one’s body had a key role in Black’s identity quest. The Secret History of Las Vegas pushes the discourse further, testing the limit of human beings not by means of ideas of performativity (literally, what is done on/with the body) but through the central position accorded to the bodily materiality of the freak. In such ways the book complicates Abani’s discourse on the human, its meaning, and the grotesque as a way to redemption.

State violence: from Las Vegas to South Africa and back As the title itself suggests, The Secret History of Las Vegas follows Abani’s interest in the dimension of place, with long descriptions of the different hotels or portraits of the living marginality within the glitter of Vegas. But unlike his previous works, place is imbued with a new historical consciousness that encumbers Las Vegas with the tragedies of environmental and human rights abuse. The city’s history exceeds its more recent rhetoric of a city linked to the industry of gambling, magic, and hope, as exemplified by the plethora of casinos, the use of Nevada as the supposed setting for shooting the landing on the moon (SHLV, 164), or the choice of that area for alien visits. Rather, Las Vegas’s atomic history, and the consequent condemnation of the practice, comes to the forefront. Las Vegas’s contemporary history conventionally begins in 1945 with the creation of Bugsy Siegel’s Flamingo Hotel. Six years later, in 1951, governmental nuclear experiments started in the area with the creation of the Nevada Nuclear Test Site, just miles away from the state’s capital city. The myth of the city of tinsel and light is hence deeply interlaced with nuclear history, despite the amnesia that has tried to bury the twenty-year-long nuclear explosions. In this sense Las Vegas hides ‘secret’ histories: that of its nuclear past, of the twins’ deformed body, but also that of Sunil Singh and his sinful past in South Africa. As Ken Cooper notices, the coincidence of Las Vegas’s life and nuclear history has sound echoes in the literary history of the

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city, with a number of authors such as Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Stephen King, Normal Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, J. G. Ballard, and Hunter S. Thompson registering nuclear explosions in their books.6 Abani follows this literary tradition by giving environmental violence central stage, capitalising on the ‘inseparability’ of the fiction of Las Vegas from nuclear issues and situating the Nevada nuclear testing at the very beginning of the book with the birth of the conjoined twins.7 The novel’s very first sentence, ‘This hands cannot do’ (SHLV, 3), contains in nuce one of the book’s main nuclei: the abominable capacity of nuclear testing to challenge humanity. ‘This’ vaguely refers both to the conjunction of babies in a woman’s womb and to the explosion of a nuclear bomb which Selah, Fire and Water’s mother, witnesses near the Nevada Nuclear Test Site. Her hands, ‘interlaced across a pregnant woman’s stomach’ cannot protect the still unborn from a ‘flash of light and a cloud that grows not into a mushroom, but rather into a thick tree with a dense plume; a tree to shame Odin’s, a tree to make Adam cover the inadequacies of his, a tree even Shiva would stand back from in awe’ (SHLV, 3). In this mythical description of the bomb that challenges the power of different gods, the light emanating from the explosion becomes ‘a rogue star, a renegade sun’ (SHLV, 3), escaping human control and challenging human limits. After watching the detonation ‘from a spot less than two miles from its sky-obliterating epicenter’, Selah gives birth to two ‘fused’ children. The question introduced in the emblematic first chapter reverberates throughout the novel thanks to the numerous references to the atomic history of the place.8 Sunil, the historiographical voice of the  novel, explains to Salazar, the naive American, that there were some ‘fifteen hundred nuclear explosions in Nevada. Of these,  only three hundred were above ground’ (SHLV, 170); the remaining ones, Water’s girlfriend Fred adds, were ‘conducted at five-thousand-foot depths’ (SHLV, 206). Although the nuclear testings are limited in time and space, their consequences are not similarly restricted. Rather, the physical violence caused by that historical moment percolates in the living present of the twins, forced to live with an ‘exceptional’ body that results in other forms of state violence and human rights mistreatment.

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Fire and Water’s tragic conjunction is just one example of widespread problems connected to issues of environmental rights. Of those fifteen hundred explosions, twelve hundred were underground, ‘right by the water aquifers that give this entire area its water – I mean, all the civilian populations, the Indian reservations, farms, all of it, except the military base, which has its water brought in […] This is the water most of us grew up drinking, bathing in, and watering our crops and livestock with’ (SHLV, 206). The concurrence of the high number of atomic explosions together with a consciously pernicious management of natural (here, hydric) resources by the state, as this quotation suggests, reveals a government culprit of a double form of environmental violence. The disorder caused by the atomic testing is in fact visible not only in physical deformation, as in the case of the twins, but also in the widespread contamination of human and animal life and, in general, of the whole agricultural system. Homicide is not committed; yet, inasmuch as the state does not safeguard its citizens’ health and sacrifices them in order to achieve its scientific and military goals during the Cold War, we are in the presence of what Achille Mbembe calls ‘necropolitics’, that is, the administration of power to regulate death.9 In necropolitics one of the rights of the sovereign state is ‘to expose to death’.10 This is a performance of power which creates ‘living dead’ subjects, as all the inhabitants of Las Vegas’s surrounding areas are. The Army boy who gets Selah pregnant and then disappears is, in this sense, a micro-reproduction of the state that deserts its citizens, providing no protection but rather silencing the danger of exposition. Sunil recalls that, in contrast to the health danger of the detonations, the state marketed the explosions as a fashionable proof of the USA’s grandiose power, so much so that nuclear bombing became part of the glamour of the then-booming Vegas. In the 1950s, ‘when the U.S. government set off nukes in the nearby desert, sometimes as close as six miles from the city’, casinos used to hold ‘bomb parties’ (SHLV, 56). They sold package tours to see U.S. history in the making: the end of the Commies and the death of the Red Threat. People flocked by the thousands to the dawn parties to watch the mushroom clouds.



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Minutes after the display, they would return to gambling or turn in to catch some much-needed sleep. Seats on the terrace, where one could watch the explosions while sipping on a cocktail, were fought over. Those unable to afford the parties or terraces drove out to ground zero and hiked as close as possible. The Atomic Energy Commission never turned them away, even when there were families with ­children. (SHLV, 56)

Whilst the USA cannot be accused of explicit killing, the nonprotection of inhabitants and the silence about the insecurity of the place have produced deaths. No matter how distant from other h ­ istorical examples of necropolitics present in the novel (for example, the deaths perpetrated at Vlakplaas), innocence cannot be found in the US government, guilty of leaving its own citizens and territory to die because of its operations. In this light issues of e­ nvironmental rights turn into questions of human rights: the twins’ conjoined bodies; Selah’s leukaemia of which she dies; but also the real-life John Wayne, as The Secret History of Las Vegas tells, who after shooting the film The Conqueror in the nearby St.  George, Utah, developed cancer and died of it, as did ninety other people of his crew (SHLV, 206) – they are all victims of governmental politics. While Fire and Water’s conjoined body is the visual witness to environmental-turned-human abuse, the colour of their skin further enlarges their subalternity with respect to institutional power. Their blackness extends in fact the historicity of violence, as their family story confirms. Born to a single mother deserted by an Army soldier, the twins are indeed also missing their only grandfather, ‘shot by a sheriff too excited to see that the gun the black man was holding was actually just a pipe he was packing with tobacco before sucking on it’ (SHLV, 5). The coincidence of disability and racial stigma provides a further juncture for the expression of state violence when they are unjustly detained by Detective Salazar, a legal representative of the state. In order to hold them longer than standard law procedures, Detective Salazar leverages on the twins’ physical impairment and asks the help of Dr  Sunil Singh, a psychiatrist at the state-funded Desert Palm Institute. Law and science converge in the exploitation of the twins’ body, which can be thus understood as a site of triple abuse:  victims of the

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­ istorical state-managed nuclear explosions, they are in the present h of the novel abused by the law and by science, both of which claim rights to possess their body in biased and dehumanising ways. In a sombre similarity, necropolitics also marks South Africa and its Apartheid regime, which shares with the United States a history of racism, as Sunil Singh, the narrating voice and the person repository of the memory of the places, often highlights.11 The son of a black mother and an Indian father, Sunil gets to study psychiatry abroad on a state scholarship. Once back home he has to ‘pay back’ the state scholarship by working at Vlakplaas, the real name of a historical death camp near Pretoria, ruled during Apartheid by Eugene DeCock, a historical character also present in The Secret History of Las Vegas as the director of the structure and Sunil’s boss. Officially the place ‘served as the head-quarters for the South Africa Police Counterinsurgency unit, C10 – a paramilitary hit squad that killed enemies of the state in neat, efficient operations, as far afield as Angola’ (SHLV, 239). However, as we discover through Sunil’s memories, Vlakplaas is more than that. It is ‘[t]he most feared place in South Africa’ (SHLV, 173), a place of torture, a death camp so sadly famous ‘its name could make a fullgrown man piss himself’ (SHLV, 238), a place where torture is at the service of the social dissemination of terror beyond the physical boundaries of the site. Vlakplaas uses torture to obtain political information. Abani is precise in the description of violence. Via DeCock he explains that pliers are used to extract teeth; alternatively, they make use of the ‘good old-fashion fist work’ or of ‘the cut inner tube of a car  tire  pulled down over the face to suffocate in controlled measure’ (SHLV, 225); finally, an instrument of torture is the metal pear, ‘a working reproduction of a medieval torture device’, which opened up into four perfect quarters, spreading like the metal petals of a flower […] You insert the pear into someone’s mouth, and then you twist the bottom here until it begins to open. You keep twisting it and pretty soon it breaks the teeth, dislocates the jaw, even begins to rip the cheeks apart […] Now, the great thing about this, as I found out once, is that it works on any human orifice’, DeCock explains. (SHLV, 229–30)

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The physicality of torture in this passage is extreme, but the infliction of pain at Vlakplaas can be even worse, becoming almost cannibalistic, as in the scene of the man chopped into pieces and burnt on the grill (SHLV, 246). At the centre of such a kingdom of suffering is DeCock, who describes himself as a sort of ‘Satan’, ‘Jesus’s dark soul, his unconscious, and his id’, a mockery balance ‘between the human ideal and their animal baseness’ (SHLV, 245). As in the account of the nuclear explosion causing the fusion of Fire and Water, the aggrandisement obtained by the reference to mythic elements (Shiva and Adam there, Satan and Jesus here) should not obscure the deeply political aims of these acts of brutality. For the all-embracing violence at Vlakplaas does not obliterate its deeply historical role as a clear and definite product of a state’s attempt at controlling politics, life, and its established power. Vlakplaas is above all a place for the annihilation of those who try to eradicate the Apartheid institution; it is, in this sense, a military outpost to governmental racism. I refer here once again to Mbembe, who also considers Vlakplaas in his examination of violence and sovereignty in ‘Necropolitics’ (2003). As the philosopher states, Apartheid is an apt example of how a state under siege transforms a part of its population into an internal enmity and claims its sovereignty through the administration of death. In this form of lethal biopower the idea of race, upon which Apartheid is predicated, figures prominently, because it enables the imagination of the other as inhuman, thus justifying their being ruled and, eventually, their death. Mbembe follows Hannah Arendt’s definition of racism in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), in which she states that race is not the outcome of the perception of the other as a feature of his or her humanity but the end of humanity: ‘not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death’.12 In Foucauldian terms race can be considered a ‘technology aimed at permitting the exercise of biopower’,13 and thus at the very base of the divisions existing in South African as exemplified by the system of townships and homeland – a regulation of land, people, and movement aimed at controlling and distributing what Orlando Patterson, writing about slavery, called ‘social death’.14 To describe the regulation of South African Apartheid society, in a beautiful three-page-long passage Abani makes use of Dante’s

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Inferno to provide the imaginary through which to explain ‘the entire architecture and structures of racism and apartheid: three concentric circles of life and economics. Color-coded circles for easy understanding, whites at the heart, coloreds at the next remove, and finally, the blacks at the outmost circle; the closest to hell – the strange inverse sense of apartheid’ (SHLV, 185). In the outer ring of hell, yet closer to the flames, in an orbit so cut off from the benevolence of the heart of apartheid, mired in poverty they could never again enough purchase to dream an escape from, were the blacks […] They spent 60 percent of their daily income on transportation alone, and since there were no legal supermarkets or shops in the third ring, they had to spend 20 to 30 of the remaining 40 percent on food in the white heart, or sometimes, and only sometimes, in the colored towns, where the prices were even higher but there were more shops willing to take their money. (SHLV, 186)

The system of township, summed to the racism of South African society, talks of the institutionalisation of a system of dividing boundaries, of internal frontiers which blacks trail along like ‘a long column of ants carrying their misery on their heads wrapped with the workloads’ (SHLV, 186). The economy of such division is patrolled by the constant alarm of ‘armored Casspirs rolling through Soweto like hyenas on the prowl’, of beatings and lynching, of arsons and rape, ‘a state-sanctioned form of policing’ (SHLV, 80). As Arendt stated, a politics of race cannot but be a politics of death; the sovereignty of the state is expressed through the constant terror of possible dying. Sunil’s role at Vlakplaas is ameliorating the technology of torture, reducing the killing while securing more information because, as Eugene laments, torture is ‘an imprecise science’ (SHLV, 225), which he practises but with ‘regret and honor. I never dispose of their bodies; I return them to the honor of nature’s use. I feed their bodies to the scavengers; I grind their bones up and fertilize the flowers in the compound’ (SHLV, 245–6), thus confusing necropolitics with nature. In this distorted viewpoint, which shatters the division between human and animal life, good and evil, state and nature, Sunil is there to facilitate the capitulation of prisoners by diminishing their force of resistance. As a psychiatrist he has to

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make science surrender to the goals of politics, and in order to do so he has to participate in experiments to assess the limits of endurance. The victims of such tests are a female baboon and her baby, held in a cage, which get literally roasted to calculate ‘how long the mother would endure the pain before putting the baby down and standing on it’ (SHLV, 22). The savagery of this investigation, which is examining not only the limits of endurance but the point at which one’s life becomes more important than someone else’s, emerges in all its entirety when one considers the bond that they try to break, the one between a mother and her child, a relationship that is supposed to grant life and protection rather than death. In a further step towards ultimate dehumanising violence, such experiments make use of human beings. Sunil recalls that ‘the first human trial at Vlakplaas of the heat test was a woman called Beatrice. No last name. Her baby didn’t even get a name in the file. Just Baby’ (SHLV, 22). The victims of such research, reduced to silence and with no name, go through a process of total dehumanisation: deprived of even the last hint of personhood, a name, their bodies are at the service of a rather disputable use of science. The ferocity of this form of violence is, if possible, only soothed by the author’s choice of the woman’s name, Beatrice, a name that relates to Abani’s description of South African Apartheid as a Dantean circle of hell (SHLV, 185–6). Beatrice, from the Latin Beatrix, ‘she who makes happy’, is the guiding woman of Dante’s Paradise; her name thus recalls a ghostly humanity and morality against the barbarity of history and DeCock’s infernal experiments (SHLV, 237).15 The perversion of Sunil’s role becomes transparent when his genealogy and his political inheritance are considered. With his kinky, thick hair and ‘skin so dark, he could be black’ (SHLV, 29), he clearly stands on the wrong side of the Apartheid regime. What is more, his father was a warrior opposing the regime, a member of the Zulu impi whom Sunil fatally betrayed when he was a child. His work at Vlakplaas implies therefore not just being complicit with human abuse in any form, bending science to political aims, but joining the torture of fellow brothers and sisters in his same racial and political position. His presence at the camp becomes then the Dantean contrapasso of his paternal betrayal when he was a child. (In Dante’s Inferno, contrapasso is a form of punishment

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that, symbolically or not, opposes the crime committed. In Sunil’s case, his crime was the betrayal of his father, a combatant for racial equality; his ‘punishment’ is becoming a part of South African institutionalised racism.) This participation in forms of extreme violence leads Sunil to a sort of schizophrenia that causes his emotional dumbness. The screams of the dying infant, during the experiments, ‘kept him up at night’; he stuffs his ears with cotton in order to avoid ‘[t]hat sound, a muffled gurgle, like a distant brook’, which anyhow ‘became the soundtrack of his denial, a white noise that successfully obliterated every last bit of conscience when he needed it’ (SHLV, 22). Morally compromised, he closes himself in an emotional silence trying to elude history, as if ‘it was possible, even desirable, to live in a perpetual present’ (SHLV, 23). The epigraph to the book by the poet Gilbert Parker makes us think of Sunil and of his passage from South Africa to Las Vegas as an attempt at moving beyond the trauma of his past, but also of the impossibility of it, because ‘There is no refuge from memory / And remorse in this world. The / Spirits of our foolish deeds haunt us, / With or without repentance’ (SHLV, epigraph). As the novel posits, Apartheid is not just a product of violence. It produces violence: the violence of White Alice, Sunil’s mother’s friend, who misleads a child in order to obtain information to sell to the regime; the violence of Red, who betrays his fellow inhabitants of the township; or again the violence of Eskia’s father, who literally hunts human beings as Eskia does with Sunil in a vengeful madness that outdoes time and spatial boundaries (SHLV, 98). Born from an extreme and perverted racism, which converts into a technology of governance, Apartheid reproduces ferocity in everyone, whites and blacks alike. What emerges from both the American and the African sides of the novel is then a dehumanising use of science, represented as a tool of institutional coercion, an obscure device that intersects death practices at the service of the authorities rather than the citizens. In The Secret History of Las Vegas knowledge is thus political in its most visible way, an instrument of the state whose benefits are not democratically shared. Sunil functions as the point of connection between these two edges of the Atlantic, his

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scientific t­raining equally in the service of the South African and the American state. Although Sunil’s job in Las Vegas may appear as an attempt to forget Vlakplaas, in the end he finds himself in an institution that recalls DeCock’s centre, which uses science for the benefit of the Army and is directed by Brewster, a less Mephistophelean character than DeCock, yet similarly involved in necropolitical activities. The Desert Palm Institute is indeed a branch of Army-funded military research, whose main project is the implementation of a substance that can control violent activity in human beings. As we discover in the second part of the novel, the corpses found near Lake Mead are the consequence of the institute’s scientific experiments. It recruits homeless men ‘from the streets of Vegas with offers of money and sometimes drugs’ (SHLV, 103). These second-class citizens, unclaimed by families or friends, ‘were housed in seclusion in the basement of the institute’, prisoners for science’s and the army’s sake. When they had enough subjects, the centre’s staff would put them into rooms in batches of ten, administered doses of the serum [to activate violent actions] and a placebo to the control group, and then waited for the results. The drug and its antidote were delivered via an implant in the men’s heads that could be controlled from a distance. Every test had proved disastrous. Not from the perspective of inducing psychotic breaks. That was easy enough. In fact, 50 percent of the placebo group was able to match the ferocity of the medicated. What proved abortive was the ability to control the behavior. The antidote hadn’t worked, and neither had electric collars, subdermal shock implants, or even tear gas. The rage just couldn’t be harnessed. (SHLV, 103)

This episode reads as a sad reflection on the natural thirst for violence innate in human beings; meanwhile it also crucially exposes the doubtful ethics of some scientific experiments, which distribute death with the logic of order and, in doing so, institute a hierarchy of ‘disposable’ human beings. This is the ultimate form of necrosovereignty, ‘the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not’.16 Spurred by uncontrolled rage, a passion that self-nourishes, those ‘disposable’ men ‘simply bet one

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another to death’ (SHLV, 104) – an image stereotypically linked to an atavistic age without Reason, in which violence is boundless, incommensurate. Yet Reason is the source of such ‘humane endpoint’, as the phrase used to indicate the executions reads. In this scientific language, obscuring rather than enlightening, the dead homeless men become ‘nonviable laboratory test subjects’ (SHLV, 21), an expression that neutralizses any possible reference to the sacrifice of human beings. The homeless people’s corpses are then dumped near Lake Mead, where they are found, in a mound, with ‘No particular order. No particular ritual. Just tipped out in an untidy pile’ (SHLV, 160). They are discarded as scientific ‘waste’, safely unclaimed because of their social exclusion and lack of fixed abode (SHLV, 103). Protected by its institutional role and its ‘scientific’ paradigm, the Desert Palm Institute, specifically in the figure of Brewster, its boss and the architect of those assassinations, secretly claims the Agambean ‘right to kill’, so much so that, in the end, the murder of those homeless people remains unresolved. They are the real homines sacri, killed with impunity because even the law does not acknowledge them as victims. Even the golden-hearted but naive Detective Salazar is manipulated: his collaboration with Sunil is a smart orchestration used to cover up any possible link between the killings and the Desert Palm Institute (SHLV, 104). An expression of state power, law is portrayed as effective for the state’s sake only; any idea of human rights is plainly stepped on, notions of legality are slippery and opaque. The aims of science eventually coincide with the state’s necropolitics.

