5	Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon, Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail and the Law

Stories about cops chasing immigrants.

Nothing shocking, really, people upset

because they were out of work, etc.

These are the sad stories I have to tell you.

Roberto Bolaño, Antwerp

As if disclosing before a stubbornly incredulous audience that the emperor has no clothes, in his analysis of the current immigration situation in Europe, the Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk observes that “the poor, unemployed and undefended of Asia and Africa who are looking for new places to live and work cannot be kept out of Europe indefinitely. Higher walls, tougher visa restrictions and ships patrolling borders in increasing numbers will only postpone the day of reckoning” (“The Souring of Turkey’s European Dream”). Because of the current map of social exclusion, transnational migration of third-world populations to the global North has long ceased to be a phenomenon to be discouraged by Western governments to become instead an inevitable reality that the developed world must accept and address. For millions, migration is now a matter of life or death. The truth is that the existing unequal distribution of wealth has pushed vulnerable populations to abandon their homelands in search of survival where they can access some means of sustenance, even under dangerous exploitation.

As analyzed in the previous chapter through the case of India, decolonization, which initially presented itself as the panacea for economic and cultural growth, proved to be a utopian dream once countries were left on their own after years of mismanagement and exploitation. Coinciding with Frantz Fanon’s early diagnosis, so-called emerging countries have attempted to resurrect their forgotten pre-colonial cultures and generate competitive economies with the help of institutions supposedly created to aid in their “development” (the IMF, the WTO, the World Bank), yet it is clear that their structural adjustment plans have only impoverished vulnerable populations more, while the local elites enjoy benefits akin to the foreign ruling class during colonial times.¹

The decades after decolonization have witnessed the economic meltdown of former colonies because these countries have become utterly indebted and are now subjected to the demands of global finance capital, the latest (more sanitized) form of colonization. Haiti, for example, the first Latin American country to achieve independence, proves that early freedom does not translate into earlier recovery; in fact, Haiti’s situation is extremely dire. In Africa, Ghana and Nigeria (the countries analyzed in this chapter) fall into a similar pattern.² What the former colonies regrettably share is the ghost of utter debt together with an increasing chasm between rich and poor, so that migrating to the West has now replaced the old independence dream: for many, the global North has become the Promised Land. A novel element, however, is that those migrating to the West encompass an ever-increasing number of women, many of whom are being trafficked.

Western countries’ response to the influx of people from those previously economically exploited societies has typically been one of xenophobia and exclusion, with immigrants from poor countries constructed as a problem. Despite the much-needed menial and underpaid work these groups generally perform for Western economies, they are regarded as an economic and cultural burden, allegedly consuming more national resources than they produce, or reproducing more rapidly than the (usually white) host population. As a general rule, the solution has been to militarize borders and criminalize those who manage to cross them—the perfect recipe to keep trafficking growing. Jyoti Sanghera explains that trafficking “rests upon two major factors: the illegalization and criminalization of poor people,” while she further notes that “[p]olitical and legal responses to trafficking [ … ] are by and large repressive and punitive, harming these vulnerable populations even further” (qtd. in Kempadoo xxv).

In this respect, human rights activists have persistently worked to create a conscience worldwide and persuade governments to stop prosecuting trafficked women for illegality and prostitution. Some analysts even suggest granting legal citizenship to foreign survivors of sex trafficking as a way of stopping the illicit cycle, but, predictably, this initiative has encountered hostility in first-world states.³ Immigration and nationhood still constitute paradigms fiercely defended by national governments clinging to an ideal of racial purity akin to notorious fascist regimes of the past, which have lately begun to resurface with the increasing influx of poor immigrants into the developed world. Despite human rights advocates’ efforts, to this day the problem has not found a viable solution precisely because the issue is still addressed through the illegality of the migrants in destination countries. Western nations assume that to legalize victims of trafficking would imply an open door policy to immigration from poor countries, so, once again, the criminal violence endured by these women takes second place because it conflicts with national interests. Marjan Wijers explains that

[t]he overall picture is that trafficked women are considered, above all, as undesirable aliens. The fact that they may be a victim of sexual violence and exploitation is completely subordinate or even irrelevant to their immigration status in the context of the current immigration policies of European countries. In this situation it is almost impossible for migrant women to ask for protection if exploitation, violence and forced prostitution occur. (72)

One of the strongest merits of Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon (1995) and Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail (2006), then, lies in their honest disclosure of the obstructive way in which legal institutions work in destination countries. Both works reflect the situation of third-world women trafficked for prostitution internationally, as the women here represented become victims first of their traffickers’ abuse, and later of the new countries’ laws that force them, in Darko’s character’s case, to hide the mistreatment from the authorities and, in Abani’s, to suffer the consequences of a problematic rescue system. Through their characters, these authors powerfully illuminate the nuances of an extremely lucrative business that relies on trafficked women’s illegality and silence.

Trafficking across countries essentially necessitates the victim’s criminality to maximize its profits, while the shadowy businesses of bribes, fake documents, undercover transportation, sales and re-sales of slaves, etc., generates massive revenues for those involved. The most common way trafficking operates across national borders consists of relatives or acquaintances luring potential victims with promises of work and a better future (reportedly, some of the women know that they will be engaging in prostitution, but they have no idea that the conditions will resemble literal slavery). Once out of the origin country, recruiters remove the women’s passports and provide them with fake documents to sell them as prostitutes to local pimps. This turns the women into extremely vulnerable undocumented aliens not likely to seek help because they could end up imprisoned and deported for working in “the trade.” Traffickers themselves insure that victims are threatened and terrorized during the first weeks of their “training,” so it is unlikely that these women would leave on their own looking for help from an NGO or a police department. The language barrier also plays into the vulnerability of these women, who frequently cannot understand enough of the local language to ask for help effectively or even to know where to look for it. After their ordeals, they are unlikely to trust anyone. As far as law officers are concerned, traffickers are known to bribe them, so women cannot readily determine whether a law enforcement agent works for traffickers or not (rescued victims often testify that corrupt police officers rape them and later return them to their pimps) (Ejalu 167). All in all, the weight of the law generally falls on the female victim/prostitute, easy to catch and prosecute, thus sex slaves tend to suffer their horrific circumstances in silence, assuming them as a lesser and already known evil. It is also worth noting that women and girls trafficked for prostitution are often shunned by their communities if they manage to escape and return now “impure,” which explains why many do not attempt to go back home. Of those women voluntarily trafficked, one should assume that the scant possibilities in their own village or city prompted them to leave in the first place, so returning after all the pain endured is not an option; some, like Darko’s main character in Beyond the Horizon, decide to become prostitutes once they escape (or pay off their debt) for lack of better options available to them.

