Reviewed by A. Naomi Jackson

In his latest offering, Becoming Abigail, Nigerian poet and novelist Chris Abani tells the powerful story of a young Nigerian girl who spends most of her life bending to and rebelling against the will of the men in her life. During her early childhood, Abigail mourns and imitates her mother who died in childbirth and tries to comfort her father, who never fully recovers from her death. When she is sent to live with a male relative in England, Abigail finds herself trapped in the underbelly of the sex trade, entering a devastating cycle of dehumanization and despair. She eventually escapes his grip, but not before she has lost some of her mental stability and almost all of her dignity.

If there is any prose piece where we know that Chris Abani is a poet, it is in Becoming Abigail. Experimental in its use of time and form—chapters are announced “Now” and “Then”—Abani leads the reader on a trip through his protagonist’s subconscious and present experience. In so doing, the author draws not only a circuitous route through Abigail’s story but also points to her fragile mental state, the extent to which she does walk the world in the space between the present and past, affected by yesterday’s trauma and re-enacting some of the same scenes from her painful childhood with new actors.

The novella form is difficult and infrequently attempted, given its nebulous existence between the short story and the novel form. Abani succeeds in this effort by leaving us neither dissatisfied with the arc of the story line nor with its length, neither hankering for more characters or for a tighter story. This novella succeeds in fact because it is introspective, examining the events in Abigail’s life that have brought her from a troubled girlhood in Nigeria to a poisoned life as a young woman in London. While sometimes the reader may yearn for less abstraction, for more anchors to carry her throughout this text, Abani offers up Abigail as the hand to cleave to, drawing her so masterfully that we are able to understand Abigail not through physical clues, but through her experiences with violence and her obsessions with maps and Chinese poetry. Abani writes: “And this was the shape of her desire: To be a white bird beating its wings against night. Beating until that was all. To be. Yet not the bird. Or night. Or the air. Or the beating. To be a white bird.” In passages like these Abani surprises us with poetic language that demands a second reading, both to savour the language and to unearth clues about the character who unravels before us.  It is a testament to Akashic Books, an independent publisher based in Brooklyn, New York, that they have taken a risk on a book that falls well outside the mainstream both in form and content. We need more stories like Abani’s that surprise and astound, both with the story and with the storytelling.