The freak and the limits of humanity Ugliness is insignificant, deformity is grand. Ugliness is a devil’s grin behind beauty; deformity is akin to sublimity. Victor Hugo, The Man Who Laughs

Seen from the broader perspective of Abani’s whole narrative production, the characters of the black conjoined twins Water Esau Grimes and Fire Jacob Grimes17 continue the author’s study

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on the body and the meanings of being human already explored in GraceLand, The Virgin of Flames, and Becoming Abigail. In ways similar to the discourse Abani has woven in those other works, Fire and Water are an example of that ‘ethical ugliness and grotesqueness’ which, in the author’s aesthetics, leads to the sublime and the beautiful. The idea of body performance, already present in GraceLand when Elvis tries to become Presley, continues in Becoming Abigail, in which the young protagonist scars and brands herself as a form of identity quest, and in The Virgin of Flames, in which Black turns into a burning white Madonna. These experiments in body transformation are however marginal in The Secret History of Las Vegas, where they characterise the bunch of prostitute kids Detective Salazar consults during his investigation. Reminiscent of the characters of the award-winning Snakes and Earrings by the Japanese writer Hitomi Kanehara (2003), Annie, Peggy, Petrol, and Horny Nick, with ‘star-shaped horns implanted in his forehead’, ‘pointed ears, like an elf or a Vulcan’, split tongues, purple eyes, and black two-inch-long fingernails (SHLV, 141), perform a different corporeality which hints at a borderline subculture that resists norms and categorisation by going beyond the limit of what we usually consider bodily human. Whilst the kids as well as Elvis, Abigail, and Black work on their body to achieve some form of change, the conjoined twins’ bodily materiality does not undergo transformation. Theirs is a pre-born mutation, which transforms and dismantles reading practices  by testing the limits of science, of law, and of what we consider human at the same time. As such they function as a sort of mirroring glass to standard humanity, which explodes the intersection of gazes trying to define them. In such a use of an unusual body, framed in the novel through the two diverging but embedded discourses of science and the freak, Abani continues the portrayal of humanity ‘beyond established aesthetic and ethical paradigms’, as he had already explored in his controversial work on Nollywood with the South African photographer Pieter Hugo, bypassing ‘conventional modes of representation in order to zoom in on adventurous and often shocking areas of existence’.18 In so doing he revises the nineteenth-century discourse on the exceptional body as he dovetails it with recent debates on disability and rights.

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Science is the first lens through which the twins’ extraordinariness is seen, as the reader comes to know Fire and Water initially through the perspective of Dr Singh’s investigations and conjectures. While they are under custody at the Desert Palm Institute, we discover Fire is to Water what is usually called a parasitic twin, that is, a twin who has not completely developed during pregnancy and makes use of his brother’s body in order to survive. The twins can be thought of as the fictional rendition of real historical cases, such as Laloo the Indian or Perumal, even though the only reference Abani provides in the novel is to Edward Mordake in Chapter Fourteen. Here a long taxonomy of possible brotherly conjunctions is provided (SHLV, 75), and the ahistorical legend of Mordake is given as an example to comprehend Fire and Water’s case: ‘Edward Mordake […] had a second face growing out of the back of his head. This other face, rumored to have been female, wasn’t fully functional and couldn’t speak or eat. But it could laugh and cry and its eyes would follow people around a room’ (SHLV, 76). A twelve inch-long being attached to his brother, Fire appeared to be little more than a head with two arms projecting out of Water’s chest. He had no legs or feet, but he did have one toe, and that was attached to Water’s torso. He was bald, and a large skin caul, like a turkey wattle, dropped down one side of his head. His left eyelid was swollen and misshapen, almost as if he had been punched there. His nose was squished nearly flat against his face and the nostrils flared with every breath he took, although he seemed to do most of his breathing through his mouth, a rattling harsh wheeze, and with each one his surprisingly generous lips curled back to reveal caninelike teeth. Only his bright and gentle eyes gave any indication of the intelligence behind them. (SHLV, 13–14)19

Sunil avails himself of scientific texts in order to make sense of Fire and Water’s extraordinariness; however, the books he consults provide only descriptive information about the origin of such phenomena (fission versus fusion) and a taxonomy of possible coupling  – craniopagus twins, thoracopagus twins, xiphopagus ­ twins, etc. (SHLV, 75–76). Despite its apparent objectivity, such scientific language covers thorny issues. The taxonomy in particular articulates a need to classify with deep roots in a historical and

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detrimental use of science to define bodies and outline humanity. Meanwhile it triggers a reflection on the discourse about the disabled body and how it is, on the one hand, linked to a historically ambivalent use of science, and based on a perverse fascination with the visuality of difference and its exposition on the other. The use of science to categorise diversity and the visual fascination for human bodily variety coincided during the nineteenth century and, especially in the USA, with the spread of sideshows and freak shows. This is a central topic in The Secret History of Las Vegas, in which the freak show is presented as an ambivalent practice in deep contrast to the limiting and imprisoning scientific discourse Sunil has access to and typical of the centre where the twins are unjustly detained. The reading of the twins’ conjoined body alternates an empowering vision of the freak show against a coercive use of institutional science, an opposition that creates the narrative structure along which Abani advances his explorations of human limits. In the novel Selah, Fire and Water’s mother, is the first to initiate the boys to sideshow-like display. Because of the absence of a real job and family network, Selah ‘dressed as a carnival gypsy’ and, for three dollars, showed her ‘monster’/boys in a terrarium (SHLV, 6). After she develops leukaemia as a consequence of radiation and commits suicide (SHLV, 8), Fire and Water are welcomed in Reverend Jacobs’s travelling freak show, ‘the Lord’s Marvels’. The sideshow becomes from that moment on their familial and professional background till their thirties, the narrative present when they play ‘King Kongo, the Witch Doctor’ in Reverend Jacobs’s freak show. In this act Water works as a ventriloquist, moving and giving voice to his semi-dead brother Fire. In order to get a full understanding of Abani’s elaboration on the freak and how it goes hand in hand with his career-long research on the human, it may be worth outlining a brief history of the sideshow. Sideshows and freak shows were popular in the  Western world between 1840 and 1940.20 Their stars were people like the ‘ape woman’ Julia Pastrana, the ‘Hottentot Venus’ Saartjie Baartman,21 or the dwarf General Tom Thumb, alongside conjoined twins, tattooed women, and extremely tall or fat people. As this very short and incomplete list displays, sideshows were an

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ambiguous form of entertainment, because in their offering central stage to physical diversity they transformed human variety into a source of fascination as well as an object of exploitation. Unlike ancient visions of ‘monsters’ or ‘wonders’, as they were called before the nineteenth century, the extraordinary bodies exposed in sideshows established with their spectators a relationship of deviancy and normalcy which coincided with the desire of mastery over difference of the expanding imperialism of the time, its connected scientific racism, and Victorian ideals of masculinity and femininity. In other words the freak show served as a form of visual representation which marked normalcy and what did not ascribe to that category. As the counterpart to mainstream definitions of Victorian masculinity and femininity, sideshows contributed therefore to map out interpretations of humanity. The spectacularisation of the ‘primitive’ (such as the ‘Black Venus’ Saartjie Baartman) or the disabled (such as General Tom Thumb) betrays a voyeuristic curiosity for the other which was never naive, but rather imbued with questions of physical and ideological ‘normalcy’ and, therefore, ‘humanness’ in the spectator vis-à-vis ideas of difference, deviance, and exotica.22 Given these premises, the novel’s exhumation of such a show in contemporary Las Vegas may appear controversial: should it be read as an exploitation of diversity for the readers’ entertainment, as the historical sideshow was? The spectacularisation of freakiness is indeed a factual problem, as the episode of Halloween in the novel posits. Arrested on what we discover to be 31 October, before getting to the Desert Palm Institute the twins are at an Emergency Room waiting area, where they get confused as a further person in costume by the other people disguised as Spider-man, Wonder Woman, a gorilla, etc. (SHLV, 389). They are, in a sense, ‘spectacularised’ in such a context, understood as a mask to show. However, as Abani had already clarified before the publication of The Secret History of Las Vegas, his interest in extreme ­diversity  – what he calls ‘the grotesque’ – shouldn’t be understood as an opportunity to reassure the reader of their ‘normalcy’, but rather to crack monolithic definitions of humanity and open space for a more inclusive notion of what it means to be human. Whilst, at the time of the classic freak show, the exposition of extraordinary bodies was

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meant to affirm the ‘normalcy’ of the looker, thus silencing the freak’s voice in the definition of humanity, in this novel Abani tries to go in the opposite direction, eventually giving voice and action to the community of Reverend Jacobs’s show. As Fire explains, thus providing a reading key for the whole book, a sideshow is not like a circus, providing entertainment and escape. The freak show is ‘a confrontation’; it is about freaks, yes, but, above all, ‘about people and the limits of acceptability’ (SHLV, 131) and, we may add, of ‘tolerable, knowable humanity’.23 As Fire explains to Detective Salazar: ‘We’, the freaks, ‘push those limits’ (SHLV, 131) – be they physical, psychical, or conceptual. The interrogation of limits was a prominent feature of The Virgin of Flames, a theme the novel develops by means of its protagonist’s interrogation of both gender and race. The Secret History of Las Vegas exceeds that interest in fluidity against binarisms by testing the limits in a new way, that is, by giving central space to a couple of conjoined twins who, for their very physicality, interrogate ‘the very categories we rely on to classify humans’.24 As scholars of disability studies explain, conjoined brothers interrogate the limit of one individual against another and the idea of a single body for a single person – say, our very concept of the individual.25 Although conjoined twins may have different personalities, as Fire and Water prove, Elizabeth Grosz argues that their physical appearance continuously blurs ‘the usual hard and fast distinction between the boundaries of one subject and another’.26 This is even more so when we consider the specificities of parasitic twins, in whose case a part of one is ‘submerged’ in the body of the other brother or sister. This becomes ‘an affront to the common sense of identity’, so much so that ‘the freak is an ambiguous being whose existence imperils categories and oppositions dominant in social life’, because they occupy an ‘impossible middle ground’ between the distinctions we have culturally used to categorise the humans.27 Using Grosz’s words on conjoined twins, we can affirm that Fire and Water ‘cross the borders that divide the subject from all ambiguities, ­interconnections, and reciprocal classifications, outside of or beyond the human’, for example by transgressing the limit of life and death (because Fire is a mentally dead organism surviving thanks to his brother), but also the limit of our ‘benevolent’ and ‘humanitarian’ vision, unable to

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perceive the twins’ disabled body as an agent of terrorist acts, as I will show in the following paragraph.28 As mentioned above, testing the limits of our visual and interpretative skills is a key feature of the novel, whose narrative genre (the noir or detective story) promotes an emphasis on the ability of ‘reading’ reality. However, the two investigative characters of the book, Detective Salazar and his partner Sunil Singh, appear to be both unable to go beyond expectations when it comes to the disabled body of Fire and Water. From this incapacity of reading comes, for example, Detective Salazar’s inability to make sense of the twins’ use of the word ‘freak’ and the Las Vegas nuclear history they embody. Or Sunil’s inability to decipher the protrusion of Water’s tongue, an indication of Water’s ventriloquism and of Fire’s brain death. In this light the twins’ atypical body unveils Salazar’s and Sunil’s dis-ability to read reality, their distorted vision of the world due to a stereotyped understanding of the impaired body which Abani transgresses repetitively by depicting Fire as verbally aggressive or Water as a sexually active man – two characteristics that invalidate the image of the disabled man as passive, verbally innocent, or asexual.29 How the twins’ body is a site of contested readings cracking superficial definitions of humanity, also supported by the narrative structure of the book, is visible in the alternation between Detective Salazar’s naive and trivial voice and Sunil’s more investigative and nuanced approach to life, or in the opposed standpoints of Sunil’s and his boss Brewster’s ideas on the twins. In this respect the minor character of Brewster plays a fundamental role, because he gives voice to a sadly belittling vision of disability, on which Abani plays to articulate definitions of humanity. Brewster’s simplistic, outdated, and dangerous approach to the twins in fact brings us back to the initial question of science and its discursive production of the body. The episode of the zoo is telling in this regard, because it collapses the idea of science as enlightened avant-garde, a product of the progress of humanity. As the head of the experimental Desert Palm Institute, Brewster is captivated by the possibility of using the twins as a case study during their detention, and he requires an MRI of their body. Judging it too wide to fit a regular MRI, Brewster considers asking the assistance

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of a zoo, against Sunil’s ethical objections. The invocation of the zoo echoes the distant yet classical animalisation of freaks in the shows of the past (think of Ota Benga, exposed at the Bronx Zoo) and a general animalising discourse directed at people with disabilities, with the aim of dismissing their humanity.30 In this case, therefore, scientific and freak discourse overlap. As scholars of disability studies have shown, these two discourses are in fact deeply imbricated, because in the past the incipient modern science made recourse to sideshows as a sort of living archive to find samples for its investigations. Meanwhile science was invoked by sideshows impresarios for the certification of their freaks’ authenticity. Such co-operation ended by the 1940s, when the freak and the scientific discourse definitely parted ways. In those years the medical discourse prevailed over the vision of certain disabled bodies as extraordinary and marvellous, thus changing the approach to exceptional bodies that passed from the over-exposition of the nineteenth century to ‘the sequestered scrutiny of experts by the mid-twentieth century’.31 The imbrication of medical and freak discourse is most evident when Brewster provocatively and repetitively calls the twins ‘monsters’: ‘I have no interest in your humanity’, says Brewster. ‘No, I am only interested in your monstrosity, and that, my friend, is the medical term for your condition’ (SHLV, 304).32 This word, retrieved from nineteenth-century medical books to address ­conjoined twins, was used before the coming into popularity of the  expression ‘Siamese twins’, from the most famous conjoined twins ever, the Thai-American sideshow stars Chang and Eng.33 The epithet ‘monster’ thus marks Brewster’s clear-cut vision of disability as monstrosity and a possible source of exploitation for scientific goals. By insinuating a link between the scientific research centre and the medical word used in the nineteenth century to address conjoined twins, the expression ‘monster’ connects medicine to a retrograde vision of diversity, implicitly arguing for the menace of science when handled by wrong hands, such as Brewster’s. The example provided by Brewster, which situates corporeality over humanity, speaks volumes about the constantly active ‘enfreaking’ process, that is, the obliteration of the freak’s potential

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humanity by the superimposition of the body as the only category of value and meaning, expunging all other aspects of a person’s life – desires, passions, feelings.34 This process occurs when one reserves their rights of interpreting the other and their body. What is really ‘enfreaking’ in the novel, then, is not the reality of the freak show but the dehumanising procedures Fire and Water experience because of the law and medical enforcement they are subjected to and which limit and police them. The discrimination imposed by these institutions, supposedly created to defend a state’s citizens, is most visible and questioned in a verbal exchange between Fire and Dr Singh, who is responsible for the decision of their detention. In it Fire openly questions the US juridical system as prejudiced and, as a consequence, unequal: I just don’t think the justice system works for people like me, Fire said. Are you saying you’re above the law? This is exactly my point, Doc. When I admit that I don’t believe in this country’s justice system, you think I’m saying I am above the law, which you might call a grandiose sense of self-worth. If I keep making jokes you will say I am exhibiting glibness and superficial charm. If you decide that I am not answering your questions or at least not answering them honestly, you will think I am a pathological liar and that I am cunning and manipulative. If I complain about any of this, you will say I am not accepting responsibility for my own actions. If I admit to being bored, which I am by the way, you could read that as a need for stimulation and proneness to thrill seeking. I am living off the side of my brother, so I do qualify for parasitic lifestyle and I think you will agree that I’m pretty high in the aggressive narcissism scale, which makes me think you are going for an evaluation of us that fits with something you’ve already decided. (SHLV, 117–18)

In this passage Fire laments that their body marks them as impossible subjects of rights in front of both the law and science. Abani’s work aligns here with the agenda promoted by the United Nation Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner and the protocol on the rights of people with disability, which lament, among others, the absence of equal access to justice and to choose medical ­treatment.35 Fire’s argument calls to mind such protocol, because,

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as he points out, his disabled body is read in advance by both medical science and law, which are hence partial and enforcing defining paradigms. The right to know, which has historically propelled science, thus entangles with the power to mistreat, especially when science integrates with forms of institutional power as in the case above. The medical or scientific capacity to define collaborates with the state in a suppressive rule that regiments people, their diversity, and their possibilities of action, as the collaboration between Detective Salazar and Sunil evidences. In this specific case science’s hypothetical knowledge of body and psyche, from which its faculty to provide definition and categorisations, changes into a legal power used against the brothers. In opposition to the detrimental scientific discourse that imprisons Fire and Water, Abani’s narration proposes the sideshow as a place and space for shared humanity, as a source of identity and of acceptance, of community, in spite of its detrimental legacy. Whilst science is depicted as a coercive tool of nation-states, as in the figure of Brewster and, especially, as the expression of toxic experiments against the environment that cause disability, the freak show is saved from its unfortunate historical legacy and transformed into a possibility to retrieve humanity and test the limits of such a concept. In opposition to the vision of the research centre as a prison, the sideshow is portrayed as the cradle of Fire and Water’s innovative, authoritative, and fully human perception of themselves. The segregation they have lived in Mr Jacobs’s circus has indeed created a safe space for an almost familiar community, in which political awareness and, eventually, radical nationalism has emerged.36 ‘Sideshow or die’ Fire says (SHLV, 119), and we may interpret that as a reference to their personal history, when, at seven, they were forced to find a way to survive after their mother’s death. Yet ‘sideshow or die’ may also be a mode of self-definition, an expression of pride, for what they are and what they have been able to become. Being ‘freaks’ is, in this interpretation, ‘a badge of honor’, as Fire asserts, which does not simplistically indicate ‘less capable’ people ‘in this able-biased society’ but denotes those who have carved out a fully human perception of themselves despite their condition (SHLV, 119).