Darko established herself as a writer with Beyond and, for the most part, she has published in German with some books translated into English.⁴ Abani achieved international recognition before Becoming through his Grace-Land (2004), a gripping coming-of-age tale of migration and ironic cross-pollination with Western culture. As in the previous chapters, I will examine the representation of sex trafficked women and their abusers, the aesthetics of the violence depicted, as well as the authors’ purpose in crafting stories of female oppression. Abani accounts for a longer, more established literary career than Darko, yet what ties them together here is that both writers thought-provokingly address sex trafficking of third-world, racialized females in some of their novels. Unlike the rest of this book, this chapter explores two works because the narratives complement each other by showcasing the effects of oppressive immigration laws from different angles: Abani’s novella represents the topic from the perspective of an underage child (legally defined as a victim deserving protection), while Darko’s novel depicts trafficking from the point of view of a woman (by default, a criminal subject to deportation). Interestingly, both female characters have been prey of African exploiters, but that remains secondary to their immigration status.

In Darko’s case, her personal experience as an immigrant in Germany grants vividness to a controversial reality that many Western countries choose to ignore: the perilous status of the trafficked immigrant and how the host nation profits from it.⁵ Abani, for his part, constructs a carefully researched tale of a girl trafficked to London by a relative. With near-documentary precision (in Darko’s novel) and evocative lyricism (in Abani’s), these authors describe the process from beginning to end, underlining the hypocrisy of a legal system that traumatizes the victims more than their trafficking already has, since, even if they try to express themselves, they are denied subjectivity because of the status they have acquired in a Western country. Darko’s protagonist Mara ends up claiming some agency through prostituting herself as a way out, while Abani’s Abigail is “saved” by a benevolent but tyrannical system that does not understand her needs and acts for her instead. In both narratives, the female subalterns cannot speak their oppression to the legal institutions, so they have to find creative ways to overcome their exploitation on their own.

Sex Trafficking in Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon: “… too illegal and too black for any proper job”

In Broadening the Horizon (2007), a critical collection dedicated to Amma Darko’s work, Vincent O. Odamtten notes that this Ghanaian female author “appears to be someone who emerged at the right moment in her nation’s cultural history and someone with the kind of abilities and training that enabled her to recognize the need for new and different stories to be told,” as the existing African narratives “were only partial in their ability to reveal the new topographies of illicit flows of people, goods and capital that made dependency theories and oppositional models of center and periphery seem obsolete” (4). Along these lines, Catherine Jonet observes that in “the case of West African fiction, women’s subject positions as ‘doubly oppressed’ did not initially figure into post-colonial engagements with literature and writing” (201). Jonet explains that

[m]ore often than not, women were presented within a masculinist economy that positioned them as agents in the de-colonization project, and that did not critically interrogate indigenous patriarchal institutions. Areas such as domestic abuse, the trafficking in women as capital between men, domestic rape, and the exploitation of women’s bodies were not central issues in postcolonial writing, which was performed primarily by men[.] (201)

In this context, Amma Darko surfaces as a new and much-needed female voice. The author has been compared to already established Ghanaian writers such as Efua Sutherland and Ama Ata Aidoo in their treatment of social, political, and cultural issues in Ghana, yet Darko offers a fresh take in confronting and contesting patriarchal oppression both in the private and public spheres.

Beyond the Horizon, Darko’s first novel where she deals with female sex trafficking from Africa to Europe, launched the author into relative international success. The author herself immigrated to Germany following a by now familiar global economic pattern.⁶ Louise Allen Zak explains that in the 1980s the “government [ … ] instituted strict measures to comply with the International Monetary Fund’s requirements for economic restructuring” (Odamtten 12);⁷ as a consequence, Ghana was left “with few employment options even for university graduates. Many Ghanaians saw the opportunity to better themselves by going to aburokyire, the Akan word for ‘beyond the horizon’, or overseas” (12).

That many women and children support families in Africa through prostitution in the so-called first world is no secret. Chris Abani’s compatriot Chika Unigwe, for example, in her On Black Sisters Street (2009), powerfully depicts the lives of sex trafficked women in Antwerp, Belgium, who through their illegal work support families back home. Winner of the 2012 Nigeria Prize for Literature, On Black resists easy categorization as it complicates issues of subaltern women’s victimhood and agency: the four women portrayed in this novel, for different reasons, voluntarily choose to be trafficked to the West as sex workers.⁸ Unigwe goes to great lengths to avoid representing her female characters as victims; some of them manage to establish profitable businesses once their debt is repaid and one even becomes a brothel owner herself (thus repeating the cycle of exploitation). Yet, crucially, the fact that the main character is murdered by a trafficker’s employee after she decides to quit prostitution before her debt is paid off necessarily forces readers to question how much autonomy she actually as an illegal sex-trafficked woman. Unigwe has candidly wondered “why a single Nigerian woman would move to a country (Belgium) without any knowledge of the language, without knowing anyone, and without any conceivable survival plan [, or] how far such a person would go to survive” (“Women” 111). For her part, Darko has confessed in several interviews her own shock upon arrival in Germany, when she confronted the reality that illegal African women there constituted a sort of third-class population (behind Turks) forced by its status to perform menial domestic jobs or, like her main character in Beyond, work in prostitution. Darko’s keen eye and lively storytelling abilities allow her to represent this bleak reality facing many African women with remarkable precision. Indeed, the dream of the “been-to” so idealized in Africa loses all its charm in Darko’s unapologetic voice.

Despite being Darko’s first foray into literary writing, Beyond the Horizon does not lack merit. Above all, Darko seduces her audience with the uninterrupted flow of her prose and her honest, often sarcastic, depiction of the situation of poor African immigrants in Europe. In this work, Darko traces the life of Mara, a naive village girl married by her unloving father to Akobi, an ambitious man from her village. This arranged liaison is predictably doomed to fail, as readers learn early that Akobi has been in love with a woman (Comfort) from Accra. Akobi takes Mara to live with him in Accra, and after a couple of years of an abusive marriage that includes marital rape, he leaves for Germany. Unknown to Mara, Akobi has devised a plan to win Comfort: traveling to Germany will grant him the coveted status of a “been-to,” while he expects to make enough money to support his lover’s expensive tastes. The means to finance Akobi’s dreams will be Mara (who will provide the money) and his German wife Gitte (who will provide the legal status). Once there, Akobi arranges for Mara to join him in Germany for a supposed future together. The extremely “green” Mara accedes, and thus her trafficking begins.

