Becoming Abigail

by Chris Abani

Overview

A breathtaking novella from the award-winning author of Song for Night and GraceLand.

—A New York Times Editors’ Choice

“Moody, lyrical prose reminiscent of Toni Morrison’s Beloved . . . Though the fictional Abigail exists only on the pages of Abani’s novella, her character will seize the imagination of everyone who reads her story.” —Essence Magazine

“Becoming Abigail, a spare yet voluptuous tale about a young Nigerian girl’s escape from prostitution is so hypnotic that it begs to be read in one sitting . . . Abigail is sensitive, courageous, and teetering on the brink of madness. Effortlessly gliding between past and present, Chris Abani spins a timeless story of misfortune and triumph.” —Entertainment Weekly

Tough, spirited, and fiercely independent Abigail is brought as a teenager to London from Nigeria by relatives who attempt to force her into prostitution. She flees, struggling to find herself in the shadow of a strong but dead mother. In spare yet haunting and lyrical prose reminiscent of Marguerite Duras, Abani brings to life a young woman who lives with a strength and inner light that will enlighten and uplift the reader.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781936070206
Publisher:	Akashic Books, Ltd.
Publication date:	03/01/2006
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	128
File size:	257 KB

About the Author

CHRIS ABANI, a Nigerian-born, award-winning poet and novelist, currently teaches at Northwestern University in Chicago. He is the recipient of a PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, a Prince Claus Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a PEN Beyond Margins Award, a PEN/Hemingway Award, and a Guggenheim Award. He is the author of the novellas Song for Night and Becoming Abigail, the editor of Lagos Noir and the series coeditor, with Kwame Dawes, of the African Poetry Book Series—the latest of which is Tisa: New-Generation African Poets, A Chapbook Box Set.

Read an Excerpt

Becoming Abigail

a novella

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By Chris Abani

Akashic Books

Copyright © 2006 Chris Abani
All right reserved.
ISBN: 1-888451-94-7

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Chapter One

And this.

Even this. This memory like all the others was a lie. Like the sound of someone ascending wooden stairs, which she couldn't know because she had never heard it. Still it was as real as this one. A coffin sinking reluctantly into the open mouth of a grave, earth in clods collected around it in a pile like froth from the mouth of a mad dog. And women. Gathered in a cluster of black, like angry crows. Weeping. The sound was something she had heard only in her dreams and in these moments of memory-a keening, loud and sharp, but not brittle like the screeching of glass or the imagined sound of women crying. This was something entirely different. A deep lowing, a presence, dark and palpable, like a shadow emanating from the women, becoming a thing that circled the grave and the mourners in a predatory manner before rising up to the brightness of the sky and the sun, to be replaced by another momentarily.

Always in this memory she stood next to her father, a tall whip of blackness like an undecided but upright cobra. And he held her hand in his, another lie. He was silent, but tears ran down his face. It wasn't the tears that bothered her. It was the way his body shuddered every few moments. Not a sob, itwas more like his body was struggling to remember how to breathe, fighting the knowledge that most of him was riding in that coffin sinking into the soft dark loam.

But how could she be sure she remembered this correctly? He was her father and the coffin held all that was left of her mother, Abigail. This much she was sure of. However, judging by the way everyone spoke of Abigail, there was nothing of her in that dark iroko casket. But how do you remember an event you were not there for? Abigail had died in childbirth and she, Abigail, this Abigail, the daughter not the dead one, the mother, was a baby sleeping in the crook of some aunt's arm completely unaware of the world.

She looked up. Her father stood in the doorway to the kitchen and the expression she saw on his face wasn't a lie.

"Dad," she said.

He stood in the doorframe. Light, from the outside security lights and wet from the rain, blew in. He swallowed and collected himself. She was doing the dishes buried up to her elbows in suds.

"Uh, carry on," he said. Turning abruptly, he left.

The first time she saw that expression she'd been eight. He had been drinking, which he did sometimes when he was sad. Although that word, sad, seemed inadequate. And this sadness was the memory of Abigail overwhelming him. When he felt it rise, he would drink and play jazz.

It was late and she should have been in bed. Asleep. But the loud music woke her and drew her out into the living room. It was bright, the light sterile almost, the same florescent lighting used in hospitals. The furnishing was sparse. One armchair with wide wooden arms and leather seats and backrest, the leather fading and worn bald in some spots. A couple of beanbags scattered around a fraying rug, and a room divider sloping on one side; broken. Beyond the divider was the dining room. But here, in the living room, under the window that looked out onto a hill and the savanna sloping down it, stood the record player and the stack of records. Her father was in the middle of the room swaying along to "The Girl from Ipanema," clutching a photograph of Abigail to his chest. She walked in and took the photo- graph from his hands.

"Abigail," he said. Over and over.

"It's all right, Dad, it's just the beer."