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Violence and disability rights Among the various limits that Abani transgresses in The Secret History of Las Vegas is the threshold of disability and bellicosity, especially in the exploration of the twins as a violent menace to the Desert Palm Institute – and the inability to read them as such. The  coupling of disability and aggressiveness interestingly shows the traditional limits of the concept of freakiness and, as a consequence, of humanity. The twins’ real identity comes about in the second part of the novel as central for the narration’s mise en abyme of the detective story, because it creates a dual thrilling effect achieved by the two mysteries the novel deals with: on the one hand the killings Salazar and Sunil are investigating; on the other Fire and Water’s real identity as eco-terrorists. Their belligerent character comes to the forefront at the end of the novel when, in order to pursue their goal of environmental justice, they detonate a bomb to destroy the Desert Palm Institute. In a real turn of events the conjoined twins pass from victims of unjust detention, as they supposedly were in the first part of the book, to activists who intentionally stage their presence near Lake Mead in order to get detained and have access to the research centre. They are in fact members of the Downwinder Nation, a radical group made up of ‘people adversely affected by the nuclear tests in Nevada because they lived downwind from  the test sites’ (SHLV, 205). Because of the place where they lived, they are the ones to carry the consequences of that environmental disaster. Downwinders are also nationalists, whose mission is ‘the eradication of dangerous military research in Nevada, Arizona, and Utah’ (SHLV, 287) and whose actions as political activists transform into acts of patent terrorism. The bombing, described in the book from the point of view of the twins, infuses a sense of victory, with no remorse whatsoever for the crime committed, and even of redress in its invocation of the nuclear experiments as a term of comparison: ‘the institute went up in a ball of fire. It was spectacular, as though the old days of the bomb tests were back. Flames and smoke in a big plume that rose over a hundred feet into the sky, throwing debris everywhere, s­ howering

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the parking lot of the strip mall with ash’ (SHLV, 305) – a conclusion that almost replicates The Virgin of Flames’s finale with the ash covering Los Angeles. Whilst the group’s attempt at evening past abuses may be understandable in a historical perspective, the rambunctious words describing their act talk of a boisterous use of extreme violence, implicitly involving presumably innocent people who were not part of the state framework implementing past nuclear tests.37 Their violence is, therefore, calculated revenge, sustained by a broader political vision. In the  Downwinders’ standpoint, justice is retribution. However, there is no hope in the achievement of justness, because what was done cannot be undone. This makes the twins ambivalent characters, ambiguously champions of the battle for human rights of disabled people yet perpetrators of the killings of human beings, the ultimate form of violence against a fellow person. The action of bombing opens up to two lines of reasoning, one on the right to violence and the other on the antagonistic visions of disability violence provides. The right to violence intersects with a vision of the state as an abuser rather than defender of citizens’ rights, as evidenced in the first part of this chapter. A ‘necropolitical’ state regiments deaths and administers, in this sense, violence on a certain territory. The Downwinder Nation’s act then contravenes such monopoly, opposing a vision of the state as a legitimate institution. The twins’ assumption of the right to punish means legitimising themselves as authoritative persons in spite of the condition of subalternity they are relegated to because of their disability. Nevertheless the assumption of the white Western phallocentric cowboy-like logic of ‘the right to punish to obtain justice’ is a controversial operation that critics have been trying to pillory for decades and whose complexity and multilayered argumentations we cannot investigate properly here.38 What I am interested in, as a following consideration of Abani’s discourse on humanness and its limits, is how Fire and Water’s claim of a ‘right to violence’ intervenes in the reader’s perception of the twins, who change from victims of the system to perpetuators of violence. The disability–violence match allows us to advance our exploration of the limits applied to extraordinary bodies that has been so central in this analysis, and how disability is understood

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and theorised as a concept in society, thus passing from a popular view that codifies disability as tragedy to disability as a manifestation of the complexity of being human. Although despicable, the terrorist act is in fact connoted as action, an expression of agency, and of being in full command of one’s potentiality; it thus implies an opposition to the passive idea of ‘lack’ (lack of command, lack of force, lack of agency) which is usually associated with disability, as the long-used word ‘handicap’ suggests. In other words the participation in the Downwinder Nation functions as an expression of subjectivity and agency, contrary to the tendency to make disabled characters objects of action.39 The disruptive force of the combination of disability with violence becomes clearer if we borrow from the investigations of disability studies scholars, who lament the diffused ‘paternalistic humanitarianism’ of contemporary political discourse positing objects of violence and suffering as ‘unfortunate victims […] in need of charitable protection’.40 This is an approach to matters of rights typical of that ‘sentimental education’ which considers literature as a field for changing readers’ perceptions and therefore ‘educating’ them for the progress of society.41 Much in vogue in the Western world at least from the nineteenth century, such ‘sentimental education’ posits its attention on the reader, who should leave the text with a sense of relief when an ethical equilibrium is re-established through the narration. This is the feeling of the benefactor or saviour, intervening to solve problematic situations according to their high ethical standards. Asia, Sunil’s lover and a prostitute by profession, names such a feeling the toxic compassion of the ‘good john’, the client who wants to be kind. He wants to lavish attention on you, gifts even. He will pay you more to let him kiss your lips, your breasts, and your vagina, to trace his breath on your neck in tender arousal, to bury his nose in your hair and nuzzle you. He will try hard to make you come. He will ask your name, your real name, and he will whisper it as he enters you. He will always be clean when he comes to you. Will always smell good, will never disrespect you, and will always act like he is on a real date with a woman he loves, or can love. But he cannot, and that is why he has chosen you. Because you will let him love you, but only in the ways he wants to, the ways he thinks



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you should like, the way in which he is capable, the ways that make him feel good. For him you reflect how gentle he is, how special, how unlike other men he can be. (SHLV, 310–11)

In the description offered by Asia this man kisses, is clean, and is generally respectful, in order to alleviate the prostitute’s condition of supposed suffering. He leaves with a sense of accomplishment, for behaving like a real human being in a condition that does not require so; however, as Asia also points out, the prostitute is a void, the other is an ‘illusion’ (SHLV, 311), not permitted to be a fully human being with personal tastes, bad moments, and flows. The other functions as a mirror, allowing the surfacing of the good feeling of the ‘only’ complex subject of the interaction. What appears like a special attention for the other reveals deceitful: the prostitute remains passive, a person deprived of full humanity. As people with a disability Fire and Water also qualify as people in a condition of supposed suffering, as Asia is as a sex worker. However, the twins neglect both passivity and compassion by replying to their interlocutors with aggressiveness and violence and finally showing wit and their right to violence. What emerges is an ethical critique of the usual discourse on disability, which leaves the reader alienated and disarmed. Borrowing Crystal Parikh’s words on minor literatures, The Secret History of Las Vegas leaves the reader with ‘a certain discomfort in our skin’ for being forced to look at the other, the ‘impossible subjects of rights’, in the face of their rage and revenge.42 Contrary to the vision of the other as administered victim, object of help, Fire and Water are depicted as subjects of rights who claim, even by means of forms of extreme violence, space for agency and their own vision of justice. Sceptical of a state that has never granted them either protection or justice, the twins assert their compensation by refusing a state of victimhood that is, in any case, unrecognised. Violent agency adds therefore to the pile of dismantling limits Abani proposes in this novel, because the proper success of Water and Fire’s operation confirms the conventional inability to read a disabled body in its full humanness, assertiveness, and, in the end, also violence. The ‘ability’ to produce damage is a taboo that clashes against the conventional passivity attributed to disabled

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bodies, traditionally depicted, culturally and literary, as people to be protected, provided for, and taken care of. This is even more so if we engage this reasoning with the category of gender. Writing on disability and masculinities, Barbara Pini, Cassandra Loeser, and Vicki Crowley assert that ‘the disabled male subject is aligned with the “feminine” realm, assumed to be devoid of self-mastery and control, social independence, physical and interactive competence and social productivity’ – the vulnerability of the disabled body, in other words, makes the overlapping of received masculinity with agency impossible.43 In this ‘subtle manipulation of the human form to destroy the usual perspective and to move things slightly off kilter’,44 The Secret History of Las Vegas matches the aims of disability literature, that is, the ‘interrogat[ion of] the category of the human, asking how it is defined, who belongs within it, and what political work it ­performs’.45 Such stress on the limits of acceptability allows us to interpret Abani’s use of the conjoined twins not as a strategy to catch the reader’s curiosity (note: no image of the twins is shown on the cover) or to confirm standards of normalcy, but rather as a site in which advancing and questioning ideas of rights takes place. Unlike the sideshow of the nineteenth century, Abani’s interest in the world of freaks comes therefore from an ethical attempt to ‘recover that which has been edited out, without a moral framework’, as he states, ‘with a curiosity and integrity that I hope allows us to revisit our fear’.46 The difference between a gaze hungry for objectifying extravagance, as typical of past sideshows, and a gaze that challenges the ‘limits of acceptability’ is possibly pointed out by Diane Arbus, the famous photographer of freaks and an inspirational source for Abani, who quotes her in the epigraph to The Virgin of Flames, the novel preceding The Secret History of Las Vegas, and announcing Abani’s more and more manifest interest in freakiness or grotesqueness. As a photographer Arbus maintained that ‘the virtue of the photograph is a permanence that allows the viewer to overcome the initial shock of the extraordinary body and invest the freak with human qualities’.47 According to Arbus, in those moments our gaze is not just scopophilic or voyeuristic; on the contrary, the time one can devote to looking at the picture, thanks to the fixity of the visual medium, allows humanity, because



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it gives time to trace similarities, establish connections, and formulate questions beyond our initial awe. The same reasoning about the power of the photographic medium can be applied to Abani’s novel: narrative time creates a new space for complex representations, contributing to an expansion of the idea of ‘the human’ and its rights.

Redemption: motherhood, dogs, hope because the horror never overwhelms you. Only the random acts of kindness. Abani, Daphne’s Lot

As the previous paragraphs show, The Secret History of Las Vegas portrays a nightmarish postmodern world, its images of piles of corpses and mutilated bodies comparable, for their brutality and the emotional dumbness it creates, to the works of other contemporary writers such as Cormac McCarthy’s novels Blood Meridian (1985) and The Road (2006) or Nic Pizzollatto’s True Detective (2014). Yet, as the final section of this chapter highlights, the conclusion of The Secret History of Las Vegas leaves some space for redemption because, as Sunil affirms, even if history tells us ‘we’re a race doomed and full of shit’, ‘I keep hoping to find out we aren’t’ (SHLV, 165). Abani’s novel follows thus his concern for the idea of redemption, a broad concept that in the writer’s aesthetics means hope, love, and, in general, emotional purification.48 Love is a salvific form of human interaction, expressed in The Secret History of Las Vegas as maternal love (between Sheila and her sons Water and Fire), prostitute love (between Asia and Sunil), or friendship (the one that develops between Salazar and Sunil). In these cases love proves that the obliteration of one’s consciousness, a side effect of exposition to extreme violence, is not irreversible; a sense of ethical humanity may persist, even though that does not mean looking away ‘from the dark things about us’.49 Maternal love is a delicate but persistent presence in The Secret History of Las Vegas,50 which devotes space to the twins’ and Sunil’s

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mothers, Selah and Dorothy respectively. The author, for example, dedicates intense pages to the latter character, whose mouth is sewn in order to visually reproduce her silence, her opposition to betray her dissident husband in Apartheid South Africa. Or, at the very beginning of the book, touching lines describe the heart-wrenching yet poetic image of Selah’s corpse swinging from a bristlecone tree, her sons weeping under her feet – an image reminiscent of Abani’s poem ‘Strange fruit’, in which the object of the title is a woman’s skeleton dangling from a tree, in a probable reference to Billie Holiday’s song of the same title (DW, 100). These maternal figures show an author acutely perceptive of women’s emotional and social life, as he had already proved in Becoming Abigail, and especially mindful of the figure of the mother, as he had already done in GraceLand and Song for Night but, most convincingly, in the poem collection Daphne’s Lot, dedicated to Abani’s own mother Daphne. The consequence of such attention to the sorrow of women’s lives and, mainly, to mother figures, is the depiction of different and more fluid types of masculinity that expand received visions of genders. Abani’s interest in transcending the limits of manhood was already visible in GraceLand, in which Elvis inhabits a softer kind of maleness in comparison to other characters in the novel, so much so that some critics have read symptoms of latent homosexuality in the protagonist. The same is true for Black, the protagonist of The Virgin of Flames, in which make-up is used as a tool to allow the osmotic passage between genders. Even though homosexuality remains latent, especially in The Virgin of the Flames, I prefer to read those characters as experiments of fluidity that contravene the traditional division of genders as not overlapping. Abani himself confessed in an interview his interest in new forms of masculinity, obtainable ‘through tenderness, rather than through […] violence’.51 Such a form of tenderness, explored through the tenuous male make-up in GraceLand and the explicit drag transformation of Black in The Virgin of Flames, is eventually achieved through the figure of the conjoined twins in The Secret History of Las Vegas despite their flirtation with assertive violence. A fluid conception of gender means that men and women are not polar ideas but transitioning and overlapping entities. The Secret History of Las Vegas in a sense completes Abani’s examination of

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how masculinity can also contain femininity, a term I here use in an improper way, not as a simplistic visual manifestation but as a signifier of the ‘caring for the others’ that women take on during certain moments of their lives, such as pregnancy and early maternity. I state that because I dare to read the condition of Water and Fire, in which Fire is the parasitic twin to Water, as a form of forced ‘male motherhood’, an extreme and grotesque, yet powerful, form of gender relocation.52 Because of this bond, which Water has not selected, the man is in fact forced to care for his brother in extreme ways, that is, nurturing him, sustaining him, moving him, and even giving him his voice. Contrary to first impressions, Fire and Water are not conjoined in serious ways. As Sunil sees in his examinations, ‘a band of tissue connected the twins, but they didn’t share lungs or a heart or any major organs. They could very easily have been separated at birth. It’s confusing why they weren’t. Maybe their parents couldn’t afford the operation. But he knew so many surgeons would have performed the procedure for free, just to get papers out of it’ (SHLV, 200). The union of the twins could have been severed, and their freakiness or disability neutralised. Yet, not deciding for the operation, Water’s mother has forced her son to bear Fire’s extreme disability, despite the ‘perfection’ and even beauty of Water’s body according to standards. Water’s disability is therefore not really a ‘lack’ (the inability of doing something), but dis-ability in the truly original Latin meaning of the prefix dis-: the ability of doing differently; the ability, in this case, of living while carrying the burden of someone else, of living for the other, as the other, of assuming someone else’s diversity. The reading of Water and Fire’s relationship as a maternal one is justified by the language and images Abani uses to describe Water’s life with Fire, as when Fire admits he gets most of his nutrition from Water, like an infant does with their mother (SHLV, 94). Or as when, in Chapter Fifteen, in one of the most touching pages of the book, Water sings a lullaby to his brother (SHLV, 113). Imprisoned in the centre, Water watches the full moon, a ‘pregnant moon’ (SHLV, 77), and thinks of his mother Selah. He hums then a lullaby, while his parasitic brother is warmly asleep in his caul, a term strongly connoted with maternity. In his 2008 TED Talk,

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Abani talks about small acts of redemption and humanity shining against the percolating pain of existence; similarly, Chapter Fifteen is ‘small’, just one page that, nevertheless, instils hope and love against the nihilistic violence of both South Africa’s past and Las Vegas’s history. Coming immediately after a chapter in which Sunil ‘scientifically’ presents what parasitic conjunction is, Chapter Fifteen reads as the counterpart of the previous dehumanising scientific discourse. Opposing a taxonomy which estranges, it presents a form of motherly love that provides an alternative to the reading of the twins as scientific oddities. Confirming once more the extent to which the novel is an exercise in reading, Sunil, who watches the twins from outside the room, interprets Water’s action as egoistic and almost deviant (‘he was hugging himself’); he does not realise (namely, he cannot read the twins beyond the definition he has learned from books) he is spying on a moment of grace, because in reality Water is hugging Fire, his lips slightly moving and intoning the same cradle song their mother Selah chanted to them when they were children. In The Secret History of Las Vegas womanhood plays then a special role, as it shows residual hope and its potentially transformative power, a power that derives not from utopic visions but from the acknowledgment, in a very Butlerian sense, of a common vulnerability, which does not prevent action but elicits gentleness in relation to the other, as in the motherly hug by Water or in the tenderness with which the women at Vlakplass handle bodily fragments (SHLV, 174). This is the same kindness that filters also in other works by Abani, as in Daphne’s Lot, in which the author relates of the woman at the airport who gives all her belongings to Abani’s mother, travelling alone with five kids from Nigeria to England and with no other luggage than the clothes she wore. Hardened by war and encouraged by the responsibility of her ‘lot’, this act of compassion is described by the author as the only action that causes Daphne to shed a tear; the intense emotion of seeing the other acknowledging and taking care of our vulnerability cannot be physically contained. Or again, it is the vulnerability of Sunil, unable to move out of his feeling of guilt and to fully love Asia. Or the vulnerability Sunil recognises at fourteen, when he works in Uncle Ben’s shebeen; fascinated by the residual humanity of the ‘two or three drunkards who wouldn’t leave’ the place

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(SHLV, 181), Sunil discovers the vulnerability of a grown man like Red, ‘a bent shade of a man, bent even lower by the alcohol’, fearful of night and loneliness after the ANC has made his wife and son disappear ‘into the dark’ (SHLV, 182). It is also the vulnerability of the ‘holy homeless’, to use a quotation from a poem in Santificum, that ‘fill the city like so many weeds’ (S, 46) whom, nevertheless, the centre does not hesitate to eradicate for its scientific aims. One night one of those many ‘weeds’ – a figurative language that calls to mind Whitman’s rendition of humanity as leaves of grass – enters a diner where Salazar and Sunil are. The vagrant is transporting his bulldog. ‘Why the fuck are you carrying your dog’, Salazar asks. ‘He’s tired’, answers the man (SHLV, 101). The simplicity and absurdity of the exchange strikes a central point  in the novel, as it evidences the polarity between the main detective narration, with its sometimes gross lines and the pain and cruelty unveiled by the investigation, and the indiscernibility of a world caring for acts gentleness, even for a dog – the invisibility of such kindness narratively reproduced in the inconsequential character of the passage, just half a page long and useless for plot development. Yet the invisibility of the scene, narratively short and with an extra at its centre, a passing-by homeless man, does not equate with insignificance. The passage is rather revealing, because it implies two key figures of Abani’s aesthetic, that is, the ‘migrant’ and the dog. The homeless person, a specific type of migrant, is the victim of the Desert Palm Institute’s experiments in biopolitics, the specimen of all those human beings treated as disposable bodies at the service of knowledge and state procedures. The figure of the vagrant had already been proposed as an allusion to (if not a source of) redemption in Kalakuta Republic, in which the poet is ‘saved’ by the vision of ‘an old bum searching the bins outside Burger King’ (KR, 105). The triviality of the scene matches the one just described, in which a dog makes its appearance together with the vagabond. This animal is one of the tropes Abani makes use of repeatedly in his works, and an element that triggers the author’s reflection on humanity. For example his poem collection Dog Woman takes inspiration from a sequence of paintings by the Portuguese-British artist Paula Rego, whose women in canine positions may have given origin to

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the ­powerful image of Abigail in chains in Becoming Abigail. In the novella the doglike condition prompts a consideration on the removal of humanity, as explained in Chapter 3. In contrast to the use of the dog image in Becoming Abigail as the non-human and as the fruit of human violence on their fellow beings, the long and evocative poem ‘Dog woman’ links the image of the dog to Homer. In the Odyssey Homer depicts Ulysses’ dog Argo as the only one able to empathise with the incoming vagrant who, in reality, is Ulysses. In a sense Argo is more human than Ithaca’s inhabitants, who cannot ‘read’ their fellow beings. Dogs are also in The Virgin of Flames, in which Black is portrayed giving shelter to the remains of stray dogs killed by Los Angeles gangs as practice targets (VF, 182–4). The episode, like the cameo of the homeless man and the dog in The Secret History of Las Vegas, appears not as a fundamental sketch in the narrative economy of the work; yet, it reveals Abani’s vision of animals as soul-spirits which create the possibility of a different form of relationality and, therefore, of humanity.53 In his essay on Song for Night, ‘creaturely mimesis’, and spiritual animism, Sam Durrant compares Abani to Kafka in light of ‘their shared intuition that hope lies in our forgotten connection to (other) animals, in our creaturely relation to those who, in these profoundly deanimating times, have undertaken to guard our souls’.54 In his original reading that, however, does not consider The Secret History of Las Vegas, the critic underlines the importance of animals in Abani’s works, because there lies redemption, ‘beyond the narrative of human exclusivity, in widening the orbit of the “us” who are otherwise cut off from hope’.55 And the figure of the dog in The Secret History of Las Vegas does provide the occasion for an act of pure gentleness, sabotaging the inescapable collapse towards brutality. The scene conveys the ultimate form of mutual affection, in similar ways to the dog in the poem ‘Strange fruit’, in which the suicidal woman’s feet, hanging from the tree, are licked by her affectionate dog, the only figure expressing gentleness in the tragedy of someone taking their life (DW, 100). The vulnerability of the animal, killed as a target in Los Angeles or alternatively carried in repose by a vagabond in The Secret History of Las Vegas, is similar to the vulnerability of Salazar, described as capable of acts of secret gentleness and therefore exposed in all

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his humanity, as when he builds funeral boat-shaped pyres for the victims of the killings he investigates. On this note about a purifying fire, which recalls the same imagery of The Virgin of Flames, the novel ends, with Salazar and Sunil watching a ‘flaming ship’ (SHLV, 318), their new tenuous friendship based, in a very Butlerian sense, on feelings of loss yet indicative of a possible future ‘we’.56 In the dispute between the voiding dissemination of violence and the residual strength of hope The Secret History of Las Vegas chooses the latter. ‘Maybe that’s what makes us deeply human’, states Sunil. ‘Pushing ever against the inevitable’ (SHLV, 233): this is the unconsumed grace of provocative hope that does not renounce humanity. The Secret History of Las Vegas ends with this sentence: ‘A loon took off from the tamarisk and rose toward the sky’ (SHLV, 319). The tamarisk, the tree Abraham plants, supersedes the bristlecone pine, present throughout the novel as a recurring trope of antiquity, of pain, of entanglement. The novel ends with this menial image proposing, as the conclusion of The Virgin of Flames does, an image of a world that continues despite us, as always, able to contain the vulnerability of one of the species that inhabits it. Like those women in Vlakplass digging for corpses, ‘[e]ngaged in some beautiful ballet only they understood’, the world moves ‘forward, slowly, but always forward’ (SHLV, 174). It is a conclusion that recalls other works by Abani, in which the majesty of pain and fight cannot obliterate ‘the best in us’ (KR, 78): There will always be quarrels, Biblical in proportion, older than Eden, siblings fight. I cannot settle that. I can only write a poem. But I know God still speaks to us. (DL, 79)

Notes  1 Bifocality is a key element in Abani’s prose, as highlighted by Obi Nwakanma with reference to GraceLand and The Virgin of Flames, but also pointed out here in Chapter 3 on Becoming Abigail. See

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O.  Nwakanma, ‘O, Polyphemus: on poetry and alienation’, ARIEL, 39:4 (2008), 136–49.   2 Y. Goyal, ‘A deep humanness, a deep grace: interview with Chris Abani’, Research in African Literatures, 45:3 (2014), p. 237.   3 Goyal, ‘A deep humanness’, pp. 237–8.   4 See C. Ross Nickerson, ‘Introduction: the satisfactions of murder’, in C. Ross Nickerson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 4. Black detectives have come to the scenes in recent years, thanks to the works of Walter Mosley and Gar Anthony Haywood. It would be interesting to read The Secret History of Las Vegas alongside these authors’ works. For an introduction to the question of race in crime fiction see M. Reddy, ‘Race and American crime fiction’, in C. R. Nickerson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 135–47.   5 As for the global turn of detective novels see R. Adams, ‘At the borders of American crime fiction’, in W. C. Dimock and L. Buell (eds), Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 250–1.   6 Hunter S. Thompson is in particular an explicit reference Abani acknowledges. His understanding of the city, Abani admits, comes primarily from TV and cinema and films such as Chained for Life (1951), about the jurisdictional vicissitudes of two conjoined sisters, or the more recent cult movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) with Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro. The film, based on the  work by Hunter S. Thompson, tells a story of drug excesses in the 1970s. Its emphasis on limits and excess as a way to knowledge partly matches Abani’s aesthetic of the grotesque as the road to the sublime. In Abani’s own reading, the final scene of the film, with Thompson writing in a flooded hotel room, is ‘melancholic and prophetic and yet hopeful’, providing a ‘dystopic yet beautiful hope for the future’ to be found also in The Secret History of Las Vegas. C. Abani, ‘Sin city on-screen: sexy and shocking scenes set in Las Vegas’, Bookish (31 January 2014). www.bookish.com/articles/ sin-city-on-screen-sexy-and-shocking-scenes-set-in-las-vegas/. Accessed 30 July 2017. About Las Vegas and its literary history it may be useful to recall that the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, hosts an important writing programme at the Black Mountain Institute, which has also hosted two of Abani’s favoured writers, Wole Soyinka and Derek Walcott.