When compared with data provided by sociological research, Darko’s description of Mara’s traffic from origin to destination country looks painfully realistic. For the purpose of this analysis, it is worth looking at the plot in detail because of its similarities with an actual trafficking scheme. The woman is escorted by an African agent hired by her husband who arranges the necessary (and very expensive) bribes, provides Mara with fake papers, and removes her passport once in Europe, substituting it with a fake one that contains another African woman’s picture. To assuage Mara’s fears, the agent explains that this tactic will pose no problem to her: “In German people’s eyes [ … ] we niggers look all the same. Black faces, kinky hair, thick lips. We don’t fight with them about it. We use it to our benefit” (Darko 59). At the airport in East Berlin, Mara comes under the tutelage of a second African man (Osey) who takes her to his house where Mara meets his wife. Here Mara encounters the future awaiting her: readers learn that Osey’s wife (Vivian) has been forced to prostitute herself and pretend to be Osey’s sister because the man has married a German woman to become a legal resident. Mara later finds out that her husband Akobi, like Osey, is now married to a German woman (Gitte) to insure his legal stay in Germany, so Mara has to live with Akobi and his unsuspecting German wife pretending to be his sister. To pay for her expenses while in their house, Akobi finds Mara a job as a maid for a white family, but she soon ends up unemployed because the German family doesn’t want any problems with the government. They hastily let her go, explaining that their neighbors “were confronted yesterday by the Labour Office detectives and have been charged with employing an illegal immigrant” (108). With Mara jobless and not producing any income, Akobi then puts his plan to prostitute his wife into effect earlier than he has intended—an obvious indictment of the German immigration laws that contribute to push Mara into a far more exploitative trade. Akobi then takes Mara to a “party” where he drugs her and videotapes her having sex with (according to Mara’s hazy memory) probably twenty men in a pre-arranged orgy. To Mara’s horror, Akobi then threatens to send that video to her family unless she cooperates. Mara finds herself without any options other than prostitution, as Osey warns her: “… Mara, Mara, oh Mara, even if you don’t want to, you will still have to. For an illegal nigger woman like you, there is no other job in Germany, Mara. If you don’t get a housemaid job then there’s only this. You understand? Because you are too illegal and too black for any proper job, you get it?” (114).

In this way, without legal documents or money, not speaking the native language, and having been already “broken into,” Mara is sold to a pimp who regularly deposits her earnings into Akobi’s bank account. Once Mara starts her life of prostitution, she learns that many African women in Germany find themselves in her appalling situation. Her new friend Kaye, for example, explains to Mara that she has “gone through a similar ordeal years ago” when her then-boyfriend decided to traffic her from Africa because he saw “how other men were making fast money with their girlfriends” (117). Kaye’s boyfriend trafficked her to Frankfurt, then “he coerced her into prostitution, pocketed every mark she made and kept her in the trade by blackmailing her with pictures he had clandestinely taken of her in action with different men” (117). Mara’s own ordeal continues for some time, until, after suffering the harsh reality of sexual slavery long enough, Mara becomes a more cynical, calculating woman finally capable of action. She eventually manages to escape with Kaye’s help, not without first avenging herself on Akobi. In a final plot twist with a rather surprising spying scheme (probably Darko’s attempt to provide her audience with an unforgiving heroine), Mara exposes Akobi’s fraudulent marriage and illegal status, which gets him immediately imprisoned.⁹ As for herself, she cannot go back home after so many years of humiliation, so she decides to stay, now a drug addict, working as a prostitute in Munich and financing her family back home with the money she now earns.

Clearly, in this world Darko depicts, women are commodities to be traded, used, and discarded. As Gayle Rubin would argue, from the beginning Mara becomes an object of exchange between men (initially, between father-husband, later, between husband-pimps), which highlights her social subordination as a woman both in the domestic and public spheres.¹⁰ The author targets a culture where marriage and prostitution intertwine as one and the same, with women becoming exchange currency from which only men enjoy the profits. Here, those who “traffic” Mara are African and European men who use her to obtain an economic benefit because of a patriarchal hierarchy that places poor, uneducated women as objects of consumption under men’s patronage. Mara initially depends completely on her father; she later becomes Akobi’s appendix, and finally her pimp’s property. Mara’s father thus sells his daughter to an unworthy man for “two white cows, four healthy goats, four lengths of cloth, beads, gold [jewelry] and two bottles of London Dry Gin,” yet Mara knows all too well that her father would have given her away “even for one goat” (3, 7). Her husband Akobi sells her to her first pimp (Pompey) and keeps all of her income to finance his future escapade with his African lover. Despite her being the one earning the money, Mara has no voice in the arrangement between her husband and the pimp, who “would deduct his percentage and deposit the rest in Akobi’s private account” (118). Ironically, she achieves more freedom with her last white pimp (Oves), the one she voluntarily chooses at the end of the novel, because at least then she manages to keep some of her income for herself and support her family back home. But Mara’s image of Oves does not bring much comfort either, a pimp “not as tolerant as Pompey and Kaye,” who keeps her hooked on cocaine to maximize his income (139).

None of these men evoke any sympathy from readers. In the case of the Africans (Akobi and Osey), despite sharing the same ethnicity, their treatment of Mara does not significantly differ from that of her white clients in Germany—for different reasons, all these men exploit her, but at least her sadistic clients pay her for the tortures she endures. In this respect, Mawuli Adjei’s points out that Darko “employs a highly subjective female viewpoint” (49) and represents African men following the pattern of men as “enemy” archetypes (48). Darko, for her part, responds that the chosen subject matter in Beyond (sex trafficking) leaves her with little room for likable men and that her main male character is not as terrible when “compared to some realities” as he shows a capacity to love his African lover—the sole motivation to traffic his wife and gather easy money fast (Bouillion; Higgins, “Creating” 114). Interestingly, the African men who find themselves in Germany also become pariahs in that society, victims of the same racism and discrimination Mara suffers, but they still manage to play the system to their advantage by using women. In Darko’s novel, men deceive and lure white women to marry them and become legal citizens, while they finance their expenses through prostituting their African wives and girlfriends. Even there, African men are on top.¹¹

Looking at Mara’s portrayal, some critics have pointed out that this village woman seems too naïve (Adjei 54). True, Mara’s tolerance exceeds average standards, but the author scatters enough distressing background information throughout the narrative for readers to sympathize with her predicament. Men in her life have only taken from her, so she does not know anything different. Mara has endured intolerable violations from her husband but, reflecting a common psychological reaction in victims of domestic abuse, for a while she appears resigned, even content. Since she has no education, her possibilities of earning money are limited to the permission and loans of the men to whom she submits. Her own culture, through her mother’s words of wisdom, has taught her that “a wife was there for one thing, and that was to ensure [her husband’s] well-being, which included his pleasure” (Darko 13). In Mara’s mind, Akobi’s brutality towards her is “natural,” as she remembers that “[initially,] many things that happened in [her] marriage appeared to [her] to be matter-of-course things that happened in all marriages and to all the wives” (12).