"I'm not drunk."

"Then it's the jazz. You know it's not good for you."

But she knew this thing wasn't the jazz, at least not the way he had told her about it on other countless drunken nights. That jazz, she imagined, was something you find down a dark alley taken as a shortcut, and brushing rain from your hair in the dimness of the club found there, you hear the singer crying just for you, while behind her a horn collects all the things she forgot to say, the brushes sweeping it all up against the skin of the drum. This thing with her father, however, was something else, Abigail suspected, something dead and rotting.

"Shhh, go to bed, Dad," she said.

He turned and looked at her and she saw it and recognized what it was. She looked so much like her mother that when he saw her suddenly, she knew he wanted her to be Abigail. 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.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Becoming Abigail by Chris Abani Copyright © 2006 by Chris Abani. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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What People are Saying About This

Aimee Bender

"Abani's voice brings perspective to every moment, turning pain into a beautiful painterly meditation on loss and aloneness."
—author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

Peter Orner

"Abani's empathy for Abigail's torn life is matched only by his honesty in portraying it. Nothing at all is held back. A harrowing piece of work."
—author of Esther Stories

Cristina Garcia

"Compelling and gorgeously written, this is a coming-of-age novel like no other. Chris Abani explores the depths of loss and exploitation with what can only be described as a knowing tenderness. An extraordinary, necessary book."
—author of Dreaming in Cuban

Editorial Reviews

While the books share some elements - a long-dead mother, a father who bathes his hurt in alcohol and jazz - Becoming Abigail is more compressed and interior, a poetic treatment of terror and loneliness. It may lack the earlier novel's scope (and, perhaps, hope), but its isolating strategy, its sharp focus on the devastation of one young woman, has a deeper kind of resonance.
— The New York Times

Sam Lipsyte

Abani follows up GraceLand, his PEN/Faulkner Award-winning boy's coming-of-age novel, with a searing girl's coming-of-age novella in which a troubled Nigerian teen is threatened with becoming human trade. Abigail's mother died giving birth to her, leaving her, as she grows, with a crippling guilt that drives her to bizarre childhood mourning rituals and, later, with the responsibility of caring for her chronically depressed father. Repeated sexual violations by male relatives and the self-imposed expectation that she live up to her idealized image of her mother create unbearable pain and contradiction. When, at the halfway point of the book, Abigail's father sends her, at age 15 , to live with her cousin-by-marriage, Peter, in London, it's as much to free her from him as to give her more opportunities. But once she arrives, her "cousin" proves malevolent, and her dehumanization begins. Recalling Lucas Moodyson's crushing Lilya4Ever, this portrait of a brutalized girl given no control over her life or body, features Abani's lyrical prose (Abigail's father's armchair "smelled of the dreams of everyone who had sat in it") and deft moves between short chapters titled "Then" and "Now"-with the latter offering little promise. (Apr.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

In this novella, Abani (Graceland) offers a lyrical yet devastating account of a young woman's relocation to London from Nigeria under terrifically harsh circumstances. Shifting from the present to the not-so-distant past, the narrative explains how Abigail's life has been marked by tragedy ever since her mother died during childbirth. The absence of a mother eventually leads Abigail to a pattern of disturbing behavior, not the least of which includes self-mutilation with a knife. Her exasperated father decides to send her to London to live with her cousin Mary and Mary's husband, Peter. Unknown to Abigail's father, Peter had once molested Abigail, an act that proves minor compared with the other horrors she will encounter in this strange new country with so many white people. Abani's abundant talent is clearly evident throughout, as is his willingness to be brutally honest without being grotesque. Perhaps because of the book's brevity, Abani also refrains from polemics and focuses solely on the artistic presentation of a young, tragic life, leaving interpretation to the reader. Recommended for most general fiction collections.-Kevin Greczek, Ewing, NJ Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

"Spare, haunting vignettes of exquisite delicacy . . . Never sensationalized, the continual revelations are more shocking for being quietly told, compressed into taut moments that reveal secrets of cruelty—and of love—up to the last page. Abani tells a strong young woman’s story with graphic empathy."

Booklist

"A darkly poetic investigation into the past’s deceptive hold over the present . . . Abani writes in dense, gorgeous prose. Abigail is not a creature of pity but inspiration."

The Nation

"Abani finds his place in a long line of literary refugees, from the Mexican revolutionary Ricardo Flores Magon to Bertolt Brecht and Theodor Adorno . . . Becoming Abigail is, not surprisingly, about memory, loss, and all the cruel disjunctions of exile. Not for a moment, though, does Abani allow himself that most tempting stupefacient of exile, nostalgia. Abani’s prose is diaphanous and poetic. His lyricism is elliptical, almost evasive . . . Becoming Abigail is a hard, unsparing book, cruel in its beauty, shocking in its compassion."

Los Angeles Times Book Review