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  7 K. Cooper, ‘“Zero pays the house”: the Las Vegas novel and atomic roulette’, Contemporary Literature, 33:3 (1992), p. 530.   8 The environmental violence expressed through nuclear bombing is just  the pinnacle for a region used to environmental abuse since the nineteenth century, when the gold rush started the endless mining of the land (SHLV, 163). The traces left by this early expression of environmental exploitation, with that-era ‘ghost towns litter[ing] the desert’ (SHLV, 163), matches newer abandoned cities which boomed with the nuclear governmental activities in the area.   9 Mbembe explains that, in necropolitics, ‘the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die’; this is the expression of sovereignty of states of exception. A. Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, trans. L. Meintjes, Public Culture, 15:1 (2003), pp. 11–12. 10 Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’. 11 See, for example, the comparison between the system of South African townships and Native American reservations, many of which are situated in the state of Nevada (SHLV, 27). 12 H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarism (New York: Meridian Books, 1951), p. 157. 13 Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, p. 17. 14 Mbembe recalls that, as a ‘sociopolitical, cultural, and economic formation, the township was a peculiar spatial institution scientifically planned for the purposes of control. The functioning of the homelands and townships entailed severe restrictions on production for the market by blacks in white areas, the terminating of land ownership by blacks except in reserved areas, the illegalization of black residence on white farms (except as servants in the employ of whites), the control of urban influx, and later, the denial of citizenship to Africans’ (‘Necropolitics’, p. 26). 15 The possible intertextuality of the name Beatrice is not only with Dante’s Inferno but also with Abani’s previous novel GraceLand, in which the protagonist’s mother is called Beatrice. 16 Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, p. 27. 17 The twins’ second names recall the biblical twins born of Isaac in the Old Testament and match the many biblical references present in The Secret History of Las Vegas, in spite of the novel’s plot, setting, and themes apparently linked to the eccentricity of the freak show and the dissoluteness of the city of Las Vegas. Beside the twins’ second names, their mother’s name, Selah, is also of biblical origin. Many are the references to the bible when the novel portrays trees, both in real and metaphorical

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terms. Methuselah, for example, is a biblical character who comes up when the narrator mentions a specific specimen of bristlecone tree, the reportedly longest-living organism on earth. Also the nuclear explosion Selah is exposed to is described in biblical terms: ‘Perhaps the tone seems heavy, Old Testament-weighted, but until you have seen this power bloom in a desert, you can never fully understand the truths that made Elijah weep, or Elisha wail in despair for his people; you cannot know the terrible loneliness of Moses, the cry in Gethsemane’ (SHLV, 4). 18 A. Oboe, ‘“As there are hyena-men and panther-men …”: Chris Abani, Pieter Hugo, and the shocking life of images’, Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 51:1 (2015), p. 95. 19 Such description, which focuses on the queerness of Fire’s appearance, contrasts with Water’s appearance: ‘At six feet’ Water ‘had a muscular, lean body and a face so perfectly proportioned that he seemed like a cruel joke at Fire’s expense. He was quite simply beautiful. And this made Fire seem all the more shocking and alien’ (SHLV, 14). 20 R. Garland Thompson, ‘Introduction: from wonder to error – a genealogy of freak discourse in modernity’, in R. Garland Thomson (ed.), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York and London: New York University Press, 1996), p. 4. On the history of the reception of diversity and, in general, the freak show see also R. Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988); D.  Gerber, ‘The “careers” of people exhibited in freak shows: the problem of volition and valorization’, in R. Garland Thomson (ed.), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York and London: New York University Press, 1996), pp. 38–54; and R.  Adams, Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 21 The so-called Hottentot Venus appears also in one of Abani’s poems in the collection Sanctificum (78). 22 R. Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 62; Garland Thomson, Freakery, p. 5. 23 E. Grosz, ‘Intolerable ambiguity: freaks as/at the limit’, in R. Garland Thomson (ed.), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York and London: New York University Press, 1996), p. 55. 24 Garland Thomson, Freakery, p. 14. 25 See also L. Fiedler, Freaks. Mostri o mutanti, scherzo di natura, incubi viventi, incarnazione delle nostre paure, caricature delle nostre i­ llusioni, trans. E. Capriolo (Milan: Garzanti, 1981 [1978]), p. 210.

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26 Grosz, ‘Intolerable ambiguities’, pp. 62–3. 27 Grosz, ‘Intolerable ambiguities’, pp. 62–3 and 57; emphasis in the original. 28 Grosz, ‘Intolerable ambiguities’. 29 Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, p. 25. 30 J. A. Minich, ‘Who is human? Disability, literature, and human rights’, in A. Schultheis Moore and S. A. McClennen (eds), The Routledge Companion to Human Rights and Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), p. 47. 31 Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, p. 58. 32 Quite interestingly, Brewster himself is disabled because he is on oxygen. In this respect Abani continues a tradition of depicting negative characters as people with disability. About this see D. Mitchell and S. Snyder’s Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse and their analysis of disability in literature and film, from Melville’s Captain Ahab to Dunn’s Geek Love (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). 33 The twins were born in Siam (modern Thailand) in 1811 of Chinese parents. The American merchant Robert Hunter ‘discovered’ them in 1824 and obtained permission to take them to the United States for exhibitions. Probably the greatest stars of the sideshows of their time, at a certain point of their career they retired, assumed the surname Bunker, married two sisters, became the owner of a farm, and fathered a number of children. 34 Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, p. 59. 35 ‘Persons  with disabilities face discrimination and barriers that restrict them from participating in society on an equal basis with others every day. They are denied their rights to be included in the general school system, to be employed, to live independently in the community, to move freely, to vote, to participate in sport and cultural activities, to enjoy social protection, to access justice, to choose medical treatment and to enter freely into legal commitments such as buying and selling property’ www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Disability/Pages/DisabilityIndex.aspx. 36 Unlike the racial segregation of Apartheid, here life in isolation offers possibilities. On the potential of such closed community see Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, p. 35. 37 Not only innocent and unknown people are killed in the exploitation of the centre. Water also cold-bloodedly kills Brewster: ‘wrapping his oxygen line around his neck, he slowly strangled him’ (SHLV, 304). 38 On this thorny issue see F. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. C.  Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967 [1952]) and The

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Wretched of the Earth, transl. R. Philcox (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1983 [1961]). 39 Garland Thomson, ‘Introduction’, p. 11. 40 C. Parikh, ‘“Come almost home”: human rights and the return of minor subjects’, Journal of Human Rights, 12:1 (2013), p. 122. 41 R. Rorty, ‘Human rights, rationality, and sentimentality’, in M. Ishay (ed.), The Human Rights Reader: Major Political Writings, Essays, Speeches, and Documents from the Bible to the Present (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 176–81. 42 Parikh, ‘Come almost home’, p. 122. 43 B. Pini, C. Loeser, and V. Crowley (eds), Disability and Masculinities: Corporeality, Pedagogy, and the Critique of Otherness (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), p. xxxi. The challenge of the vision of vulnerability as passivity, and the contemplation of resistance within vulnerability, aligns The Secret History of Las Vegas with other controversial works, such as the film Freaks by Tod Browning (1932), a before-Hays movie that represented the vengeance of the crew of a freak show against a usurper. Abani’s novel may be read as in dialogue with this filmic antecedent, for its depiction of a proud freak community distant from mere scenes of victimhood and the explicit agency that may derive from such empowering (yet disempowered) community; a form of agency that explodes in unequivocal violence both in novel, with the killing of Brewster and the bombing of the centre, and in the film, with the final scenes of the freaks crawling, with knives, towards the woman who has abused them in order to punish her. 44 C. Abani, ‘Omar Sharif comes to Nollywood: a storyboard in 10 frames’, in P. Hugo, C. Abani, Z. Saro-Wiwa, and S. Hardy, Nollywood (Munich: Prestel, 2009), p. 13. 45 Minich, ‘Who is human?’, p. 46; emphasis in the original. 46 Abani in B. Davis, ‘Q&A: Chris Abani on the search for better questions’, Bold as Love Magazine (2 April 2014). http://boldaslove. us/2014/04/02/qa-chris-abani-on-the-rewards-of-better-questions/. Accessed 17 May 2019. 47 Quoted in Adams, Sideshow U.S.A, p. 122. 48 As for The Virgin of Flames, hope is a word that often appears in the novel in connection to the city of Las Vegas: ‘that was the way of Vegas. To wring you dry and then send you off poor and broken but still full of hope – enough so that you would come back to lose, or win, depending on the fates’ (SHLV, 291). 49 C. Abani, ‘On humanity’, TED Talk (February 2008). www.ted.com/ talks/chris_abani_muses_on_humanity. Accessed 19 October 2020.

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50 Unlike mothers, the paternal figure is absent or controversial in The Secret History of Las Vegas, as testified by Detective Salazar’s account of his own father. In this view the novel is in line with Abani’s other works such as GraceLand and Becoming Abigail. 51 S. Aycock, ‘An interview with Chris Abani’, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, 10:1 (2009), p. 9. 52 In Daphne Lot, Abani describes his mother Daphne’s travel from Nigeria to England with her children, during the Biafran War. The author was a small child at the time of the travel, and the description of his brother Mark carrying him on his back (DL, 53) may recall the image of Water ‘carrying’ Fire. 53 See S. Durrant, ‘Creaturely mimesis: life after necropolitics in Chris Abani’s Song for Night’, Research in African Literatures, 49:3 (2018), 178–206. 54 Durrant, ‘Creaturely mimesis’, p. 179. 55 Durrant, ‘Creaturely mimesis’. 56 J. Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004).

References Abani, Chris. ‘Ape killer’, in Chris Abani (ed.), Lagos Noir (New York: Akashic Books, 2018), pp. 201–17. ———. Becoming Abigail (New York: Akashic Books, 2006). ———. Daphne’s Lot (Los Angeles: Red Hen Press, 2003). ———. Dog Woman (Los Angeles: Red Hen Press, 2004). ———. ‘From four movements’, Callaloo, 34:3 (2011), 682–97. ———. GraceLand (New York: Picador, 2004). ———. Kalakuta Republic (London: Saqi Books, 2000). ——— (ed.). Lagos Noir (New York: Akashic Books, 2018). ———. ‘Omar Sharif comes to Nollywood: a storyboard in 10 frames’, in Pieter Hugo, Chris Abani, Zina Saro-Wiwa, and Stacey Hardy, Nollywood (Munich: Prestel, 2009), pp. 7–14. ———. ‘On humanity’, TED Talk (February 2008). www.ted.com/talks/ chris_abani_muses_on_humanity. Accessed 19 October 2020. ———. Sanctificum (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2010). ———. ‘Sin city on-screen: sexy and shocking scenes set in Las Vegas’, Bookish (31 January 2014). www.bookish.com/articles/sin-city-on-scr een-sexy-and-shocking-scenes-set-in-las-vegas/. Accessed 30 July 2017. ———. Song for Night (New York: Akashic Books, 2007).

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———. The Secret History of Las Vegas (New York: Penguin, 2014). ———. The Virgin of Flames (New York: Penguin, 2007). Adams, Rachel. ‘At the borders of American crime fiction’, in Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell (eds), Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 249–73. ———. Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001). Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books, 1951). Aycock, Amanda. ‘An interview with Chris Abani’, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, 10:1 (2009), 1–10. Bloch, Ernst. ‘Introduction’ to The Principle of Hope (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995 [1954]). www.marxists.org/archive/bloch/hope/intro duction.htm. Accessed 18 April 2021. Bogdan, Robert. Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Browning, Tom. Freaks (1932). Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004). Cooper, Ken. ‘“Zero pays the house”: the Las Vegas novel and atomic roulette’, Contemporary Literature, 33:3 (1992), 528–44. Davis, Bridgette M. ‘Q&A: Chris Abani on the search for better questions’, Bold as Love Magazine (2 April 2014). http://boldaslove.us/2014/04/02/ qa-chris-abani-on-the-rewards-of-better-questions/. Accessed 17 May 2019. Durrant, Sam. ‘Creaturely mimesis: life after necropolitics in Chris Abani’s Song for Night’, Research in African Literatures, 49:3 (2018), 178–206. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks, trans. C. Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967 [1952]). ———. The Wretched of the Earth, trans. R. Philcox (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1983 [1961]). Fiedler, Leslie. Freaks. Mostri o mutanti, scherzo di natura, incubi viventi, incarnazione delle nostre paure, caricature delle nostre illusioni, trans. E. Capriolo (Milan: Garzanti, 1981 [1978]). Fraser, Harry L. Chained for Life (1952). Garland Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). ———. ‘Introduction: from wonder to error – a genealogy of freak discourse in modernity’, in Rosemarie Garland Thomson (ed.), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York and London: New York University Press, 1996), pp. 1–19.

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Gerber, David A. ‘The “careers” of people exhibited in freak shows: the problem of volition and valorization’, in Rosemarie Garland Thomson (ed.), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York and London: New York University Press, 1996), pp. 38–54. Goyal, Yogita. ‘A deep humanness, a deep grace: interview with Chris Abani’, Research in African Literatures, 45:3 (2014), 227–40. Grosz, Elizabeth. ‘Intolerable ambiguity: freaks as/at the limit’, in Rosemarie Garland Thomson (ed.), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York and London: New York University Press, 1996), pp. 55–66. Hugo, Victor. The Man Who Laughs (1869). Jazzybee Verlag, E-book. Kanehara, Hitomi. Snakes and Earrings (New York: Vintage, 2003). Mbembe, Achille. ‘Necropolitics’, trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture, 15:1 (2003), 11–40. McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian (New York: Picador, 1985). ———. The Road (New York: Vintage, 2007). Minich, Julie Avril. ‘Who is human? Disability, literature, and human rights’, in Alexandra Schultheis Moore and Sophia A. McClennen (eds), The Routledge Companion to Human Rights and Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), pp. 46–52. Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). Nwakanma, Obi. ‘O, Polyphemus: on poetry and alienation’, ARIEL, 39:4 (2008), 136–49. Oboe, Annalisa. ‘“As there are hyena-men and panther-men …”: Chris Abani, Pieter Hugo, and the shocking life of images’, Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 51:1 (2015), 95–107. Parikh, Crystal. ‘“Come almost home”: human rights and the return of minor subjects’, Journal of Human Rights, 12:1 (2013), 121–37. Pini, Barbara, Cassandra Loeser, and Vicky Crowley (eds). Disability and Masculinities: Corporeality, Pedagogy, and the Critique of Otherness (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Reddy, Maureen T. ‘Race and American crime fiction’, in Catherine Ross Nickerson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 135–47. Rorty, Richard. ‘Human rights, rationality, and sentimentality’, in Michelin  Ishay (ed.), The Human Rights Reader: Major Political Writings, Essays, Speeches, and Documents from the Bible to the Present (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 167–85. Ross Nickerson, Catherine. ‘Introduction: the satisfactions of murder’, in Catherine Ross Nickerson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 1–4.

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Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (New York: HarperCollins, 2005 [1971]). United Nations. Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner. Protocol on the Rights of People with Disability. www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/ Disability/Pages/DisabilityIndex.aspx. Accessed 6 April 2021.

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Critical overview and conclusion

The work is larger than the writer, larger than the critic and, in many ways, if we are lucky, larger than the historical moment. Abani in interview with Goyal

Critical responses to Chris Abani’s prose works are an index of how deeply and innovatively they speak to our unsettled times, and of how far they push for a revision of both the aesthetics and ethics of literature. Our study moves from and builds on the voices of reviewers and scholars from various disciplinary fields and is the first book-length overview of Abani’s prose production, also including intertextual references to his essays and poetry. So far criticism has mainly focused on Abani’s fiction rather than his poetry, despite the important awards that collections such as Kalakuta Republic have won. As regards bibliographical records on Abani’s complete literary production, Daria Tunca’s website The Chris Abani Bibliography1 deserves recognition and appreciation: it contains the most updated and complete bibliography on Abani, to which our work is also indebted. Critical readings of Abani’s works published as chapters in books are not many. We find one devoted to each of Abani’s two novellas, Becoming Abigail and Song for Night, in Tunca’s Stylistic Approaches to Nigerian Fiction; a contribution on GraceLand in Madhu Krishnan’s Contemporary African Literature in English, which considers it a book surpassing ‘any binary or static notion of tradition and modernity’,2 whilst Maximilian Feldner’s Narrating the New African Diaspora reads GraceLand alongside Sefi Atta’s Swallow as two expressions of typical Lagosian narrative. The

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geographical interest evidenced in Feldner’s chapter parallels Dustin Crowley’s investigations in Africa’s Narrative Geographies: Charting the Intersections of Geocriticism and Postcolonial Studies, where the critic focuses on the global urban cityscapes of GraceLand and The Virgin of Flames. A geopolitical lens also characterises Caren Irr’s approach to literature.3 In her Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U.S. Fiction in the Twenty-First Century, Irr stresses the transnational quality of Abani’s works and reads them, alongside Dinaw Mengestu’s and Teju Cole’s, as representatives of a new American literature of migration taking some distance from previous US narratives from Southern and Eastern Europe. Whilst the number of book chapters on Abani’s fiction may seem limited, the number of monographic essays dedicated to his prose is substantial. So far GraceLand has the longest bibliographical record, not only because it chronologically comes first but also because it appears more easily in line with the concerns of postcolonial critique. Among the various essays dedicated to the study of GraceLand, we can identify three major strands: those who deal with issues of genre; those addressing the representation of the city and, in general, Nigeria; and those interested in questions of identity as performance or as masculinity. The earlier studies often tackle the representation of the city. Lauren Mason’s ‘Leaving Lagos: intertextuality and images in Chris Abani’s GraceLand’, for example, is interested in how Abani provides a new visual narrative of the city, which mixes traditional descriptions with references to films and photographs. Such intertextuality, according to Mason, represents ‘fading notions of cultural solidarity, nationhood, and collective national identity’.4 The focus on the city calls for a reflection on issues of nationhood and national belonging, as Chris Dunton (2008), Veronica Hendrick (2010), and Madhu Krishnan (2011) show. Matthew Omelsky (2011), for example, reads Abani’s urban aesthetics as a political act, which highlights the violence of the state on the one hand, and the main character’s ambivalent reaction on the other. The political character of GraceLand, as a text ruminating on urban structural violence, global postmodernity, but also cultural agency, is also discussed by Ashley Dawson (2009) and Hilary Dannenberg (2012). Other scholars, such as Rita Nnodim