Yet the descriptions of Akobi’s treatment of Mara can only shock: one night Mara is awoken by “a painful kick in [her] ribs”; another day she looks at her husband in terror as he “clenched his knuckles ready to knock pain into [her] forehead” (11, 21). Typically, sex between Mara and her husband, in her own account, would go as follows: “Wordlessly, he stripped off my clothes, stripped off his trousers, turned my back to him and entered me. Then he ordered me off the mattress to go and lay out my mat because he wanted to sleep alone”; on other occasions, while the position does not change, Mara refers more specifically to the “sharp pain of Akobi’s entry in [her],” or how “brutal and over-fast” he is with her (22, 84). Mara is regularly insulted, punched, kicked, hit, slapped, raped, and forced to sleep on the floor. Her first pregnancy only enrages her husband more, so the beatings intensify. By offering her readers an outrageous description of marriage—where the representations of marital sex throughout resemble plain cases of domestic rape and culminate in a husband trafficking his wife for prostitution—Darko brings attention to the cultural silences that allow violence against women to remain in the private domestic sphere in her native Ghana.

But even when Mara leaves her “primitive” land to start a life in “civilized” Europe, she is forced to conceal the sexual abuse/torture she continues to endure at the hands of unknown men because the stigma associated with prostitution does not guarantee that her abusers will be prosecuted and punished; worse, she has become an illegal (and therefore criminal) resident, so by asking the state for help, she risks jail time and subsequent deportation herself. Mara then endures the rapes during her marriage as her fate as a wife, while she accepts her European customers’ exploitation as her destiny as a prostitute. Analyzing the contradictions of the legal discourse on rape, Anne McClintock distinguishes that until “very recently, two categories of women have been deemed unrapeable by law: wives and prostitutes” (“Screwing the System” 77). Darko paints an unsettling portrait of Mara’s situation powerfully exposing such patriarchal assumptions. As Catherine Jonet argues, the “revelation that West African women are exploited (sexually and otherwise) by European and African heteropatriarchy is the open secret that Darko names, which is no secret at all” (202). Darko’s mordant critique, then, rocks the surface and disturbs established orders, while she problematizes the “lawful” (citizenship) and the “natural” (marriage).

Indeed, here lies one of the novel’s sharpest edges, in bringing to the surface a reality that remains hypocritically unaddressed. Pervasive assumptions regarding women as men’s property and prostitution as a necessary evil mix with European racism and xenophobia in a schizophrenic cocktail: in Beyond, African men rape and sell their African wives into prostitution, but seduce and entice German women into marriage, while German men demand and consume African sex slaves in the shadows of the brothels, but openly prosecute and deport them for their illegal status and activities in the sanctity of the law courts. If we extrapolate this tension to a global context and theorize it through Lacan’s figuration of the split subject, one could argue that the global north desires and imports these women (illegally), but then rejects them and deports them (legally).¹² In other words, in order to maintain a façade of stability and coherence, the German legal system in the novel expels these commodified African women that, ironically, German men desire and purchase.

Along these lines, Judith Butler explains how the coherence of the subject is consolidated through “Othering.” Butler observes: “As Iris Young has suggested in her use of Kristeva to understand sexism, homophobia, and racism, the repudiation of bodies for their sex, sexuality, and/or color is an ‘expulsion’ followed by a ‘repulsion’ that founds and consolidates culturally hegemonic identities along sex/race/sexuality axes of differentiation” (108). “Young’s appropriation of Kristeva,” Butler continues,

shows how the operation of repulsion can consolidate “identities” founded on the instituting of the “Other” or a set of Others through exclusion and domination. What constitutes through division the “inner” and “outer” worlds of the subject is a border and boundary tenuously maintained for the purposes of social regulation and control. The boundary between the inner effectively becomes outer, and this excreting function becomes, as it were, the model by which other forms of identity-differentiation are accomplished. In effect, this is the mode by which Others become shit. (108)

In this novel, European citizenship is consolidated through excluding and rejecting those who do not have German passports. The women Darko represents here, however, manage to devise plans to escape and gain some (limited) control of their lives by playing with the same legal system that treats them as excrement: Vivian leaves Osey to marry a drug-addicted American GI and thus obtains an American passport that enables her to move legally to the US, while Mara pays a German drug addict for a fake marriage and gets a five-year resident visa that allows her to move freely and find work at a brothel of her choice.

Regarding the representations of sexual violence, like the authors analyzed in the previous chapters, Darko oscillates between tropes of pain, torture, and humiliation from Mara’s point of view. The novel begins with Mara facing an oval mirror “staring painfully at [ … ] what is left of what once used to be [her] image” (Darko 1). She is in tears, feeling empty and isolated, looking at a body that has been mutilated, “used and abused by strange men” (1).The catalogue she offers when she describes her physical condition after years of sexual slavery speaks directly of the men who have ravaged her at the brothels. She now looks like a mockery of the village woman she once was, with “sore cracked lips” covered in thick red lipstick and “hideous traces of bites and scratches all over [her] neck [ … ] that extend even far beyond the back of [her] ears”; blankly, Mara contemplates the “several bruises and scars left generously there by the sadistic hands of [her] best payers, [her] best spenders. And even back down [her] spine too run a couple more—horrendous ones” (2). The narrative only describes a few elusive scenes showing what goes on inside the brothels, so audiences are lead to imagine what men do to Mara through these scars imprinted in the texture of her skin. One of her customers broke her little finger in a sadomasochistic game, leaving her with an indelible reminder of the torture and the torturer:

[my little finger is] bent. Its bone’s been displaced and it looks weird. I see it all the time and I loathe it, but not the money that came with it. The injury was done to me by one of my best spenders, a giant of a man but who always, when he comes to me, cries like a baby in my arms, telling me about his dictator wife whom he loves but who treats him so bad she makes him lick her feet at night. Then filled with loathing and rage or revenge for this wife he’d love to kill, but lacking the guts to even pull her hair, he imagines me to be her, orders me to shout I am her and does horrible things to me like I never saw a man ever do to a woman before in the bushes I hail from. But I bear it because it is part of my job[.] And even when he puts me in pain and spits upon me and calls me a nigger fool I still offer him my crimson smile and pretend he’s just called me a princess [my emphasis]. (2–3)

Unable to verbalize the sexual violence directly, Mara only mentions “horrible things,” yet by describing the litany of injuries her body has endured, readers understand that her clients have consistently brutalized her. Hence the presence of those men paying for sex with Mara (the more affluent demand side that keeps the trafficking engine going) materializes in the narrative through what is left of her body, “this bit of garbage that once used to be [her]” (3). Like most of the authors analyzed in this work, Darko does not pry into the minds of those clients torturing Mara. Her “consumers” are practically elided from the text, but remain conspicuously present in Mara’s mutilated flesh.

