"On Black Sisters’ Street" by Chika Unigwe

·         Thanks to Ayọdèlé Morocco-Clarke who thought it good to bless me with this book.

*****

Agreed, I haven't read much on Nigerian-women-immigrant-prostitution. A fact, the multitudes of hearsays and valid stories that I have heard, ones which all culminated into the same story of women trafficking, could easily make banality of any fiction that hinges on that theme. In Nigeria, especially in Ubiaja, Edo state where I spent the early years of my teens, we call the women of this ignoble foray the 'Italos'. Whether what they do was in Belgium or Italy, the least mattered to us and the tag we gave them stayed untainted. What we saw of them were splotches of skin-burns that gave them the peculiarity their sudden wealth brought. Riches that separated them at families' funerals as they threw money at everything, even at anybody who complimented 'welcome Sista. Sista, you just too fine'.

With my foreknowledge of this subject that the media seems to give this book so many accolades for, I didn't go into On Black Sisters' Street starry-eyed like a reader who obsequiously feeds on the imagination of a writer with unrealistic hope that he would be satisfied with mere literary figments. I already had my preconception of the conflict and resolution. When Sisi's death is known from the few pages I had hurriedly zapped, my mind fleshed out the characters and the mysteries that may surround them and I wondered what more should I give my curiosity to. At the estuary of tossing the book to the back of my shelf and wanting to know why the denouement had hurriedly been given away when Sisi's demise welcomed me into the book, my indifference was somewhat redeemed.

It was few pages later that I got to know the book isn't only about the death of a particular character. The demise of Sisi is simply an image about what may have gone wrong with the lives of the characters before their arrival at Antwerp. Though the reader knows the death of Sisi beforehand, the circumstances that lead to her death are also the conflicts of the theme of the book. In the book, Sisi's death is inevitable if the reader must know the cruxes of the conflict that climaxes in the lives of the other characters. Sisi is the beginning of the novel, the crack in the window that allows us a satisfied look at the lives of Joyce, Ama, Efe, Dele, and the resolution of the conflicts.

 

The Themes:                               

Political & Family Imbalance - Either affects the other. When something goes awry with one, the other shoulders the responsibilities. The political shame that exists in the African terrain is no doubt what writers have always given a larger part of their literary devotion to. If Nigerian economy were good, perhaps, Sisi's dream of nailing a job would have been a reality and the prophecy of greatness given at her birth a certainty. Chisom (later known as Sisi) becomes the prime investment of her family after her degree. She will dream of riding in her company's executive cars, her parents will debate over the model she will buy and how they will be lifted from the muck of poverty. After many applications to known and unknown companies without a response, Dele shows her what treasures she could get on Zwartezustraat posing her flesh in booth for whoever pays for its pleasure.

Alek (Joyce) faces trauma at its worse. Hers is the story of a country's defeated political structure. Alek loses her parents and sexual privacy to the militia who evade their home on the kill the Dinkas' rampage in Sudan. When she arrives at Black Sisters' Street, the price to pay pales in comparison to the pains she bears at the penetration of each member of the militia on her parents' bed in Sudan.

When Ama's parental cocoon breaks at the revelation that the man who had been violating her is not her father, the short-lived freedom that gives her at the place of Mama Eko, her mom's sister, paves the way for Dele, who introduces her to what the black sisters in Antwerp do on Zwartezusterstraat.

Verisimilitudes of Life - When Sisi's father's pay rises up a notch at work, the future gleams to him at the prospect of more pay-increases at work. The skewed shape his life takes after so many years of hoping when his next salary would swell directs his dream to the glory his daughter's (degree) would bring. When Ama hitches to explore more places and escape from the mundane task of shuttling between home and Mama's Eko's restaurant, she is little aware of what may come afterwards. Excitedly as she brims with dreams at the proposal of Dele to travel abroad, she only becomes prepared for the fate that lies ahead of her when Dele samples her for her new job with the black sisters.

 

My Re-Commendation:

Fiction is a fragment of the assiduousness of imagination with a subsumed division of researches. The in-depth knowledge a writer possesses about a story spices the art of storytelling and rid fiction of unnecessary complexities that only tend to cover up for ineptness. Ironically, I have also read writers whose extensive examinations become the very undoing of their craft. At most times, one can hardly come across a well researched book whose writer doesn't convulse with what he wants the reader to know rather than what they should personally observe. For this, Chika Unigwe should be commended for how she unfurls her story without blurring the narrating view with unnecessary journalese and academic inclination. The contents and style of this book is not short of my recommendation. Chika, in On Black Sisters' Street, really does write well with the beauty of a first-hand witness. 

"Say You’re One of Them" by Uwem Akpan

Thanks to Ayọdèlé Morocco-Clarke who gave this book as a gift.