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(2008), have compared Abani’s work to literary texts about Lagos and looked at the city as a dystopic place for identitarian struggles. Crowley is also deeply concerned with the spatial aspect of Abani’s  prose, not only in GraceLand but also in The Virgin of Flames. As he points out, Abani’s depiction of Lagosian urban space is ‘inequitable and truculent’,5 yet his ‘characterization of global urban cityscapes’ is always ‘ambivalent’, as ‘places of simultaneous freedom and rootlessness, opportunity and disenfranchisement’.6 In general the city is where the dislocation and disintegration of the postcolonial subject takes place: GraceLand provides a negative vision of ‘the shift from the local or national to an unwelcoming global public sphere’ by examining ‘the disorienting movement where home and world become one’.7 Like Elvis Oke, the children of the postcolony live, in Alexander Greer Hartwiger’s reading, in an unhomely cityscape of ‘contested spaces that harbour struggles between the individual and the nation-state for identity and ­acceptance’.8 GraceLand thus reads as an opportunity for narrating the city from the point of view of one of its poorest inhabitants, whose impossible Bildung, according to Sarah K. Harrison (2012), elicits a critique of the postcolonial state: Elvis’s arrested development highlights the repeated marginalisation that the city offers as a space of castrating global, economic, and cultural circuits. Written in Portuguese, Divanize Carbonieri’s article ‘GraceLand e Cidade de deus: subvertendo a colonialidade nas favelas de Lagos e Rio de Janeiro’ is worth mentioning in this context, because of its comparison between GraceLand and Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund’s film City of God (2002), which signals a transnational and translingual interest in the struggling outskirts of megacities, such as Lagos  or Rio de Janeiro. In this reading GraceLand does not speak simply of Lagos and Nigeria, even though that is the novel’s setting, but of a residual condition that is typical of the globalised economy as lived by people of the global south. Whilst most critics have focused on space and its meanings, others like Virginia Dike (2008), Amanda Aycock (2009), and Madhu Krishnan (2012) have paid more attention to characterisation, that is, the issue of Elvis as Elvis and how it intersects with the themes of identity, performance, and masculinity. This is implicitly linked to the question of musical performance, understood as the

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role of music in the novel, as in the essays by Jacob Patterson-Stein (2009), and as the protagonist’s performance as Elvis Presley.9 More original are the studies by Erin Fehskens, who reads Elvis as a maroon of sorts (2015), or Dolores Phillips’s focus on bodily acts such as eating and excreting in GraceLand (2012). The body is also at the centre of Rebekah Cumpsty’s essay (2020), in which she attempts a more organic reading of Abani’s work by considering GraceLand, Becoming Abigail, and The Virgin of Flames and their construction of their protagonists’ ‘transnational bodies’. A significant part of the scholars’ attention has addressed questions of literary genre, trying to define what kind of novel GraceLand is. Whilst critics generally agree on its being a Bildungsroman, in which the young protagonist grows to be included in or excluded from the nation, some essays explore more original framing, such as Susan Z. Andrade’s reading of the novel as an example of realist modernism, or Stacey Balkan’s understanding of GraceLand as a ‘petropicaresque’ work (2015). According to the latter, GraceLand is a text illuminating the global tensions provoked by the oil market (from which the term petropicaresque): a narration to be considered as an ‘instrument of exposure and critique’ against the dominant narratives of global capital.10 Although approaching the matter from a more narratological point of view, Balkan’s conclusions do not differ much from Dawson’s, for example, or those who have given more space to the representation of the city: whether a consequence of a rotten postcolony or the result of worldwide market fluxes, GraceLand is an expression of the new millennium global violence and very local reactions to it. The global dimension of GraceLand is also underlined by Joseph Slaughter (2011), who reads the novel as a postcolonial oeuvre blinking at the market of world literature. For example Slaughter analyses the narrative structure of the book and how it is written with a Western reader in mind, because of the composition of chapters and their replication of a certain established postcolonial tradition, which welcomes pinches of exoticism here and there as in the form of the extracts from Elvis’s mother’s journal. Tanure Ojaide (2009) is openly critical in this regard, accusing GraceLand of lacking realism in its depiction of African places and protagonists; he rather reads Abani’s work as a matter of marketing ­convenience,

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instead of a book stemming from a true involvement with an ‘African’ sensibility. Whilst Slaughter and Ojaide read GraceLand’s global dimension somehow negatively, as a request of the market, Adélékè Adéèko engages (2008) the novel’s transnational reach as an indication of a shift in cultural power relations that were dominant in previous African works. According to Adéèko, GraceLand, as well as other works by writers of the so-called Nigerian ‘third generation’, is the expression of a wider move that poses the United States ‘as the preferred cosmopolis’ of Nigerian recent migration and cultural dialogue.11 Similarly Yogita Goyal reads GraceLand as a representative text of ‘a new kind of worlding of the African novel and a new kind of figure of the African writer’, not limited to the geography of origin and to the tradition in which she or he is situated.12 As Goyal points out, unlike the canon established by writers like Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who reframe the colonial encounter and create a narration of resistance, GraceLand and Abani’s following works mark a shift, moving out of the centrality of the nation and giving voice to a more globalised and fluid world.13 Becoming Abigail represents an inspired transitional stage between GraceLand and Song for Night. Though analyses of its lyrical prose are scanty, with the notable exception of Daria Tunca’s in-depth examination referred to in Chapter 3, the novella has been praised for its poetic treatment of violence and loneliness, and its more compressed and interior structure. Alexandra Schultheis Moore and Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg (2014) examine the interplay of lyric and narrative voices in the novella, in order to show how Abani deploys temporal and aesthetic constructions to respond to the limits of/implicit in normative human rights (legal instruments and official discourses). This delicate balance of lyric and narrative, instead of calling upon the reader’s responsibility towards the human rights violations he depicts and fostering literary humanitarianism (which has been extensively critiqued as paternalistic by scholars such as Slaughter and Anker), generates a more complicated ethos of reciprocity between reader and text, which asks him or her to see the interconnections with Abani’s young character and the invisible people caught in the illegal world of human trafficking. By making that connection, Pamela

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McCallum argues, readers ‘acknowledge an ethics of vulnerability’ through the intervention of the literary text.14 Using Judith Butler’s reflections on ‘precarious life’, she states that works like Becoming Abigail ‘provide sites that open up the possibility of seeing trafficked persons not merely as passive victims, but as singular individuals with concrete agency’.15 Abigail inhabits the ‘precarity’ that Butler ascribes to all human life: to the extent that readers and viewers are open to precarious lives, McCallum believes that ‘something like  Butler’s “ethics of vulnerability” might take shape’.16 Crucially, the recognition of Abigail does not imply that she is a passive victim: ‘the intersections between Africa and Britain, both in the twenty-first century and in the histories of traditional societies, colonialism, imperialism, and independence, traces of which all persist into the present, form spaces where Abigail answers her exploitation with a human voice’.17 Quite a number of critical interventions have debated the question of whether Abigail can exert agency from her enslaved, subaltern position. Pietro Deandrea, Ashley Dawson, and Susan Hall provide the best examples of this thematic reading. On the one hand, Deandrea believes in the capacities of literary texts to convey what is often unnarratable, to ‘mediate’ problematic situations through the power of the imagination. In his reading of Becoming Abigail he sets the effectiveness of Abani’s lyrical narrative against some of the limitations of mainstream trafficking discourse, and highlights how British legislation and institutions are seldom prepared ‘to offer real help for the recovery of self-dignity’ to the victims of contemporary ‘new slaveries’.18 For him Abani’s novella develops a valuable cultural perspective which runs against ‘the institutional denial of agency and full personhood’ to the victims of trafficking.19 Similarly, but with an accent on gender difference, Dawson states that mainstream trafficking representations ‘tend to perpetuate stereotypes of gendered helplessness’, and that ‘[n]ot only do such well-meaning representations rob women of their agency; they also set up an invidious standard of innocence to which few trafficked people can lay claim’.20 By playing out the complexities of agency and its destruction within the shadow economy, Abani’s novel ‘offers important lessons about how we may avoid diminishing displaced people’s security by reinscribing gender hierarchies’.21

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In addition, by tracing its protagonist’s resistance to the forms of gendered subordination inherent in the family and in current frameworks of legal citizenship, ‘Becoming Abigail represents the struggle for agency of those who are rendered human cargo’.22 In Susan Hall’s view, Abani’s representation of the sex trade aligns with human rights, sex work, or liberal feminist positions associated with policy debates on trafficking, which are tied to two related political concerns: border politics and sexuality, particularly the regulation of women’s sexuality. Although she emphasises the neo-colonial agenda of the prevalent trafficking discourse and policies, Hall thinks it necessary to expand the parameters of the discussion about Abigail’s agency by taking into account not only the material and sociopolitical factors that impinge on her ability to act and to make choices, but also ‘her unconscious desire that governs her conscious life’.23 Her analysis of the psychoanalytical references in Abani’s work seems to confirm that Abigail’s range of action is quite limited; the repetition of the traumatic cycle, or ‘the prevalence of ritual’ as Abani puts it (BA, 61), ‘suggests that her agency remains governed by the psychic fantasy in which she is positioned as the object of her father’s desire’.24 Nevertheless, for Hall, Abani’s revision of the typical trafficking representation is interesting because it claims that ‘it is not Abigail who is in need of rescuing but that the familial and social spheres are in need of radical reformation’.25 Critical readings of Song for Night discuss its genre and formal features, its connections to other child-soldier narratives, and its position in relation to current debates over human-rights-oriented approaches to literature and to the child-soldier figure in humanrights discourse. They include readings inspired by postcolonial, trauma, and gender studies, anthropological incursions into initiation rites, and the role of the child in literature, as well as psychological and ethical examinations. In the early 2000s a prodigious critical literature on the African child-soldier figure in the context of humanrights discourse emerged. Cultural critics and literary scholars have manifested uneasiness in relation to the child-soldier narratives’ globalised provenance and market,26 maintaining that, for audiences in the global north, they can simultaneously confirm perceptions of Africa as a perpetual warscape, where rapacious masculinities and

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child abuse are rampant. Song for Night is indeed part of a larger Nigerian and international literary reflection on the meanings of civil conflicts and child soldiers, as well as on ideas of the nation and human rights in the African postcolony and beyond, in which the child becomes visible as a stigmatised subject produced through the violence of war. In this context the dilemma of the child-soldier narrative mostly revolves around how to absolve, rescue, or normalise this figure. Abani’s novella, however, removes any fantasies of (cultural, national, or sexual) purity or innocence connected to the child soldier, as well as possibilities of rehabilitation of the character in the postwar society. As Yogita Goyal observes, ‘Abani suspends the questions of agency, choice, and blame that have long dominated the human rights conversation about child soldiers, imagining the boy’s consciousness outside of such logic, emphasizing his inner monologue in place of questions of blame’.27 Innocence and experience are indeed tempting analytical categories for critics, as in the analysis by Arijana Luburić-Cvijanović (2011), whose Blakean reading confirms visions of attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, as necessary to human existence. Cecilia Addei (2018) takes a sociological view of children in times of peace and in times of war, juxtaposing their prewar socialisation and the socialisation through war. In her reading, the novella represents war as a perverted form of initiation, which takes away one’s childhood without making one an adult. More interestingly, in ‘Troubling humanitarian consumption’, Allison Mackey suggests that stories such as Song for Night and Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation, though highlighting the apparently ‘oxymoronic nature of the figure of a “child” who is also a “soldier”’, undercut complacent readings, and make ethical demands on Western readers in order to try to complicate their easy or uncritical consumption.28 Similarly, contributions that debate the figure of the child as a potential moral actor address the novella’s central ethical question concerning agency and responsibility, thus distancing childhood itself from ignorance, unawareness, unreliability, as My Luck’s story proves. To read the traumatic consequences of war on Abani’s child soldier, as well as questions of representation and linguistic ­expression, critics have also resorted to inputs from trauma theory.

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Hamish Dalley (2013) interestingly starts his analysis by observing that the novella’s ‘formal qualities – temporal disjunction, repetition and communicative ambivalence – signify an intertextual engagement with trauma theory’,29 and proposes to read Song for Night as an allegory of the war’s significance in post-conflict Nigeria. In his analysis, the text expresses a desire for a border-crossing perspective that would reconcile former antagonisms, whilst pointing to the obstacles that preclude this. Tunca (2013) agrees that the novella can be termed a successful exploration of trauma, and endeavours to show how the concept of ‘translocation’ may be profitably used, in an abstract form, to describe ‘the passage from traumatic experience to language’, which in her view reflects Abani’s conception of writing as a way of articulating trauma.30 If, as Francesca Giommi stated in an insightful early critical essay, Abani depicts war as ‘an experience which […] can hardly be described or grasped in any human language’,31 Tunca contends that My Luck’s struggle with the linguistic medium is a metaphor for the character’s vulnerability and the difficulty of overcoming trauma through the recovery of language. In her stylistic reading, she further argues that Abani’s complex strategy is based on ‘an accumulation of misunderstandings and linguistic ambiguities, to the extent that the text lends itself to two distinct readings: one empathetic with the narrator, the other heavily ironic’.32 Uncovering these two levels of comprehension, she claims, prompts ‘the recognition that Abani’s book does not follow the convention of the child soldier narrative that is also found in human rights reports’, but rather (sometimes almost satirically) challenges it.33 The question of how Song for Night dialogues (or not) with human-rights discourse is a crucial one. The themes of freedom and the rights of human beings are a constant presence in Abani’s texts: they are inscribed in the apparently hopeless humanity he depicts, and are a window into the structural inequities and political failures that underlie human-rights abuses. In this regard one of the most perceptive readings comes from Schultheis Moore and Swanson Goldberg (2014), who argue that Abani’s representations of extreme violence – in the lives of a sex-trafficked girl or a child soldier – help us to see ‘the limits of the law: the gap between the human subject and the legal person whose legal claims are

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­recognizable’.34 At the same time his narratives challenge readers to extend a recognition of shared humanity across facile divides of right or wrong ­behaviour. Schultheis Moore and Swanson Goldberg show that, rather than calling upon the reader’s responsibility and fostering literary humanitarianism, Abani’s delicate balance of lyric and narrative generates a more complicated ethos of reciprocity between readers and the subjects whom the text calls into being as characters. This review of critical interventions on Song for Night cannot end without mentioning Sam Durrant’s ‘Creaturely mimesis: life after necropolitics in Chris Abani’s  Song for Night’. In a scintillating tour de force that places Abani in the company of Kafka, Benjamin, Adorno, and Mbembe, the critic argues that ‘the possibility of life after necropolitics depends on our ability to acknowledge an expanded idea of ancestry or filiation’ by drawing on the redemptive resources of both animist and historical materialism.35 Following Mbembe and Emmanuel Eze, Durrant understands African literature as a process of self-writing that invents its own cultural tradition, not through mimesis of a lost past but through a process of ‘existential repair’.36 He proposes that, after the cultural annihilation by colonial and postcolonial necropolitics, animist literature has the function of keeping alive ‘the very possibility of inheritance’: ‘as a practice of inheritance, association, and reanimation, [it] counters modernity and the necropolitical drive toward oblivion, disassociation, and deanimation’.37 Specific spiritual traditions having been erased, writers must thus improvise rites of connection, ‘borrowing, as Abani’s unabashedly transcultural, post-nativist writing does, from both African and extra-African spiritual resources’.38 This is the extraordinary gift of Song for Night, which turns ‘the stripping down of the human into the condition for new, trans-species forms of relatedness, for post-sovereign affirmations of similarity’.39 In Durrant’s reading of Song for Night and of what African literature is or should be, we are warned that ‘we betray African literature, that we betray ourselves, if we do not engage in magical thinking’ and processes of re-enchantment.40 Enchantment and transformation are also at the centre of Black’s process of self-fashioning in The Virgin of Flames, a work that, in

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contrast to GraceLand, Becoming Abigail, and Song for Night, has not raised productive critical discussions yet, as is also the case with The Secret History of Las Vegas. This may be due to their more recent date of publication, but also to the fact that they stem from different locales and experiences, connected to Abani’s relocation in the USA, which have somehow estranged the interest of critics dealing with African postcolonial and Black British literatures. The Virgin of Flames, for example, has received little critical attention despite its having being published in 2007, the same year as Song for Night. Reviewers expressed some hesitation when the novel came out, bashing its poor plotting and convolutedness. Among its defenders is Obi Nwakanma, whose rich essay ‘O, Polyphemus: on poetry and alienation’ explains how bifocality is a distinctive trait of Abani’s prose, central in this as well as previous works such as  GraceLand. As Chapter 5 shows, The Virgin of Flames presents a new complexity, connected to and expanding themes already present in Abani’s oeuvre. For example, its attention to the spatial dimension is investigated by the already cited Dustin Crowley (2015) and by Lena Mattheis in her ‘A brief inventory of translocal narratability: pamlipsestuous street art in Chris Abani’s The Virgin of Flames’. Besides this geo-centred approach, Krishnan (2013) tackles the novel from an Africanist perspective, reading the protagonist Black’s drag as an example of the Igbo tradition of egwugwu, a ritual in which ‘a male ancestor is figuratively brought back to earth’.41 Cheryl Stobie’s ‘Indecent theology, trans-theology, and the transgendered Madonna in Chris Abani’s The Virgin of Flames’ is by far the most articulate and fascinating essay dedicated to the novel and its religious themes. Yet there is more than that, as we try to show in this study by reading The Virgin of Flames as a highly religious work and as an example of Abani’s career-long pondering on the body, performance, and ideas of beauty and hope. As we show in Chapter 5, The Virgin of Flames interrogates ideas of belonging and of gender transgression, situating Abani’s novel within the Los Angeles literary tradition and the city’s Chicano culture. At the moment of writing this book, The Secret History of Las Vegas has not received proper critical attention, with one single essay by Miriam Pahl (2018) partially devoted to it. In it the author

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addresses Abani’s novel alongside Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ ’s Black Star Nairobi (2013), and reads the two books as examples of African crime fiction reframing the nation-state. Durrant names The Secret History of Las Vegas in his already mentioned 2018 essay, but does not analyse it, not even briefly as he does for The Virgin of Flames. This omission is thought-provoking, because of the importance of Durrant’s work in the criticism of Abani’s output as one of the rare research pieces that tackles Abani’s prose as a whole and does not focus on just one single novel or novella. Our investigation of the novel in Chapter 6 fills that gap and situates The Secret History of Las Vegas in line with Abani’s previous works and their focus on the body, marginality, and the grotesque as lenses to reflect on the human, further exploring the Mbembean notion of necropolitics in the transnational context of Nevada and South Africa. Abani is one of the authors whom critics have included in more general studies on the so-called ‘third generation’ of Nigerian writers, that group of authors who have contributed to the flourishing of diaspora Nigerian literature in the new millennium – this despite Abani’s declared unwillingness to identify with any of the three generations and his positioning himself ‘across’ the tradition of Nigerian Anglophone writing. Although these essays have a more comprehensive approach, their somewhat uneasy inclusion of Abani is of interest here, because they unveil the difficulty of ‘labelling’ him and how much he contributes to the becoming of Nigerian, postcolonial, Black Atlantic and even new diasporic American literature. Whilst critical works generally originate from within the field of African literary and postcolonial studies, some critics advance (and Abani himself asserts and our work in this book confirms), that the label ‘postcolonial’ seems to be restrictive, especially if certain works such as Becoming Abigail, The Virgin of Flames and The Secret History of Las Vegas are considered. His biracial heritage and nomadic existence rather call for a ‘mongrelisation’ of themes and works, which do not represent a strictly national allegory or development, but confront universal themes of violence, human dignity, hope, and fluid subjectivities. Yogita Goyal’s interview with Chris Abani, which appeared in a special issue of Research in African Literatures dedicated to how