At the same time, from Mara’s white clients calling her a “nigger,” readers understand that Mara’s race plays a role in her exploitation, with the African woman offering them an eroticized and exoticized object of desire. Kempadoo explains that “images of the ‘exotic’ are entwined with ideologies of racial and ethnic difference: the ‘prostitute’ is defined as ‘other’ in comparison to the racial or ethnic origin of the client”—who distinguishes between white women, fit for marriage and motherhood, and black women, left for “uninhibited and unrestricted sexual intercourse” (10). Research shows that female black bodies remain in high demand within the sex industry, as white clients often prefer to unleash their repressed fantasies of sex with an orientalized Other, altogether desired, feared, and reviled. Yet despite this demand for black bodies, “Third World women [ … ] are positioned second to white women. White sex workers invariably work in safer, higher paid and more comfortable environments[, while] Black women are still conspicuously overrepresented in the poorest and most dangerous sectors of the trade” (11). Kempadoo further contends that to

some scholars, the racial/ethnic structuring visible in the global sex industry highly resembles the exoticist movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in which “labelling the anthropomorphical Other as exotic legitimated treating the people of the ‘third world’ as fit to be despised—destroyed even … while concurrently also constituting them as projections of western fantasies” (Rousseau and Porter 1990: 7). (10)

Castillo, for her part, refers to Julia O’Connell Davidson’s “suggestive study [showing that] for many Anglo-European heterosexual men ‘the extensions of universal rights to persons of colour and women is experienced as a loss of male sovereignty and selfhood’” (841). Relevant to this analysis, when looking at the relation between Mexican sex workers in Tijuana and their white American clients, Castillo observes that

in Mexico[,] the prototypical white, heterosexual client from the United States momentarily, for the length of the service, (re)gains a fantasized superiority that he presumes is his by right of his sex, nationality, and race but that he nonetheless experiences through a knowledge of its continuous loss in the global North, since the women of his own country do not recognize or accept the natural right of male domination. (841)

While patriarchy clearly enables Mara’s exploitation, the power white and black men exercise over Mara is slightly different: German men exploit Mara because she is a black and poor; African men exploit Mara because she is a woman.

In this respect, readers notice that while Akobi’s sexual abuse of Mara during their marriage is described in straightforward language, the violent sexual scenes where Mara is raped by her clients in Germany seem to escape the text, reflecting the difference between what Mara perceives as “natural” inside a marriage (and which she can thus verbalize) from the traumatic transgression (with which she cannot cope). As mentioned above, Mara’s actual victimization during her life as a prostitute is often elusively addressed rather than openly depicted. Suggesting the difficulty of symbolizing rape aesthetically and empathetically, readers note that Mara’s first rape scene during the orgy that initiates her life as sex slave is practically erased from the character’s consciousness since she has been drugged by her husband. During her initial fragmentary account, Mara refuses to name what is happening, resorting instead to circumlocutions:

[ … ] suddenly the room was filled with people, all men, and they were talking and laughing and drinking. And they were completely naked! There must have been at least ten men for what I saw were at least twenty images.

Then they were all around me, many hairy bodies, and they were stripping me, fondling me, playing with my body, pushing my legs apart, wide apart. As for the rest of the story, I hope that the gods of Naka didn’t witness it [my emphasis]. (Darko 111)

Mara feels her genitals ache the following morning, but she seems unaware or forgetful of what has taken place during the party. Incapable of dealing with the sexual aggression endured, she represses the trauma.

When that rape is finally addressed in the narrative, Darko resorts to describing the scene through Mara watching everything on a video tape, which distances her from her rape once again as she becomes now a shocked spectator of the savagery. Not coincidentally, the authors analyzed in previous chapters resort to similar devices: Douloti and Soon-ah mentally and emotionally detach from their rapes and “watch” the violence from outside their bodies. Darko, for her part, conveys the sexual violence Mara suffered indirectly, mediated first through drugs and then a videotape. Even at the end of the novel, when readers perceive Mara as a now-seasoned prostitute resigned to her fate, the character still avoids talking directly about the sexual acts she must daily perform; instead, she confesses to having “accompanied [many men] on sinful rides through the back doors of heaven and returned with them back to earth,” as if the metaphor would push her abject reality further away from her (131). As a stylistic choice, Darko emphasizes the violence Mara undergoes from the woman’s point of view, without showcasing her protagonist as a star in a pornographic novel for readers to project their scopophilic gaze upon her.¹³ Once inside the brothels, what we are allowed to “see” are scars, bite marks, and a broken finger, not erotic sex.

In what begins to look like a familiar pattern in these stories addressing forced prostitution, even though the action of her novel revolves around sex trafficking, Darko does not devote significant space to sexually explicit scenes. Like the authors previously analyzed, Darko targets instead the structural constraints affecting her female character: the perils of being an “illegal” migrant in a Western country, depending entirely on abusive men. The author juxtaposes the dream of Europe, which Mara has imagined as “Heaven itself[,]” with the inferno she encounters once she finds herself trapped in a Western country, only capable of surviving through prostitution (34). As an authoritative source who has lived there, and therefore can tell the tale, Darko shows that, despite the glamorous image of Europe Africans have constructed, once there, illegal Africans face xenophobia, racism, and exclusion.¹⁴ Mara’s African culture also plays a role in her exploitation since the unreal expectations of success in Europe force migrant Africans in this novel to tolerate humiliation and abuse for the sake of not disappointing those left at home—and continue the uninterrupted supply of money and goods for relatives in Africa.¹⁵ In the novel both men and women feel the pressure to succeed in Germany at any price, often enduring prejudice and exploitation, but coinciding with the works previously analyzed, trafficked women pay a double price, becoming the “last instance” or weakest link in the chain of oppression, since once outside their native lands, they even lose the hope of some official protection (however minimal) against abuse (Spivak, “Woman” 82). Instead, they remain in the control of husbands, boyfriends, or pimps who actually benefit from the women’s illegal status and the foreign country’s xenophobia.