***

As I flip from page to page riding on the tidal currents of Uwem's offerings, I could feel that Uwem has more experiences to be shared than what he has written on in those five stories that make up Say You're One of Them. My premise is rooted in the manner Uwem drags on in some of the stories, which individually spans almost a hundred pages, sating the reader with every of the superfluous details he wants the reader to know. He tends to be so compassionately biased with the way he tells some issues with brevity aided with creativity and others in a narrative that nearly makes them novellas within an anthology of five short stories. What however makes Uwem lure the reader into every of his story is in how he gets the reader with the storytelling spells that can only be identified with a narrator who is not only telling his stories in vivid descriptive words alone but in the fluidity of one who knows his stories well before telling them. You might be wondering what kind of literature with five short stories really chronicle the events in Africa in picturesque sequences, you only would need to be told that each of the stories set in five different countries of the continent told in children's perspective, does not foist what should be on you but rather makes you piece meanings together for yourself from the accounts of disoriented children of nefarious abuses and violence. 

Uwem must have been aware that his piece of literature could easily be thrown off as one of the lots that appeal to the West with stereotypical African themes of child soldering, religious calamity, child trafficking, etc, hence he adopts the point of view that speaks with tones of innocence rather than narrative that relays events with adult confident accuracy.  Sympathy could always save flaws when stories are told by a child and one might not quickly overreact against pictures that are just too blackly painted to seek pity when it is a minor blathering about it. Say You're One of Them seems to make a reader confess and expiate on behalf of the villain in sheer empathy that grieves one so dearly after each story.  

Say You're One of Them is an afro geo-collection of short stories which unfolds in different settings of five African countries.

 

The Five Short Stories

An Ex-mas Feast (kenya):  Maisha is never her family's favourite when it comes to moral standards, but she does command the greatest dignity when the family needs depend on the finances she get from prostituting as a minor. She is the sacrificial lamb that holds the family together in seeming unity until the Ex-mas Feast when she explores full time in her trade to cater for the more demanding wants of her family.

Fattening for Gabon (Benin): For Yewa and Kotchikpa, the coming of a Nanfang motorbike into their uncle's, Fofo Kpee, home is the beginning of the abysmal era that will soon ravage them apart. When the source of the Nanfang is known, it has already become too late for Fofo Kpee to remedy events and save his cousins from the suffering he has sold them into. The story delves into the hypocrisy of religion while it still maintains its objectivity on the child-trafficking issue that majorly characterizes the story.

What Language Is That? (Ethiopia): Before the war that tears the narrator apart from her best friend, Salem, all what they know is the world they have mutually created in their own infantile simplicity. In severe suddenness, they become as guilty as the circumstance that creates a gorge between them. With the falseness of emotions that those caught in the middle of religious crisis exude, the two children go aboard to learn another language that could communicate their friendliness to each other even though the plumes of thick smoke that billows from the charred part of their houses robs the atmosphere of all harmony.

Luxurious Hearses (Nigeria):  The quietness of the hearse might not be luxurious to the dead. The still silence of the dead that squirt blood all over is never a pleasant sight even when ferried in luxurious buses. The situation that plagues the characters in this story is antithetical to the lives they must have lived at one time or the other. After Tijani's co-Muslim faithful betray his trust during a religious war that breaks loose in the northern part of the country, he returns to reposing his confidence in the God of the south he knows little about. A fanatic of some sort, Tijani who calmly watches the martyring of his blood brother of the Christian faith can't brave to reveal his Muslim identity in the refugee bus where he seeks protection. Amidst staccato of gunfire, jarred dismembered bodies and reprisal attacks from the two religions (Muslim and Christian) and ethnic groups (North and South), Tijiani almost does make it, but when his chopped off wrist gives him away in the South-bound luxurious bus, nothing could save him as a northern- adherent- Mohammed- worshipper.

My Parents' Bedroom (Rwanda): As succinct as this story is, it well re-enacts the inter-tribal carnage between the Hutu and the Tutsi brilliantly. A child can eavesdrop on the creaking bed of his parents, but when the matrimonial room of the home becomes an abattoir where the mother's head is slashed, the memory of the bedroom may become a hunting ghost. This story uses the setting of a simple Rwandan family to show how inhuman the war between the two tribes is and how the actors of the savage wear bestiality as fitting garbs.

 

Take this…

This anthology might turn out to be Uwem's definitive work, I don't see him writing anything as entrancing as this. That some of the stories were almost on the whole pages of the book shows that he was under pressure as to what genre to writer under; a collection of short stories or a full novel. Writing about religion is one fragile issue writers seldom dwell on. Being a Jesuit priest I thought Uwem Akpan was going to let prejudice guide him towards giving an imbalanced narration while stifling the views of the opposite religion in Luxurious Hearses. The diplomacy he employed in equally giving voices to the two religious groups takes Luxurious Hearses out of the packs that use literature as their controlled mock courts where cases are adjudged on emotions and microscopic reasoning.