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Paul Gilroy’s notion of the Black Atlantic dialogues with Africa, is particularly fascinating in this regard. Goyal’s is an innovative critique of Abani’s work, able to go beyond the analysis of content or style in a single work; it rather offers an overall view of Abani’s production that, on the one hand, she sees in perspective with the African or Nigerian tradition (Achebe, Soyinka, etc.), with which Abani certainly dialogues but strongly innovates; and on the other, with global, transnational literary trajectories and with a US-based African-American tradition (Baldwin, Ellison, Everett) that Abani knows and takes inspiration from. In the frame of the journal’s special issue Abani’s work is taken as an example of how Africa participates in the discourse about Atlantic modernity, disconnected from the anxiety of both the Middle Passage and national belonging, with new and fresh instances of hybridity and cultural exchange. In her book Runaway Genres, Goyal further probes into Abani’s links with the black diasporic literary tradition: she briefly looks at how Becoming Abigail ‘resonates with the neo-slave narrative in its complication of notions of agency, choice, and selfhood, rather than repeating the slave narrative’s journey from slavery to freedom’, and analyses Abani’s dialogue with Morrison and the gothic mode in Song for Night.42 Whilst initial analytical readings of Abani’s works have a more ‘nationalistic’ approach, trying to read GraceLand or Song for Night as commentaries on postcolonial Nigeria or, as in the case of Becoming Abigail, on the issue of sex trafficking and disrupted migration, more recent approaches such as Goyal’s and Feldner’s connect Abani explicitly with the trajectories (the routes) of the Black Atlantic and the concept of diaspora. In his 2019 work, for example, Feldner reads Abani alongside Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Helen Oyeyemi, for their ‘focus on experiences of migration and representations of Nigeria’ which, in his view, are the two key features of Nigerian diaspora literature and its central themes like ‘marginality, cultural difference, mobility and political engagement’.43 Whilst Feldner includes Abani in his selection of Nigerian diasporic writers, he explicitly selects which of his works can be taken into consideration in his study and which must be discarded. This is the case of The Virgin of Flames and The Secret History of Las Vegas, in which, according to the critic, the author

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‘completely diverges from the literary patterns of his peers so that [these works] cannot be subsumed under the heading of Nigerian diaspora literature’.44 In other words, they lack an explicit interest in representing Nigeria by way of national allegory or the form of the Bildungsroman, two key elements of Nigerian diaspora literature according to Feldner.45 This decision reveals the unnaturalness of literary labels, which are sometimes a priori decisions against the richness of an author’s oeuvre; at the same time, it talks of Abani’s flourishing mobility across genres, themes, and plots – a fact that may disturb critics but also foregrounds his original voice and the risks he is willing to take as a writer. Yet it is explicitly the impossibility of reading some of Abani’s works as national allegories or forms of Bildungsroman that expands their possible interpretations, confirming an uprooted yet ethically engaged transnationality, in his works as well in his life. As he writes in Santificum, I am not American, though I want to be. I am not Nigerian even though I have the melancholy. I am something deeper still. For now, Igbo, a placeholder. Also sometimes, Druid, on my mother’s side. And a red passport. […] There are slavers in my ancestry, slaves too. Some nights I wake with the bitter of rusty chains On my tongue, a whip in my hand. Avatars come and go and come again. There is only a map fading in the harsh sun. Some may call me a pessimist, but I am not. There is nothing gained from loss. I drink tea in the shade and believe in poetry. I am a zealot for optimism. (S, 60)

As Abani says in an interview, expanding his own perception of himself to the world, ‘we are more transnational than we believe. We are more peripatetic than we believe; we are more nomadic in that sense. We are more mongrelized than we would ever like to accept we are.’46

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This is also the perspective that informs our study of Abani’s work: ours aims to be a ‘spacious’ reading, which tackles the totality of Abani’s narrative and reads it alongside his poetical production. ‘Spacious’ means here an attempt at a large and hospitable vision, able to trace the writer’s engagement with prose, narrative, and poetry, and notions such as necropolitics, bodily modifications, love and violence, the grotesque, the queer, and the humane. Parts of Abani’s literary corpus are unfortunately still in shadow. His first novel Masters of the Board, for example, is hardly considered, as are some of his essays and most of his poetry. In this sense our study has endeavoured to give visibility to some of his lyrical production and essays, in the effort to acknowledge and valorise the connections between aesthetics and ethics, the personal and the political that run through and inform his writing. That is why we have extensively engaged with his poetry collections Daphne’s Lot and Kalakuta Republic, and with his autobiographical essay The Face, which we consider seminal to understanding the author’s personal and artistic legacies and routes. We have also included a critical discussion of Abani’s largely unknown essay ‘Omar Sharif comes to Nollywood: a storyboard in 10 frames’, because it appears central to unearthing the writer’s close relationship with cinema and the visual arts, and how visuality is key to his work, particularly around ideas of the beautiful and the grotesque, which the author elaborates on not just aesthetically but as ports of entry into ethical thinking. His pregnant description of the grotesque in ‘Omar Sharif’ appears in varying degrees and declinations in our critical readings of his fiction. Striking the note of the grotesque at the beginning of this book has actually been functional to identifying the many ways in which it is deployed as a strategy of representation in the novels, in the peculiar physicality of characters and in many of the narrated situations. The degree of alienation, self-effacement, victimisation, but also strategic simulation, bizarre reinvention, and resisting performativity, at work in the grotesque, are not offered to the reader as voyeuristic occasions for pleasure or gothic horror, nor should they be understood as gestures reassuring readers of their ‘normalcy’, but rather as an opportunity to crack monolithic definitions of beingness and open spaces for a wider, more hospitable notion of what it means to live in a

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c­ ontinuum of transformative possibilities between the moment of birth and the time of death. ‘Spacious’ also means unconfined, broader than a single nation or a single theoretical and interpretative category. Abani works at the intersection of different cultural paradigms, and even in his more ‘Nigerian’ texts, such as GraceLand or Song for Night, a transnational élan is always present: Nigeria exists in a constant negotiation with somewhere else, be it the American musical culture in GraceLand or London and its human trafficking discourse in Becoming Abigail. Yet Abani’s works are not easily ascribed to diaspora ideas either. As the controversy over Feldner’s selection of Abani’s novels for his study on Nigerian diaspora literature shows, the place of origin is not elevated in importance in relation to his African diasporic subjects’ destination. Novels like The Virgin of Flames and The Secret History of Las Vegas mark in this sense a daring artistic freedom, for they dialogue with unexpected American literary contexts and genre fiction while weaving surprising networks of intercontinental connections. Abani’s is a wide-ranging literary system, which is influenced by Achebe and Soyinka, Baldwin and Walter Mosley alike, pushing the limits of what is to be expected of a writer born in Afikpo to a Nigerian father and a British mother and now living in the USA, who often strategically goes back to those ancestral resources rooting him and who, at the same time, provides dazzling visions of planetary connectedness. ‘Spacious’ has of course also a more conventional spatial meaning, which corresponds to an interest in the geographical conditions of different global souths emerging in the cities that have been home in Abani’s life as well as the setting of his novels, from Lagos in GraceLand to London in Becoming Abigail, to Los Angeles and Las Vegas in The Virgin of Flames and The Secret History of Las Vegas respectively. These settings are extremely ‘located’, as in GraceLand, a novel informed by the typical features of Lagosian literature; or as in The Secret History of Las Vegas, in which Abani reconstructs the modern history of the city, from the creation of the Strip to the nuclear tests during the Cold War. Yet Abani’s storylines always contain fully open perspectives, which project the reflections of a planet into the locality of his ­protagonists

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and events. As Crowley writes, ‘Abani discursively links cities otherwise quite distant from one another, inscribing both within the common experience of urbanity worldwide’.47 The idea of mapping, of exploring invisible and unnarrated parts of the cities, is coupled with an equally urgent exploration of the body, present in all of Abani’s narrations as a double terrain of possibilities and refuge for his characters. The author muses on the potential of changing one’s own body and the meanings associated with those alterations, in the case of Elvis’s whiteface, Black’s drag, Abigail’s body branding, My Luck’s scarification, or the ‘fusion’ of the twins Fire and Water. The modification of the body by way of colour, as in GraceLand, gravitates towards more and more radical transformations, which take the form of scars as in Abigail and My Luck, and of total rethinking of one’s own persona, as in Black’s drag in The Virgin of Flames. Our analysis situates this novel, published in 2007, alongside Abani’s work of the same year, Song for Night. In spite of their distance in terms of form and content, the two books are equally informed by an interest in notions of the queer, which in The Virgin assume a visual meaning, whereas in Song for Night they emerge as a consequence of the trauma of war. In Song for Night we see Abani questioning fixed conventional ideas of the sexed or gendered subject, as he observes how war dismantles any fantasy of purity, whether linguistic, cultural, national, or sexual. This probing into the intimate desires and behaviours of his characters shows Abani’s continuing interest in transformation, and therefore also in the eccentric position occupied by the queer subject, for its potential to review the relations among power, desire and survival. Song for Night actually hints at the possibility of embracing the queer subject undergoing change, rather than rescuing the boy soldier’s innocence. At the same time it contemplates the possibility of new gender roles for women, as well as for men, during and after the upheaval of war, which we see as a further step towards Abani’s ‘queering’ of the child-soldier n ­ arrative. In our reading hence, ‘queer’ is a fil rouge that links Song for Night to both GraceLand and its queering representation of Elvis in contrast to traditional Nigerian masculinity, and The Virgin of Flames, whose final drag subverts any hierarchy, expectations, disconnecting

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forms from meanings. Here the sexual ambiguities and performative gender roles of the ­shape-shifting protagonist join hands with cultural and racial flexibility, and even extends to queering traditional representations of the Virgin Mary and of hybridized forms of religiosity. Bodily modification is connected to the theme of ‘becoming’, which we have explored as a principal concern in Abani’s work. The author always pays attention to the social contexts in which the becoming of his characters takes place, because human beings in extreme situations, or far outside of what we would think of as ‘normal’, offer the possibility of reflecting on the meanings of the human and how that meaning emerges in relation to the others. In Song for Night, for example, the becoming is extreme, as My Luck’s final transformation is to cross over to the world of the ancestors. We argue that this is My Luck’s final rest and possible redemption, yet it depends on his learning how to stay open to a world of connectedness and proximity – against and beyond family, ethnic, religious, cultural, economic strife. We read the inclusive stance towards all sorts of ‘creatures’ that the novella advocates through ancestral cultural links to place as a development of Abani’s persistent idea of ‘becoming’ as a transcultural process, and of redemptive ‘transformation’ as a collective rather than an individual necessity. In Song for Night as well as in The Virgin of Flames, the protagonists’ becoming is not solitary, but ethically connected to and depending on others. Black’s final transformation as the Virgin of Flames entails the passage from individual search to performing for other people, and in this conversion from the individual to the community stands one of Abani’s most significant reasoning on spirituality and the ethics of being together. Black’s drag performance in whiteface is read as a mysterious ‘Marian’ transformation by the Chicano crowd of East Los Angeles: the protagonist’s body, burning atop of his home, is welcomed as a miracle, which urges the reader to reflect on the limit between one’s self and the other, individual struggles and communitarian values and meanings, a feeling of personal damnation and the production of common hope. The ‘planetary’ quality of Song for Night, which Chapter 4 reads via Spivak and Mbembe, is further explored in The Secret

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History of Las Vegas, in which the issue of human rights, a constant in Abani’s prose, is matched by a reflection on environmental rights. In the novel the historical and geographical interconnections of South Africa and Nevada are two sides of the same coin, that is, state power and its biopolitical control. The investigation of the limits of agency and freedom, visibility and invisibility in sexist, racist, and violent contexts for an adolescent girl like Abigail, a growing boy like My Luck in Song for Night, or a poor peripheral teenager in GraceLand, takes new spin in the history of the conjoined twins Fire and Water in The Secret History of Las Vegas. In our analysis of Abani’s most recent novel we use disability studies and the discourse on the freak as critical tools that help highlight the author’s reflection on issue of representation and spectacularisation, on the beautiful and the grotesque, and how those same ideas are sanctioned by science and governments. Expanding GraceLand’s reflection on violence and Song for Night’s and Becoming Abigail’s discourse on human rights, The Secret History of Las Vegas’s protagonists are eco-terrorists reacting to Nevada state’s violence against the environment; the nuclear explosions that have marked the city history are in fact narrated as a double occasion to investigate their invisible yet  dreadful power, which transform the violation of the environment into an issue of human rights, patent when the black conjoined twins’ body is considered. The novel thus explores how state violence affects earth and people alike, and how ‘extraordinary bodies’ have and can claim justice, sometimes in a violent way. The relation between bodily difference and violence returns then in this novel as a form of state imposition but not of suffering; the relation between the two is innovatively inverted: if bodily modification was an attempt at agency in Abani’s previous protagonists, it becomes a consequence of state abuse in The Secret History of Las Vegas, to which Fire and Water react actively by becoming performers of a freak show. The grotesque, and its imbrications with discourses of performance and spectacle, confirm once again to be an important lens in Abani’s writing, to highlight what we consider ‘human’ and, with specific reference to this novel, the role the state has in creating and policing such notions.

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As we advance, the exploration of the meanings and limits of the human entails for Abani an investigation of the body but also of our spirituality and our ethical, sometimes even controversial, being in the world. His examination of the perimeter of humanity is conducted within the double yet insolubly linked narrations of love and violence, the two sides of the spectrum defining e­ xperience. Violence functions as the photographic negative of our human nature because, as Abani stated in his famous 2008 TED Talk: if ‘humanity is like a window’ you would ‘never see it unless there’s a bug on it’.48 Brutality cannot be embraced but is made visible, especially in the many abuses of human rights, be they the atrocity of a war, the mercilessness of rape, the deadly commerce of human organs, or the violation of the environment. In contrast to a disseminated and frank rendition of violence, love comes in the form of small acts of redemption, such as the elusive maternal tenderness of dead mothers like Abigail and Selah, or the salvific function of animals in Song for Night, The Virgin of Flames, and The Secret History of Las Vegas. The constant interpenetrating of the two constitutes the emotional soundtrack of his books. That, Abani himself declares, is the core of his aesthetics and ethics: a ‘belief in a deeper humanness that is beyond race, class, gender, and power, even as I know that it is not possible’.49 His oeuvre is the locus of a continuing research on what constitutes existence, its limits, its potentialities and permeability, which asks readers to practise open vigilance and to have faith in the possibility of redemption through inclusive acts stemming from many different kinds of love.

Notes  1 www.cerep.ulg.ac.be/abani/caintro.html.   2 M. Krishnan, Contemporary African Literature in English: Global Locations, Postcolonial Identifications (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 109.   3 The texts from which we quote are cited in the notes. All other works mentioned are listed in the Select bibliography.   4 L. Mason, ‘Leaving Lagos: intertextuality and images in Chris Abani’s GraceLand’, Research in African Literatures, 45:3 (2014), p. 206.

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  5 D. Crowley, Africa’s Narrative Geographies: Charting the Intersections of Geocriticism and Postcolonial Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 129.   6 Crowley, Africa’s Narrative Geographies, p. 3.   7 A. G. Hartwiger, ‘Strangers in/to the world: the unhomely in Chris Abani’s GraceLand’, Matatu, 45 (2014), p. 233.   8 Hartwiger, ‘Strangers in/to the world’.   9 See S. Sereda, ‘Riffing on resistance: music in Chris Abani’s GraceLand’, ARIEL, 39:4 (2008), 31–47. 10 S. Balkan, ‘Rogues in the postcolony: Chris Abani’s GraceLand and the petro-picaresque’, The Global South, 9:2 (2015), p. 23. 11 A. Adéèko, ‘Power shift: America in the new Nigerian imagination’, The Global South, 2:2 (2008), p. 24. 12 Y. Goyal, ‘We need new diasporas’, American Literary History, 29:4 (2017), p. 656. 13 Y. Goyal, ‘A deep humanness, a deep grace: interview with Chris Abani’, Research in African Literatures, 45:3 (2014), p. 228. 14 P. McCallum, ‘Between life and death: representing trafficked persons in Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail and Justin Chadwick’s Stolen’, Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, 48:2 (2015), p. 33. 15 McCallum, ‘Between life and death’, p. 29. 16 McCallum, ‘Between life and death’, p. 42. 17 McCallum, ‘Between life and death’, p. 43. 18 P. Deandrea, New Slaveries in Contemporary British Literature and Visual Arts: The Ghost and the Camp (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), p. 65. 19 Deandrea, New Slaveries. 20 A. Dawson, ‘Cargo culture: literature in an age of mass displacement’, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, 38:1–2 (2010), p. 188. 21 Dawson, ‘Cargo culture’, p. 180. 22 Dawson, ‘Cargo culture’, p. 181. 23 S. Hall, ‘The uncanny sacrifice: sex trafficking in Chris Abani’s Becoming  Abigail’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 56:1 (2015), p. 43. 24 Hall, ‘The uncanny sacrifice’, p. 59. 25 Hall, ‘The uncanny sacrifice’, p. 59. 26 See E. Coundouriotis, ‘The child soldier narrative and the problem of arrested historicization’, Journal of Human Rights, 9:2 (2010), 191–206; D. Mastey (2015); and M. Moynagh, ‘Human rights, childsoldier narratives, and the problem of form’, Research in African Literatures, 42:4 (2011), 39–59.

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27 Y. Goyal, Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery (New York: New York University Press, 2019), p. 95. 28 A. Mackey, ‘Troubling humanitarian consumption: reframing relationality in African child soldier narratives’, Research in African Literatures, 44:4 (2013), p. 111. 29 H. Dalley, ‘Trauma theory and Nigerian civil war literature: speaking “something that was never in words” in Chris Abani’s Song for Night’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 49:4 (2013), p. 445. 30 D. Tunca, ‘“We die only once and for such a long time”: approaching trauma through translocation in Chris Abani’s Song for Night’, in M. Munkelt, M Schmitz, M. Stein, and S. Stroh (eds), Postcolonial Translocations (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2013), p. 131. 31 F. Giommi, ‘Negotiating freedom on scarred bodies: Chris Abani’s novellas’, in A. Oboe and S. Bassi (eds), Experiences of Freedom in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 181. 32 D. Tunca, Stylistic Approaches to Nigerian Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 153. 33 Tunca, Stylistic Approaches, p. 153. 34 A. Schultheis Moore and E. Swanson Goldberg, ‘“Let us begin with a smaller gesture”: an ethos of human rights and the possibilities of form in Chris Abani’s Song for Night and Becoming Abigail’, ARIEL, 45:4 (2014), p. 59. 35 S. Durrant, ‘Creaturely mimesis: life after necropolitics in Chris Abani’s Song for Night’, Research in African Literatures, 49:3 (2018), 1 ­ 79–200. 36 E. Eze, ‘Language and time in postcolonial experience’, Research in African Literatures, 39:1 (2008), p. 26. 37 Durrant, ‘Creaturely mimesis’, p. 200. 38 Durrant, ‘Creaturely mimesis’, p. 200. 39 Durrant, ‘Creaturely mimesis’, p. 200. 40 Durrant, ‘Creaturely mimesis’, p. 201. 41 M. Krishnan, ‘Of masquerades and mimicry: performance, identity, and tradition in Chris Abani’s The Virgin of Flames’, ARIEL, 43:2 (2013), p. 57. 42 Goyal, Runaway Genres, p. 67. 43 M. Feldner, Narrating the New African Diaspora: 21st Century Nigerian Literature in Context (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, E-book), p. 13. 44 Feldner, Narrating the New African Diaspora, p. 7. 45 Feldner, Narrating the New African Diaspora, pp. 17–19. 46 A. Aycock, ‘An interview with Chris Abani’, Safundi: The Journal of South Africa and American Studies, 10:1 (2009), p. 5.



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47 Crowley, Africa’s Narrative Geographies, p. 129. 48 C. Abani, ‘On humanity’, TED Talk (February 2008). www.ted.com/ talks/chris_abani_on_humanity. Accessed 21 April 2021. 49 C. Abani, “Ethics and narrative: the human and other’,  Witness,  22 (2009), 167–73. http://witness.blackmountaininstitute.org/issues/dis missing-africa-volume-22–2009/ethics-and-narrative-the-human-andother/. Accessed 16 October 2020.

References Abani, Chris. ‘Ethics and narrative: the human and other’,  Witness,  22 (2009), 167–73. http://witness.blackmountaininstitute.org/issues/dismi ssing-africa-volume-22–2009/ethics-and-narrative-the-human-andother/. Accessed 16 October 2020. ———. ‘On humanity’, TED Talk (February 2008). www.ted.com/talks/ chris_abani_on_humanity. Accessed 21 April 2021. Adéèko, Adélékè. ‘Power shift: America in the new Nigerian imagination’, The Global South, 2:2 (2008), 10–30. Aycock, Amanda. ‘An interview with Chris Abani’, Safundi: The Journal of South Africa and American Studies, 10:1 (2009), 1–10. Balkan, Stacey. ‘Rogues in the postcolony: Chris Abani’s GraceLand and the petro-picaresque’, The Global South, 9:2 (2015), 18–37. Coundouriotis, Eleni. ‘The child soldier narrative and the problem of arrested historicization’, Journal of Human Rights, 9:2 (2010), 191–206. Crowley, Dustin. Africa’s Narrative Geographies: Charting the Intersections of Geocriticism and Postcolonial Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Dalley, Hamish. ‘Trauma theory and Nigerian civil war literature: speaking “something that was never in words” in Chris Abani’s Song for Night’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 49:4 (2013), 445–57. Dawson, Ashley. ‘Cargo culture: literature in an age of mass displacement’, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, 38:1–2 (2010), 178–93. Deandrea, Pietro. New Slaveries in Contemporary British Literature and Visual Arts: The Ghost and the Camp (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015). Durrant, Sam. ‘Creaturely mimesis: life after necropolitics in Chris Abani’s Song for Night’, Research in African Literatures, 49:3 (2018), 178–206. Eze, Chielozona. ‘Cosmopolitan solidarity: negotiating transculturality in contemporary Nigerian novels’, English in Africa, 32:1 (2005), 99–112.