Throughout, Darko gives readers a sarcastic glimpse of the stereotypes prevalent in Germany, which, as Homi Bhabha argues in The Location of Culture (1994), must be “anxiously repeated” in order to assure their permanence and maintain (white) hegemonic power structures unchallenged (66). These stereotypes both tacitly legitimize the imperative to prevent poor Africans from entering Europe by legal means and, once inside, render illegal immigrants far more prone to exploitation. At the port of entry, Mara faces discrimination for the first time:

The official who checked me just glanced at my face and at the picture [of another African woman], scurried through the passport and, rather than scrutinizing [her fake passport] to see the minute differences seemed more concerned to know why I had married a ‘Deustcher’ and not an ‘Afrikaner’ like myself, and whether I was intending to continue living in this their fatherland after my five years expired, and wouldn’t it be better for me to return back to Africa? Germany was too cold or how warm I felt when in truth his only concern was: ‘Ach du meine Gute!’ Yet another primitive African face come to pollute the oh-so-pure German air and stuff it with probably yet more unwanted brown babies! (Darko 60)

A by-product of their earlier colonization, Darko represents Africans as having (partly) internalized a sense of cultural inferiority. However, Darko does not show a complete acceptance of their “inferiority” as explained by Fanon or Ngugi because, despite imaging Europe as the panacea, in this novel Africans in Germany use the racist stereotypes to their advantage (these stereotypes, in fact, enable Mara’s trafficking and her later fraudulent marriage since “all black people look the same”).¹⁶ As for Mara, before travelling to Germany, she changes her style completely, switching “African cloth” for “European dresses” (48). The irony, of course, is that her attempt at European mimicry is not intended for the Europeans’ acceptance, but for her African husband’s (who also wants to assimilate a European status, but to impress his African lover Comfort). If any, Akobi’s materialistic lover Comfort would be the one who most closely replicates Fanon’s Manichean model, where Europeans embody the supposed perfection Africans lack and therefore wish to imitate. Mara and Akobi, on the other hand, have chosen other Africans as objects of desire: Mara only wants to please her African husband, while Akobi desires to possess his African lover (Higgins 316–17). Indeed, the only reason Akobi wants to Europeanize himself (and thus traffic Mara) is to lure Comfort. As for Mara’s Westernized clothes, those register neither in Akobi’s nor in German people’s eyes, to whom Mara looks like a pitiable hybrid, a “monkey in jeans” who will only be good for cheap sex (Darko 70).

As an illegal immigrant in Europe, Mara quickly finds out that “life here in Germany for [ … ] black people, from Africa especially, is very very hard” (76). Trying to warn her, Osey explains to Mara that in “the eyes of the people here, we are several shades too black for their land. And many, not all, but many, don’t like us, because for them we are wild things that belong in the jungle. I told you they call us monkeys, didn’t I?” (76). Osey continues, “[one] or two monkeys about the civilised man’s house are acceptable, but when the monkeys send for their long line of relatives and friends, the ‘civilised’ house owner begins to react” (76). Mara hence learns that “German people, or at least those who represent them, don’t want many of us here in their country, so they do all they can to make things very difficult for us, so that we will feel humiliated and think of returning to our homeland as a palatable alternative” (perhaps Osey should clarify to Mara that German people don’t want many Africans in Germany legally because Mara’s white clients daily prove to her that they certainly enjoy the benefits of illegal Africans’ occluded exploitation) (76–77).

Still, for a former sex slave like Mara, returning has lost its allure. Mara even imagines her mother looking at her body now, and the embarrassment she would feel because once “a prostitute, always a prostitute” (119). The abuse she has received from her husband and her clients does not offer Mara anything to look forward to in Ghana, while her current situation may not look like “a wholly undesirable life” (Joyce, Dubliners 29) since for the first time she has gained some control over her body and her finances. She has entered the lucrative porn industry, as she is now “to be seen in a couple of more sex videos” and stage “shows”; she confesses that she has “plunged into [her] profession down to the marrow of [her] bones,” so much that she can “no longer remember or imagine what being a non-whore is” (139, 31, 39). Darko thus provides readers with a quasi-heroine who, in spite of all her suffering, manages to utilize German immigration laws to her advantage and punish evildoers. Through an anonymous letter to the German government, she gets Akobi imprisoned and his lover Comfort deported. She now supports her family in Africa and moves to a different city to work for a new pimp. All in all, readers can see that Mara does achieve some agency in the end as she is the one choosing her destiny.¹⁷

Yet Mara’s last choice remains open to interpretation since we know that she has become a drug addict dependent on cocaine (the new pimp [Oves] “gives us ‘snow’ to sniff, to make us high”) with her psyche and body mutilated after years of exploitation (139). Through words that don’t sound very empowering at all, Mara admits: Oves “is my lord, my master, my pimp. And like the other women on my left and right [prostitutes in the brothel], I am his pawn, his slave and his property” (3). The pervasive racism of the country, on the other hand, leaves Mara with scant job opportunities outside the sex industry. As for her maltreatment, she must accept it as a consequence of her status since she is not registered as a legal sex worker and therefore cannot ask for protection against violence or enjoy social benefits.¹⁸ And while it is true that “agency and victimhood are not mutually exclusive[, and that] victims are also agents who can change their lives,” this novel’s end shows that, regardless of her resourceful attempts to gain independence, Mara has become a battered drug addict still dependent on exploiters because of her limited options. As for the money she now earns, it comes from men who treat her as a “monkey” prostitute with an impending expiration date—if her illegality ever comes to light.

Sex Trafficking in Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail: “Imagine how lucky those children are!”

A former political prisoner in Nigeria now exiled in the United States, Chris Abani has received numerous accolades for his trajectory as a writer.¹⁹ In the tradition of towering figures in Nigerian literature like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Ben Okri—yet with a distinct lyrical style—Abani has carved his own path and surfaced as a so-called “third generation” voice, addressing through his characters’ background stories the social and political problems facing his home country after independence (Novak 33).²⁰ Since his youth, Abani positioned himself as a committed writer not afraid to reveal his political and social concerns, and, like the Kenyan Ngugi, he often denounced the abuses and corruption of his government, enduring harsh repercussions.²¹

Both Abani and Darko have achieved more fame internationally than in their home countries. Abani gained especial recognition with GraceLand (2004), where the author touches upon the consequences of neocolonialism in Nigeria through the eyes of an adolescent boy, trying to show, in the author’s own words, “an epic representation of a culture [ … ] through a very intimate portrait” (qtd. in Ellis 22). Among the many relevant social issues addressed in GraceLand, the young protagonist finds out about the “rampant” global business of organ trafficking from Nigeria to the United States (here, with the complicity of the Nigerian military), Abani’s explicit commentary on the connivance of legitimized local institutions and others in the developed world in importing the latest kind of African natural resources (Kattanek 429).