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Eze, Emmanuel. ‘Language and time in postcolonial experience’, Research in African Literatures, 39:1 (2008), 24–47. Feldner, Maximiliam. Narrating the New African Diaspora: 21st Century Nigerian Literature in Context (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). E-book. Giommi, Francesca. ‘Negotiating freedom on scarred bodies: Chris Abani’s novellas’, in Annalisa Oboe and Shaul Bassi (eds), Experiences of Freedom in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 176–84. Goyal, Yogita. ‘A deep humanness, a deep grace: interview with Chris Abani’, Research in African Literatures, 45:3 (2014), 227–40. ———. Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery (New York: New York University Press, 2019). ———. ‘We need new diasporas’, American Literary History, 29:4 (2017), 640–63. Hall, Susan L. ‘The uncanny sacrifice: sex trafficking in Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 56:1 (2015), 42–60. Hartwiger, Alexander Greer. ‘Strangers in/to the world: the unhomely in Chris Abani’s GraceLand’, Matatu, 45 (2014), 233–50. Krishnan, Madhu. Contemporary African Literature in English: Global Locations, Postcolonial Identifications (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). ———. ‘Of masquerades and mimicry: performance, identity, and tradition in Chris Abani’s The Virgin of Flames’, ARIEL, 43:2 (2013), 45–68. Mackey, Alison. ‘Troubling humanitarian consumption: reframing relationality in African child soldier narratives’, Research in African Literatures, 44:4 (2013), 99–122. Mason, Lauren. ‘Leaving Lagos: intertextuality and images in Chris Abani’s GraceLand’, Research in African Literatures, 45:3 (2014), 206–26. Mastey, David. ‘Child soldier stories and their fictions’, Interventions (2015), 1–16. McCallum, Pamela. ‘Between life and death: representing trafficked persons in Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail and Justin Chadwick’s Stolen’, Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, 48:2 (2015), 29–44. Moynagh, Maureen. ‘Human rights, child-soldier narratives, and the problem of form’, Research in African Literatures, 42:4 (2011), 39–59. Schultheis Moore, Alexandra, and Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg. ‘“Let us begin with a smaller gesture”: an ethos of human rights and the possibilities of form in Chris Abani’s Song for Night and Becoming Abigail’, ARIEL, 45:4 (2014), 59–87. Sereda, Stefan. ‘Riffing on resistance: music in Chris Abani’s GraceLand’, ARIEL, 39:4 (2008), 31–47.

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Critical overview and conclusion 259

Tunca, Daria. ‘Chris Abani bibliography’, www.cerep.ulg.ac.be/abani/. Accessed 21 April 2021. ———. Stylistic Approaches to Nigerian Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). ———. ‘“We die only once, and for such a long time”: approaching trauma through translocation in Chris Abani’s Song for Night’, in Marga Munkelt, Markus Schmitz, Mark Stein, and Silke Stroh (eds), Postcolonial Translocations (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2013), pp. 127–43.

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Select bibliography

Chris Abani’s works Books Fiction Becoming Abigail (New York: Akashic Books, 2006). GraceLand (New York: Picador, 2004). Lagos Noir (New York: Akashic Books, 2018). Masters of the Board (Lagos: Delta, 1985). Song for Night: A Novella (New York: Akashic Books, 2007). The Secret History of Las Vegas (New York: Penguin, 2014). The Virgin of Flames (New York: Penguin, 2007). Poetry Daphne’s Lot (Los Angeles: Red Hen Press, 2003). Dog Woman (Los Angeles: Red Hen Press, 2004). Feed Me the Sun: Collected Long Poems (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2010). Hands Washing Water (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2006). Kalakuta Republic (London: Saqi Books, 2000). Sanctificum (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2010). There are no Names for Red (Los Angeles: Red Hen Press, 2010). Short fiction ‘Albino crow’, Callaloo, 30:3 (2007), 721–29. ‘From four movements’, Callaloo 34:3 (2011), 682–97. ‘Jazz petals’, in Kadija Sesay (ed.), Burning Words, Flaming Images: Poems and Short Stories by Writers of African Descent, vol. 1 (London: S.A.K.S. Publications, 1996), pp. 22–27.



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‘Killer ape’, in Chris Abani (ed.), Lagos Noir (New York: Akashic Books, 2018), pp. 201–17. ‘Strange fruit’, Callaloo, 26:3 (2003), 708. ‘Three letters, one song & a refrain’, Daedalus, 137:1 (2008), 87–91.

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Non-fiction, articles and essays ‘A young seminarian found comfort in “Giovanni’s” melancholy’,  NPR (28 December 2013). www.npr.org/2013/12/28/257375561/a-youngseminarian-found-comfort-in-giovannis-melancholy. Accessed 15 October 2020. ‘Abigail and my becoming’, Truthdig (19 April 2006). www.truthdig.com/ report/item/20060419_chris_abani_unintended_worship. Accessed 11 December 2016. ‘Another country’, in  Sean Manning (ed.), Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2010), pp. 192–9. ‘Chinua Achebe: my complicated literary father’, The Wall Street Journal (25 March 2013). www.wsj.com/articles/BL-SEB-74061. ‘Coming to America – a remix’, in Annalisa Oboe and Shaul Bassi (eds), Experiences of Freedom in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 117–21. ‘Ethics and narrative: the human and other’, Witness, 22 (2009), 167–73. http://witness.blackmountaininstitute.org/issues/dismissing-africa-vol ume-22–2009/ethics-and-narrative-the-human-and-other/. Accessed 16 October 2020. ‘Introduction’, in Chris Abani (ed.), Lagos Noir (New York: Akashic Books, 2018), pp. 13–22. ‘Lagos: a pilgrimage in notations’, in Ntone Edjabe and Edgar Pietersepp (eds), African Cities Reader I: Pan-African Practices (Cape Town: African Centre for Cities & Chimurenga, 2010), pp. 7–11. ‘Mapping obscurity: excavating meaning base materials and the African literary tradition’, International Journal of Ethiopian Studies, 1:1 (2003), 121–32. ‘Omar Sharif comes to Nollywood: a storyboard in 10 frames’, in Pieter Hugo, Chris Abani, Zina Saro-Wiwa, and Stacy Hardy, Nollywood (Munich: Prestel, 2009), pp. 7–16. ‘On humanity’, TED Talk (February 2008). www.ted.com/talks/chris_ abani_muses_on_humanity. Accessed 19 October 2020. ‘Painting a body of loss and love in the proximity of an aesthetic’,  The Millions (25 November 2013). https://themillions.com/2013/11/paint ing-a-body-of-loss-and-love-in-the-proximity-of-an-aesthetic.html. Accessed 15 October, 2020.

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‘Resisting the anomie: exile and the romantic self’, in Michael Hanne (ed.), Creativity in Exile (New York: Rodopi, 2004), pp. 21–30. ‘Sin city on-screen: sexy and shocking scenes set in Las Vegas’, Bookish (31 January 2014). www.bookish.com/articles/sin-city-on-screen-sexy-andshocking-scenes-set-in-las-vegas/. Accessed 30 July 2017. ‘Telling stories from Africa’, TED Global 2007. www.ted.com/talks/chris_ abani_on_the_stories_of_africa. Accessed 14 November 2016. The Face: Cartography of the Void (New York: Restless Books, 2013). ‘The graceful walk’, in Alexandra Schultheis Moore and Sophia A. McClennen (eds), The Routledge Companion to Human Rights and Literature (New York and London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 499–506. Interviews wih Abani Abani, Chris. ‘Conversation with W. Mosley’, PEN American Center, 2010. Video. www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9UR2XLNYn4. Accessed 31 March 2021. ———. ‘Song for Night highlights hope, despair’, Tell Me More, NPR (4 October 2007). www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14982 742?storyId=14982742&t=1602050636161. Accessed 11 April 2021. Aycock, Amanda. ‘An interview with Chris Abani’, Safundi: The Journal of South Africa and American Studies, 10:1 (2009), 1–10. Azua, Unoma. ‘A conversation with Chris Abani’,  Sentinel Nigeria, 5 (February-April 2011). http://sentinelnigeria.org/online/issue5/a-conver sation-with-chris-abani/. Accessed 30 July 2016. Davis, Bridgett M. ‘Q&A: Chris Abani on the search for better questions’,  Bold as Love Magazine (2 April 2014). www.boldaslove. us/2014/04/02/qa-chris-abani-on-the-rewards-of-better-questions/. Accessed 15 October 2020. Ede, Amatoritsero. ‘At the confluences’,  Sentinel Poetry,  59 (2007). www.sentinelpoetry.org.uk/1107/interview.htm. Accessed 15 October, 2020. Goyal, Yogita. ‘A deep humanness, a deep grace: interview with Chris Abani’, Research in African Literatures, 45:3 (2014), 227–40. Jones, Tayari. ‘An interview with Chris Abani’, The Believer Magazine, 12 (1 April 2004). https://believermag.com/an-interview-with-chris-abani/. Accessed 11 April 2021. Kaufman, Zuade. ‘In conversation with author Chris Abani’, Truthdig (19 April 2006). www.truthdig.com/report/page3/20060418_chris_abani_ truthdig_interview/. Accessed 30 July 2016. Paine, Patty. ‘A conversation with Chris Abani’,  Blackbird,  8:1 (Spring 2009). www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v8n1/features/abani_c/conversation_pa ge.shtml. Accessed 15 October 2020.



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Roensch, Rob, and Maery B. Gray. ‘“If I strip away everything, what is left?” A conversation with Chris Abani’, Worldlit.org (2018), 18–24. Singer, Ron. ‘Interview with poet and fiction writer Chris Abani’, Poets and Writers (1 June 2006). www.pw.org/content/interview_poet_and_ fiction_writer_chris_abani. Accessed 20 April 2021. Tóibín, Colm. ‘Chris Abani by Colm Tóibín’, BOMB Magazine, 96 (1 July 2006). https://bombmagazine.org/articles/chris-abani/. Accessed 11 April 2021. Criticism Addei, Cecilia. ‘“Rape or die”: war as initiation rite in Chris Abani’s Song for Night’, IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 23:7 (2018), 20–6. Andrade, Susan Z. ‘Representing slums and home: Chris Abani’s GraceLand’, in David James (ed.), The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 225–42. Aycock, Amanda. ‘Becoming black and Elvis: transnational and performative identity in the novels of Chris Abani’, Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, 10:1 (2009), 11–25. Balkan, Stacey. ‘Rogues in the Postcolony: Chris Abani’s GraceLand and the petro-picaresque’, The Global South, 9:2 (2015), 18–37. Barberán, Reinares, Laura, ‘Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon, and Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail and the law’, in Sex Trafficking in Post Colonial Literature (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), pp. 90–119. Coundouriotis, Eleni. ‘The child soldier narrative and the problem of arrested historicization’, Journal of Human Rights, 9:2 (2010), 191–206. Courtois, Cédric. ‘The travelling bodies of African prostitutes in the transnational space in Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail (2006) and Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street (2009)’, in Silvia Pellicer-Ortín and Julia Tofantšhuk (eds), Women on the Move: Body, Memory and Femininity in Present-Day Transnational Diasporic Writing (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), pp. 25–45. Crowley, Dustin. Africa’s Narrative Geographies: Charting the Intersections of Geocriticism and Postcolonial Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Cumptsy, Rebekah. ‘Tracing the transnational: scaling (neo)imperial realities through the body in Chris Abani’s fiction’, Interventions, 22:5 (2020), 624–40. D’Agostini, Giulia. ‘Children in conflict: agency and responsibility in Uzodnma Iweala’s and Chris Abani’s war novellas’, in Annalisa Oboe

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and Anna Scacchi (eds), A Garland of True Plain Words: Saggi in onore di Paola Bottalla (Padua: Unipress, 2012), pp. 399–416. ———. ‘War-scapes: The Nigerian Postcolony and the Boundaries of the Human’, PhD Thesis, Doctoral School of Linguistic, Philological and Literary Sciences, University of Padua, 2013. Dalley, Hamish. ‘Trauma theory and Nigerian civil war literature: speaking “something that was never in words” in Chris Abani’s Song for Night’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 49:4 (2013), 445–57. Dannenberg, Hilary. ‘Narrating the postcolonial metropolis in Anglophone African fiction: Chris Abani’s GraceLand and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 48:1 (2012), 39–50. Dawson, Ashley. ‘Surplus city: structural adjustment, self-fashioning, and urban insurrection in Chris Abani’s Graceland’, Interventions, 11:1 (2009), 16–34. Deandrea, Pietro. New Slaveries in Contemporary British Literature and Visual Arts: The Ghost and the Camp (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015). Dike, Virginia W. ‘Growing up in the hard side: male adolescent experience in contemporary Nigeria’, Sankofa, 7 (2008), 23–31. Dunton, Chris. ‘Entropy and energy: Lagos as city of words’, Research in African Literatures, 39:2 (2008), 68–78. Durrant, Sam. ‘Creaturely mimesis: life after necropolitics in Chris Abani’s Song for Night’, Research in African Literatures, 49:3 (2018), 178–206. Eze, Chielozona. ‘Cosmopolitan solidarity: negotiating transculturality in contemporary Nigerian novels’, English in Africa, 32:1 (2005), 99–112. Fehskens, Erin M. ‘Elvis has left the country: marronage in Chris Abani’s GraceLand’, College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies, 42:1 (2015), 90–111. Feldner, Maximiliam. Narrating the New African Diaspora: 21st Century Nigerian Literature in Context (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). E-book. Gehrmann, Susanne. ‘The child soldier’s soliloquy: voices of a new archetype in African writing’, Études littéraires africaines, 32 (2011), 31–43. Giommi, Francesca. ‘Negotiating freedom on scarred bodies: Chris Abani’s novellas’, in Annalisa Oboe and Shaul Bassi (eds), Experiences of Freedom in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 176–84. Goyal, Yogita. ‘We need new diasporas’, American Literary History, 29:4 (2017), 640–63. Green-Simms, Lindsey. ‘The emergent queer: homosexuality and Nigerian fiction in the 21st century’, Research in African Literatures, 47:2 (2016), 139–61.

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Greer Hartwiger, Alexander. ‘Strangers in/to the world: the unhomely in Chris Abani’s GraceLand’, Matatu, 45 (2014), 233–50. Gualtieri, Claudia. ‘Agire nel mondo: Chris Abani, scrittore tra tradizione e cosmopolitanismo’, Mondi Migranti, 1 (2012), 137–49. Hall, Susan L. ‘The uncanny sacrifice: sex trafficking in Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 56:1 (2015), 42–60. Harrison, Sarah K. ‘“Suspended city”: personal, urban, and national development in Chris Abani’s GraceLand’, Research in African Literatures, 43:2 (2012), 95–114. Harrow, Kenneth W. ‘The Amalek factor: child soldiers and the impossibility of representation’, Postcolonial Text, 8:2 (2013), 1–20. Hendrick, Veronica C. ‘Negotiating Nigeria: connecting Chris Abani’s GraceLand to Africa’s Past’, in Walter P. Collins, III (ed.), Emerging African Voices: A Study of Contemporary African Literature (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2010), pp. 75–99. Irr, Caren. ‘New Africas: Dinaw Mengestu, Teju Cole, and Chris Abani’, in Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U.S. Fiction in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Columbia University Press), pp. 49–58. Kearney, J. A. ‘The representation of child soldiers in contemporary African fiction’, Journal of Literary Studies, 26:1 (2010), 67–94. Krishnan, Madhu. ‘Beyond tradition and progress: re-imagining Nigeria in Chris Abani’s GraceLand’, Anglistica, 15:1 (2011), 97–106. ———. ‘Mami Wata and the occluded feminine in Anglophone Nigerian-Igbo literature’, Research in African Literatures, 43:1 (2012), 1–18. ———. ‘Of masquerades and mimicry: performance, identity, and tradition in Chris Abani’s The Virgin of Flames’, ARIEL, 43:2 (2013), 45–68. Luburić-Cvijanović, Arijana. ‘Innocence and Experience: Echoes of William Blake and Ágota Kristóf in Chris Abani’s Song for Night’, in Ljiljana Subotić (ed.), English Language and Anglophone Literatures Today: Proceedings (Novi Sad: Filozofski fakultet u Novom Sadu, 2011), pp. 480–9. Mackey, Alison. ‘Troubling humanitarian consumption: reframing relationality in African child soldier narratives’, Research in African Literatures, 44:4 (2013), 99–122. Mason, Lauren. ‘Leaving Lagos: intertextuality and images in Chris Abani’s GraceLand’, Research in African Literatures, 45:3 (2014), 206–26. Mastey, David. ‘The relative innocence of child soldiers’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 54:3 (June 2017), 352–66. Mattheis, Lena. ‘A brief inventory of translocal narratability: pamlipsestuous street art in Chris Abani’s The Virgin of Flames’, Narrative, 26:3 (2018), 302–19.

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McCallum, Pamela. ‘Between life and death: representing trafficked persons in Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail and Justin Chadwick’s Stolen’, Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, 48:2 (2015), 29–44. Moynagh, Maureen. ‘Human rights, child-soldier narratives, and the problem of form’, Research in African Literatures, 42:4 (2011), 39–59. ———. ‘The war machine as chronotope: temporality in child-soldier fiction’, Comparative Literature, 69:3 (2017), 315–37. Munro, Brenna. ‘Locating “queer” in contemporary writing of love and war in Nigeria’, Research in African Literatures, 47:2 (2016), 121–38. Nnodim, Rita. ‘City, identity and dystopia: writing Lagos in Contemporary Nigerian novels’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 44:4 (2008), 321–32. Nwakanma, Obi. ‘O, Polyphemus: On Poetry and Alienation’, ARIEL, 39:4 (2008), 136–49. Oboe, Annalisa. ‘“As there are hyena-men and panther-men …”: Chris Abani, Pieter Hugo, and the shocking life of images’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 51:1 (2015), 95–107. Oboe, Annalisa, and Shaul Bassi (eds). Experiences of Freedom in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2011). Oboe, Annalisa, and Francesca Giommi (eds). Black Arts in Britain: Literary Visual Performative (Rome: Aracne, 2011). Ojaide, Tanure. ‘Examining canonisation in modern African literature’, Asiatic, 3:1 (2009), 1–20. Okolo, Ifeyinwa Genevieve. ‘The child without sexuality education: a reading of Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail’, UNIUYO Journal of Humanities, 19:1 (2015), 143–62. Omelsky, Matthew. ‘Chris Abani and the politics of ambivalence’, Research in African Literatures, 42:4 (2011), 84–96. Pahl, Miriam. ‘Reframing the nation-state: the transgression and redrawing of borders in African crime fiction’, Research in African Literature, 49:1 (2018), 84–102. Patterson-Stein, Jacob. ‘De-nationalizing American music in the “third space” of GraceLand’, eSharp, 13 (2009), 48–68. Phillips, Dolores. ‘“What do I have to do with all this?” Eating, excreting, and belonging in Chris Abani’s GraceLand’, Postcolonial Studies, 15:1 (2012), 105–25. Schenstead-Harris, Leif. ‘Ghostwriting Abigail: the haunting authorship of Chris Abani and Dave Eggers’, Mosaic, 51:1 (2018), 143–59. Schultheis Moore, Alexandra. ‘Global specters: child soldiers in the post-national fiction of Uzodinma Iweala and Chris Abani’, in Walter P. Collins (ed.), Emerging African Voices: A Study of Contemporary African Literature (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2010), pp. 13–51.

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Schultheis Moore, Alexandra, and Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg. ‘“Let us begin with a smaller gesture”: an ethos of human rights and the possibilities of form in Chris Abani’s Song for Night and Becoming Abigail’, ARIEL, 45:4 (2014), 59–87. Sereda, Stefan. ‘Riffing on resistance: music in Chris Abani’s GraceLand’, ARIEL, 39:4 (2008), 31–47. Slaughter, Joseph R. ‘Form and informality: an unliterary look at world literature’, in Robyn Warhol (ed.), The Work of Genre: Selected Essays from the English Institute (Cambridge: English Institute, 2011). Stobie, Cheryl. ‘Indecent theology, trans-theology, and the transgendered Madonna in Chris Abani’s The Virgin of Flames’, Research in African Literatures, 42:2 (2011), 170–83. Timberg, Scott. ‘Living the perfect metaphor’, Los Angeles Times (18 February 2007). http://articles.latimes.com/2007/feb/18/entertainment/ ca-abani18. Accessed 15 October 2020. Tunca, Daria. Stylistic Approaches to Nigerian Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). ———. ‘“We die only once, and for such a long time”: approaching trauma through translocation in Chris Abani’s Song for Night’, in Marga Munkelt, Markus Schmitz, Mark Stein, and Silke Stroh (eds), Postcolonial Translocations (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2013), pp. 127–43.  Weaver, Jason. ‘Chris Abani – Becoming Abigail’, Spike Magazine (10 March 2008). https://spikemagazine.com/chris-abani-becoming-abigail/. Accessed 11 April 2021.

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Index

‘n.’ after a page reference indicates the number of a note on that page Abani, Chris arrest, imprisonment and torture of 2, 17–18 autobiographical writing by 20, 136 early life of 2–3, 11, 13, 24, 33, 148n.44 father of 8, 11–17, 23, 136 global Igbo 92, 155 mother of 5–13, 220 nomadic existence of 246, 250 TED talks 221–2, 254 works by see individual entries Achebe, Chinua 2, 9, 12, 31, 239, 247, 250 Adichie, Chimamanda 33, 117, 247 Afikpo 5–6, 15, 53, 56 African arts and cultures 14–15, 143, 145 diaspora, 115, 145, 156, 246–48, 250 literature 49, 156, 239, 244–6 mega-cities 32, 43, 61, 146 postcolony 92, 242, 244 writers 19, 27, 39, 135 writing 20, 26 African-American tradition 59, 247 see also Baldwin, James

Agamben, Giorgio 19, 94, 100, 204 bare life 19, 121 agency 81, 88, 126, 216, 240–42, 247, 254 and trafficking 92–93, 103 and violence 216–17 as imagined resistance 61–64 of Abigail (character) 89–90 Anikulapo-Kuti, Fela 20 animals and animalisation 27–9, 34–8, 92–3, 99, 123, 211, 223–4 see also dogs Apartheid 9, 34, 38n.55, 124, 192–3, 198–202, 220 ‘Ape killer’ (short story) 191 Appadurai, Arjun 57, 61, 64 Apter, Emily 144 Arbus, Diane 23, 218 Arendt, Hannah 101, 199–200 Atta, Sefi 33, 235–6 Aycock, Amanda 164, 174, 183n.38, 184n.42, 237 Baartman, Saartjie 207–8 Bakhtin, Mikhail 91–2, 128 Baldwin, James 2, 12, 247, 250

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Index 269

Bauman, Zygmunt 50, 149n.51 becoming 15, 46, 55, 57, 65, 79–82, 84, 87, 90, 104, 130, 137, 158–9, 164, 167–8, 170–2, 174, 177–9, 252–3 Becoming Abigail 67, 79–89, 92–104, 131, 133, 155–6, 194, 204–5, 220, 223–4, 239–41, 250, 253 Benjamin, Walter 244 Bhabha, Homi 59, 164 Biafra 5, 11, 25, 145 Bible 12, 227–8n.17 Bildung 58, 66, 117, 237 Bildungsroman 43–4, 69n.6, 81, 155, 238, 248 biopolitics 2, 121, 223 biopolitical 94, 100 Black Atlantic 55, 143, 157, 246–7 blackness 59–60, 66, 97, 99, 157, 165, 197 Bloch, Ernst 63, 178 body 8, 15, 20, 27, 52–3, 79–80, 86–7, 96, 98–9, 115, 117–19, 122, 128, 131–4, 136, 142, 144, 156, 167–70, 173, 176, 177–9, 190, 193–5, 197–8, 205–7, 209–10, 212–13, 217–18, 221, 238, 245–6, 251–4 burial rites 141–2 see also funeral rites Butler, Judith 20, 87, 222, 225, 240 cannibalism 52, 132, 143 capitalism 47, 53, 90, 159 Catholicism 175, 177 Catholic 25, 28, 129, 161–3, 176–7, 179, 180n.2, 183n.28 see also Christianity

Césaire, Aimé 28–9 Chamoiseau, Patrick 44 Chandler, Raymond 156–7 children 1, 5, 8, 82, 97, 120, 122–24, 167, 237 child beggars 53 child soldiers 115–21, 124–8, 135–43, 251 girl soldier 140 child soldier narrative 128, 135, 141, 146n.21, 151, 241–3, 256n.28 Christianity 25, 38n.55, 128–30, 169, 177, 186n.59 chronotope 128, 130, 151, 266 cinema and film 24–6, 37, 42, 50, 56, 60, 62, 138, 197, 237, 249 cities fictionalised 46 studies 236–7, 250 see also Lagos; Las Vegas; London; Los Angeles Cleopatra’s Needle 94–5 Coetzee, J. M. 120 Cole, Teju 236 colonialism 9, 53, 56, 88, 90, 98, 159, 240 and gender 147–8 and necropolitics 20, 244 and power 93, 120, 131 Conrad, Joseph 53, 95 Crowley, Dustin 45, 157, 236–7, 245, 251 Dante Alighieri 199–202 Daphne’s Lot 4–11, 168, 186n.58, 219–20, 222, 225, 231n.52, 249 Davis, Mike 47, 171, 182 n20 Dawson, Ashley 43, 47, 49, 89–90, 236–40 Deandrea, Pietro 89–90, 240

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DeCock, Eugene 198–203 Defoe, Daniel 120, 126 desire 10, 46, 55, 57, 59–60, 82, 84–7, 90, 93, 96–9, 105, 117, 120, 133, 135, 141–2, 160, 164–5, 167–8, 170–2, 178, 208, 212, 241, 243, 251 Desert Palm Institute 203–6, 210, 214, 223 detective stories 191–2, 214 Dickens, Charles 2, 182n.86 disability 28, 122, 193, 197, 205, 207–8, 221, 253 discrimination 28, 66, 80–1, 101, 169, 212 Doezema, Jo 102–3 Dog Woman 79, 107n.16, 168, 173, 175, 185n.54, 190, 220, 223–4 dog(s) 48, 64, 83, 85, 93, 105, 160, 162, 179, 223–4 see also animals Dostoevsky, F. M. 2 drag 158, 164, 166, 168–70, 184, 220, 245, 251–2 Du Bois, W. E. B. 97 Dunton, Chris 236 Durrant, Sam 123, 128, 144, 224, 244, 246 environmental issues 1, 8, 44, 48, 50, 69n.8, 121, 149 n55, 192–7, 213–14, 227n.8, 253 Essein, Major (aka ‘John Wayne’) 133–4, 137–40 ethical issues 2, 20, 23–6, 28, 30–1, 38n.55, 51, 81, 87, 89, 92, 94, 105, 119, 124, 144, 149n.51, 178, 203, 205, 211, 216–19, 235, 240–2, 249, 252, 254 ethnicity 3–4, 166

experiments, on animals and humans 201, 213 exploitation 52, 53, 99, 102, 197, 208, 211 Eze, Chielozona 62 Eze, Emmanuel 244, 246 The Face 4, 6, 10, 13–16, 249 family and domestic violence 7, 9, 85, 136, 140 nuclear vs. traditional 16 relationships 16–17, 79–83, 100 secrets 8–10 and slow violence 9, 10, 16 ties 3, 7 Fanon, Frantz 50, 59, 98 Fatima 175–6, 183, 186 father characters 42, 47, 55, 62, 67, 80–3, 93, 99–100, 127, 129, 133, 134, 138, 143, 167, 198, 201–2 Fehskens, Erin 48, 50, 64, 238 Feldner, Maximilian 156, 235–50 femininity 168–70, 177, 208–11, 221 feminist issues 85, 90, 105, 241 fire 10, 54, 86, 107n.16, 122–3, 155, 164, 172–4, 178, 184n.52 (as a character) 9, 192–9, 204–22, 225, 251, 253 freakiness and freak shows 156, 204–14, 218, 221, 253 funeral rites 224–5 see also burial rites gender 8, 13, 60, 62, 122, 218, 254 difference 89, 240 discrimination 28, 80–1, 101 fluidity 220–1 normativity 57, 136, 169, 170

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passing 168, 183, 245 performance 137–8, 169 roles 134, 136, 140, 251 subordination 89, 100, 241 transgender 180, 245 in West African cultures 12, 147 General Tom Thumb 207–8 Gilroy, Paul 55, 61, 247 Giommi, Francesca 243 global north 99, 241 global south 30, 47, 62–3, 158–9, 163, 182n.20, 237 globalisation 45, 50, 88, 144 ghosts and ghostlinesss 8, 15, 28, 56–62, 82–94, 103, 201 Goyal, Yogita 33, 42–4, 67, 239, 242, 246–7 ‘The graceful walk’ (essay) 5 GraceLand 25, 31, 42–50, 53–7, 60–4, 67, 81, 98, 136, 155–6, 190, 193–4, 204–5, 235–9, 250–3 awards for 42 grotesque 27–9, 44, 48, 58, 69, 117, 161, 169–70, 174–5, 185, 190, 194, 208, 221, 226, 246, 249, 253 Grosz, Elizabeth 209 Guadalupe, Virgin of 175–6, 185 Hall, Susan 90, 240–1 Hands Washing Water 168, 173, 175 Hartwiger, Alexander Greer 67, 237 Head, Bessie 67 Hendrick, Veronica 50, 236 Holiday, Billie 220 homelessness 17, 223 homeless 97, 160, 191, 203–4, 223–4 homosexuality 12, 137, 220

Hughes, Langston 156–7 Hugo, Pieter 24, 26, 29, 205 Hugo, Victor 204 human rights perspective 18, 101–4, 124, 192–3, 197, 204, 215, 219, 239–43, 253–4 humanity and humanness 20, 38n.55, 52, 63, 89, 126, 130, 141, 169, 175, 179, 193, 195, 201, 205, 207–14, 217–19, 222–5, 243–4, 253–4 hybridity 32, 129, 130, 176–7, 247 hybrid 4, 128–30, 141 Igbo culture and beliefs 11–17, 28, 33, 92–3, 105, 121–31, 137, 143–4, 155, 245 imagination 3, 34, 56–7, 61–4, 66, 85, 88, 89, 99, 142, 157, 191, 199, 240 illegality 55, 99–100 intertextuality 62, 180n.1, 182n.26, 227n.15, 235–6, 243 invisibility 37n.41, 62, 83, 86–7, 91, 98–101, 223, 253 Irr, Caren 236 Iweala, Uzodinma 117, 121, 242 Jackson, Michael 59 Jones, Gavin 45, 52 Kafka, Franz 224, 244 Kalakuta Republic 19–20, 23, 223, 235, 249 Kaufman, Bob 157 King, Stephen 194–5 Krishnan, Madhu 157, 235–7, 245 Kuti, Fela 20

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Lagos 42–61, 66–7, 154, 191, 235–7, 250 Lagos Noir 36n.26, 181n.9, 191 Las Vegas 191–6, 222 Lawrence of Arabia (film) 25 liminality 94, 131 liminal spaces 29–30, 33, 34, 82, 95, 128–30, 156 London 83–86, 99 Abani in 3, 5, 80, 154 Abigail’s ghostliness in 103 Cleopatra’s Needle 95 1950s racism in 99 global souths in 250 Thames, River 96 loss of language 3 see also sign language Lott, Eric 57–61 Los Angeles 30, 47, 124, 154, 156–65, 171, 173–6, 182, 191, 215, 224, 250 literature of 157, 183n.27, 245 River 131 love 1, 6–7, 10, 12, 14, 21, 79–80, 87, 91, 93, 103–6, 111, 119, 123, 129, 133–4, 139–42, 216, 219, 222, 242, 249, 254 Mailer, Norman 194–5 maps 13, 86–8, 93, 133, 251 Maroko 42–55, 62–3, 66–7 masculinity 11, 62, 74n.85, 136–8, 169, 208, 218, 220, 251 hegemonic 135, 137–8 Masters of the Board 17, 67, 249 Matlon, Jordanna 61–3 Mbembe, Achille 17, 19, 27, 48–9, 61, 91–2, 119, 123, 144–5, 196, 199, 244, 246, 252 McCallum, Pamela 90, 239–40 McCarthy, Cormac 219

mediascape 45–6, 56, 62, 64 Melville, Herman 123 Mengestu, Dinaw 115–16, 236 migrant 47, 101–3, 110n.51, 163, 167 migration 32, 66, 100, 105, 163, 236, 239, 247 illegal 159 mimicry 26, 60, 156 mimic 65, 98, 121 mine defusers 118–19, 126–7, 138 Mordake, Edward 206 Morrison, Toni 2, 82, 132, 247 Mosley, Walter 250 mother figures 47, 56, 59, 79–82, 84–5, 88, 97, 99, 117, 121, 123, 133, 136–7, 141, 161, 177, 185n.52, 195, 197–8, 201, 207, 220–2, 254 motherhood 7, 219, 221 Munro, Brena 122, 135, 139–40 music, role of 56, 58–9, 237–8 nationalism 4, 29, 186, 219 necropolitics 2, 19–20, 44–5, 92, 121, 123, 134, 140, 193, 196–200, 203–4, 215, 244, 246, 249 neo-colonial 56, 58–60, 64, 102–3, 241 Nevada nuclear tests 193–6, 214–15, 250 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 239 Nigeria 24–8, 31, 94, 97, 100–1, 125, 137 government of 2–5, 17–18 ‘third generation’ of writers from 239, 246 Nigerian civil war (1967–70) 4–6, 11, 25, 125, 129 Nigerian diaspora 247–50, 156 Nigerian literature 12, 33



Index 273

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Nixon, Rob 8–9, 48 Nnodim, Rita 46, 236–7 noir genre 191 Nollywood 25–6, 29 novella 81, 84, 100, 116, 235 nuclear explosions 195–9, 253 see also Nevada nuclear tests Oboe, Annalisa 109, 113, 152, 263, 266 Oedipal relations 135–6, 139 oil-prospecting countries 5, 48, 238 Okri, Ben 33, 91 Onitsha Market Literature 26 Palermo Protocols 101–2 Parikh, Crystal 217 Pastrana, Julia 207 patriarchy 80, 88, 135, 137 patriarchal 10, 16, 79, 136–7 Patterson, Orlando 199 performance 15, 46, 57, 59–63, 73n.66, 136–7, 156–7, 165, 169, 177, 191, 205, 236–8, 245, 252, 254 performativity 13, 15, 26, 30, 58, 65, 119, 194, 249 performative 2, 58, 63, 154, 178, 190, 252 petro-picaresque (type of novel) 44 photography and video, use of 24, 29, 219 Pinter, Harold 19, 154 planetarity 144–5 poetry 4–7, 10–11, 18–22, 79, 84, 97, 119, 158, 190, 200, 219, 222–3, 249 postcolonial as critical label 33, 155, 246 context 9, 16–20, 48–9, 92, 121 critique 236, 238

gothic mode 91–92 literatures 155, 245–46 necropolitics 244 readings 124, 236 remix 32 state 17, 23, 237 violence 20, 23, 237 postcolony 16–17, 30, 46, 48–9, 62, 92, 101, 237–38, 242 as camp 19, 22–3 poverty 45, 50, 52, 55 precariousness 51, 240 Presley, Elvis 44, 56, 98, 194, 205, 238 impersonation of 57–65 Prestel catalogue essay 24 queer 29, 130, 251–52 and child soldiers 135, 139–40 and gender conventions 134 and religion 176–77 and war 135 vs. hegemonic masculinity 135, 138 queerness 138–41, 148n.46, 165, 168, 176–7, 204, 249 race 4, 8, 12, 28, 57, 59–60, 96–8, 159, 165–6, 171, 199–200, 209, 254 racism 98, 192, 198–202, 208 rape 53, 134, 138–9 redemption (as a concept) 19, 63, 66–7, 131–2, 144, 172, 174, 178, 190, 194, 219, 222–4, 252, 254 (as a character) 42–3, 45, 47, 51–2, 55, 65–6 Rego, Paula 223–4 resilience 2, 5, 19, 23, 130–8, 161 Robinson Crusoe 120–1, 126 Rushdie, Salman 32

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Sanctificum 74n.85, 97, 158, 172, 175, 177, 181n.18, 183n.35, 185n.54 Saro-Wiwa, Ken 115, 121, 135 scarification 122, 133, 167, 205, 251 Schultheis Moore, Alexandra 119, 239, 243–4 science 193, 197–8, 200–7, 210–13, 253 The Secret History of Las Vegas 45–6, 57–8, 67, 156–7, 190–4, 197–209, 214–25, 245–6, 250, 253 seeing 25–6, 89, 111, 145, 192 sentimentality 23, 80 sentimental education 216 sex trade and sex workers 80–3, 90, 110, 115, 217, 241 Shakespeare, William 2–3, 142 Sharif, Omar 24–5, 30, 249 sideshows, history of 207–13, 218 sign language 118–19, 126 skin colour black 97, 164, 197, 201 non-white 97 white (shades of) 98–9 inscriptions, tattoos, scarification 86–7, 133 as map 93 obsession with 99–100 Slaughter, Joseph 43, 67, 238–9 slavery 50–3, 98, 102, 199, 247 new slaveries 89, 240 slow violence 8–10, 16 slum 9, 32, 42, 46–7, 49–51, 98 Soja, Edward 158 Song for Night 115–32, 136–7, 140, 144–5, 155, 194, 224, 242–4, 247, 251–2 reception of 124 South Africa 192–3, 198–203, 220, 222, 246, 253

Soyinka, Wole 2, 19, 31, 33, 247, 250 space 13–15, 29–31, 46–50, 59–66, 90–6, 127–30, 143, 155–8, 164–74, 237–40 Spivak, Gayatri 144, 252 Stevens, Wallace 156 subjectivity 2, 4, 30, 79, 177, 226 temporality 126–8, 266 terrorism 102, 214–16 third space 58–9 Thompson, Hunter S. 194–5 torture 2, 17, 21, 198–201 trafficking, human 53, 80–1, 83, 87–91, 101–5, 115, 239–41, 250 see also sex trade transcultural processes 31, 62, 144, 244, 252 transformation 23, 32, 44, 53, 58, 142–4, 175–8, 251–2 trauma theory 242–3 Tunca, Daria 83–4, 235, 239, 243 Tutuola, Amos 27, 33, 91–2 twins conjoined 9, 192–3, 195, 197, 204–5, 207, 209, 211, 214, 218, 220–1, 226n.6, 253 parasitic 206, 209, 221–2 Siamese 211 ugliness 9, 19, 28, 161, 172, 204–5 United Nations General Assembly 101 Rights Office of the High Commissioner 212 USA 3, 31, 42, 55–6, 60–1, 65, 66–7, 74–5, 156, 165–6, 169, 193, 197, 207, 245, 250

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violence active and passive 53–4 as a central experience 45 domestic 9, 136–7, 140 forms of 8–11 ‘peripheral’ 55 right to 215, 217 of the slum 46–55 of the state 193 see also slow violence Virgin Mary 154, 161, 169, 175, 252 The Virgin of Flames 45–6, 67, 131, 136, 154–9, 191–4, 204–5, 209, 218, 220, 224–5, 251–2 reception of 155 visibility 8, 20, 48, 93, 101 Vlakplaas 197–203, 222, 225 vulnerability 21–2, 28, 34, 87, 100, 102, 145, 178–9, 218, 222–5, 240, 243 warfare 135, 138–42, 251 Wayne, John (actor) 25, 197 see also Essein, Major

West African culture and heritage 14–16, 91, 124–5, 131, 136, 143 whiteface 98, 154, 164–6, 168–9, 176, 183, 251–2 Whitman, Walt 223 Wolfe, Tom 194–5 womanhood 71, 174, 222 women agency of 89, 240 citizenship 101 empowerment of 85, 109 rape of 138–9 role and status of 140–1, 251 sexuality 81, 102–3, 241 trafficked 1, 80, 92 as victims 80, 140 Woolf, Virginia 2, 82 Wright, Frank Lloyd 49 Yoruba mythology and tradition 15, 91