In Becoming Abigail, Abani also employs a child/adolescent main character, but this time he faces the creative challenge of speaking from the perspective of a young female to address the difficult subjects of child abuse and sex trafficking. And he does so successfully, as the largely positive critical reception of his novella shows. In “Introduction: Provisional Notes on the Nigerian Novel of the Third Generation,” Pius Adesanmi and Chris Dunton positively judge that Becoming extends “the boundaries of the Nigerian novel” (viii). Chika Unigwe for her part praises “Abani’s language” and especially admires “Abigail’s voice,” which she finds “convincing” (“Of Phases” 112). Regarding Abani’s narrative style, Francesca Giommi observes that the writing “proceeds through fleeting brush strokes [that create an atmosphere] of a dream-like vision” (178). Other critics have pointed out that the author effectively fuses prose with poetry in “a constant dialogue” between the two genres to achieve a narration that speaks with “precision of language and beauty of imagery” (Ellis 23).

Abani’s lyricism in Becoming thus manages to transport readers directly into the child’s psychological subjectivity, blurring clear-cut assumptions on victims and victimizers. With ease, the author captures the disturbed mind of a sexually abused and emotionally numb Igbo girl, unsettling throughout readers’ notions of right and wrong. Even though the topic of sex trafficking could easily lead a writer to represent a child as a helpless victim, Abani crafts his young protagonist as a “remarkably resilient” girl who, like her biblical namesake, shows intelligence and strength: in sharp contrast to Darko’s younger Mara, Abigail is not green (Dawson 188). Yet both female characters undergo similar circumstances when it comes to their trafficking, while ironically their families in Africa assume that these girls have been touched by the magic wand of “civilization” and therefore push them to leave their native homelands.

For the purpose of this analysis, both Beyond and Becoming enrich our understanding of trafficked victims’ predicament because the authors reflect upon the status of trafficked illegal immigrants in Europe. Very likely, if Abani’s Abigail was older and had stayed in prostitution (a typical scenario in her situation), she would have followed Mara’s steps: she would have been considered an illegal prostitute, so she would have had to endure the harshest exploitation in silence. But in Abani’s novel, the fact that Abigail is an underage victim of sex trafficking determines that she is not committed to a detention center like older trafficked prostitutes, but to the care of a male social worker—for Abigail, her first real love, for the British legal system, her latest sexual predator.

Abani’s focus also differs from Darko’s in that the Ghanaian author provides a detailed account of Mara’s trafficking in the first person and from her point of view. Darko showcases how German laws enable Mara’s exploitation and force her to hide. In contrast, Abani resorts to free indirect discourse and a third-person omniscient narrator who immerses readers in Abigail’s traumatized mind. The Nigerian author focuses on the child’s earlier development in Africa and the legal system’s procedures in England once the trafficked victim is rescued. Unlike Darko, then, Abani does not describe the trafficking process in detail, but rather Abigail’s life of abuse in Nigeria and, once in England, the effects of government agencies’ interventions on a young girl’s already damaged psyche.²²

In Becoming, the narration alternates between Abigail Tansi’s haunted reflections on “Now” (in London) and “Then” (for the most part in Nigeria, but also, as the story progresses, in London). Abani traces the troubling experiences of the young Abigail, whose mother (also named Abigail) dies giving birth to her, leaving her alone with an emotionally numb father who is incapable of dealing with his grief, much less taking care of his daughter. Haunted by her mother’s ghost and completely ignored by her father—who remains unaware of the sexual abuse she undergoes at the hands of older relatives—Abigail begins to self-mutilate, cutting herself with knives. Instead of listening to his own child’s cries for help, her father at times seems more worried about the family dog not being interested in the doghouse he has built. Even a psychiatrist disregards her evidently traumatized self and dismisses her with aspirins for children. Readers also learn that her cousin Mary’s husband (Peter) has been living in London and frequently returns to Nigeria to entice “lucky” children with promises of a better future in England. When Peter offers to take Abigail with him to London, her father accedes, hoping for the better life the girl could enjoy away from the economically depressed postcolonial Nigeria. “London will give you a higher standard of education and living,” he imagines (Abani 66). Intelligent and perceptive, Abigail senses the danger and wonders what has happened to all the other children who immigrated to London with Peter, yet her father’s suicide days later seals her fate. In this way, much like Mara in Beyond the Horizon, Abigail is trafficked to Europe to become a sex slave. Once in London, Abigail confirms her earlier suspicions that Peter’s business is non sancto. One night Peter brings a “client” who attempts to rape her, but because of Abigail’s fierce reaction when defending herself, Peter chains her to a doghouse (echoing the one her father built in Nigeria for their dog). Here, the child receives shockingly inhuman treatment but, with her cousin Mary’s help, Abigail finally manages to escape after biting Peter’s penis off during one of her daily rapes. She is found by the police and placed under the legal care of Derek, an older social worker with whom the child starts a passionate love affair that brings about their abrupt downfall.

Abigail, the child transitioning into adolescence, is the center of Abani’s novella. Her conscious wanderings dominate the action from beginning to end, while other characters (for the most part male) stand as a backdrop to her truncated development. Her father fails to protect her in every sense and actually encourages her migration to Europe with her exploiter. Peter, Abigail’s trafficker, unsettles readers from the beginning, as we learn that he sexually abused the girl when she was ten. Derek, the social worker “helping” her after her rescue, becomes another source of sexual exploitation (although the author is careful to avoid any explicit manipulation at Derek’s hands and presents Abigail as aware and choosing this relationship). Abigail’s representation is thus provocative. She has been prey to men who ignore or exploit her, but, at the same time, the author depicts her as strong and in control of her decisions, especially when it comes to her sexuality. The irony, of course, is that by the end of the novella she is only fourteen.

Her harrowing evolution from child into adolescent occupies, for the most part, the “Then” part of the story. Abigail is trying to “become” her own self, independent of her mother’s residual emotional weight. The narrator describes Abigail’s sexual explorations, prematurely and intrusively initiated at only ten years old, impassively: “Peter had cornered her in the bathroom. She didn’t shrink away like other girls her age might have at being surprised in the bathroom with her underwear halfway down[.] Surprised at her fearlessness he kissed her, his finger exploring her” (61). Earlier in the story, readers learn that she “had been ten when her first, fifteen-year-old cousin Edwin, swapped her cherry for a bag of sweets” (28). From Abigail’s perspective in the “Now” sections, we see that “[none] of the men who had taken her in her short lifetime had seen her”—for the most part, readers don’t know who these men are, when they have “taken” her, or whether that has occurred with her consent (26).

Consistent with the way children often internalize sexual abuse—regarding themselves as agents or instigators rather than victims—the narration disquiets readers because it shows an ambivalent reaction to sexual exploitation on the part of the child. Telling the story from the child’s point of view allows Abani to craft Abigail as empowered, even when the context suggests otherwise. At times, Abigail seems to regret that men didn’t stop long enough to contemplate her in all her pubescent beauty. In one of the “Then” sections, the narrator offers a titillating glimpse into the child’s body through a panoramic description (not seen in any of the other sex trafficking narratives analyzed in this work), highlighting her sensuality from the perspective of an arguably “male gaze” (Mulvey 1175):

None of them noticed the gentle shadow her breasts cast on her stomach as she reached on tiptoe for the relief of a stretch. Never explored the dip in her lower back where perspiration collected like gentle dew. They never weighed the heft of her breasts the way she did, had, from the moment of her first bump. [ … ] This wasn’t an erotic exercise, though it became that, inevitably. At first it was a curiosity, a genuine wonder at the burgeoning of a self, a self that was still Abigail, yet still her. With the tip of a wax crayon she would write “me,” over and over on the brown rise of them[.] But not the men in her life; they hadn’t really stopped long enough. She was a foreign country to them. One they wanted to pass through as quickly as possible. (Abani 26–27)

Like Mahasweta Devi’s land metaphor in “Douloti,” Abani explicitly refers to the child’s body as a landscape where men dig and pillage.²³ In this way, the author sprinkles the narrative with conquistadorial references, entwining colonialism with rape. Abigail’s “light complexion,” in fact, “was a throwback from the time a Portuguese sailor had mistaken her great-grandmother’s cries” (26). Sex trafficking thus brings attention to the continuity of these colonial rapes, now without the “hassle” of having to leave the comfort of Europe. By linking the colonial landscape with a female body, Abani resorts to a familiar trope but still keeps the emphasis on Abigail’s experience. In “The Female Body and Nationalist Discourse,” Lydia Liu brings attention to the problem of national identity and how women have conventionally served as a metaphor for the colonized nation violated by the colonizer.²⁴ The fairness of such comparison remains open to question given the links between chauvinism and nationalism and the traditional use of women to embody the purity of the nation. To utilize raped women as an emblem of colonized nationhood diminishes the relevance of the traumatic event endured by the woman for a “higher” communal purpose.²⁵ In Abani’s case, readers perceive a clear anti-colonial subtext (especially when he refers to racist attitudes in England), yet his focus remains on Abigail’s mental and physical deterioration in themselves rather than showing an allegory of his nation.

Once in London, for example, Peter takes Abigail shopping to buy her make-up and revealing clothes, which makes the shop assistants suspicious and uncomfortable but not provoked enough to react or attempt to protect the girl (or hesitant to take action for fear of being perceived as racist). After all, Peter and Abigail are black in a predominantly white society, where prejudice is very prevalent. Abigail still remembers her father’s “funny stories” about the days he visited London with his wife and found it almost impossible to rent a place to stay—the “No Black. No Irish. No dogs” landlords’ signs left them with few options (55–56). Reminiscent of some of Caryl Phillips’s novels, Abani touches upon English xenophobia and the implication that Africans encompass an underclass that should be prevented from entering the country by strict legal means. Abigail “realized pretty quickly, from the way she was treated at the shops [ … ], that the English could forgive you anything except a foreign accent” (69). But against Frederic Jameson’s contested assertion in “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” that postcolonial literature is always allegorical, in Becoming we read Abigail’s story, more than Nigeria’s history.

As for the representation of sexual violence, unlike all of Abigail’s erotic “voluntary” sexual encounters that are described in some detail, when it comes to rape by an unknown person, the description turns to the usual tropes of pain and torture. Abigail’s first rape in London happens one night when she is awakened by Peter and a man at the door of her room. Later they are joined by a petrified Mary. The man “pulled away [her bedclothes]. She scuttled back but he grabbed her and pushed his weight onto her. She fought him. Shouting. The sound caught deep in her throat. Calling for Mary. The man was like an incubus. The weight of his lust crushing her[.] Peter smiled triumphantly; turning to the man, he said: ‘Fuck her. Fuck her hard’” (88). While this particular scene seems intended to reveal more about Peter’s ruthlessness than Abigail’s inner mental state, focalizing the rape through spectators complicates the ethics of representation as it adds a voyeuristic element to the violence witnessed not present in the works previously analyzed—Peter watching and encouraging the rape, Mary unable to react or help the child. Abigail, however, is no passive victim, as she knees her abuser with all her strength so that he finally leaves her. Enraged, Peter sentences the child to life in a doghouse: Abigail “[only] felt Peter grab her from behind[.] He handcuffed her. Arms behind her back. Slipped a harness with a ball into her mouth and over her head, chipping her teeth in the process. Grabbing her by the hair, he dragged her out of the bedroom. ‘You want to bite like a dog? I’ll treat you like a dog’” (89).

There, Abigail undergoes appalling tortures that include Peter raping her daily, starving her, peeing over her, and sometimes forcing her to drink “his piss” (92). “And this is how she was made. Filth. Hunger. And drinking from the plate of rancid water. Bent forward like a dog. Arms behind her back. Kneeling. Into the mud. And the food. Tossed out leftovers. And the cold. And the numbing of limbs that was an even deeper cold[.] Her shame was complete” (91). The narration continues, “Fifteen days, passing in the silence of snow. And she no longer fought when Peter mounted her” (95). Although the violence Peter inflicts on Abigail to “break” her into prostitution seems outrageous, Abani’s account is realistic when compared with trafficked women’s testimonies (Abani in fact based Abigail’s story on the real case of a Nigerian girl enslaved in London in 1996).²⁶ The tortures endured by sex slaves during the first weeks of their training as described by sociological data verge on cruel sadism, while the intensity of the aggression frequently depends on the willingness of the victim to cooperate with pimps and traffickers. By presenting such gruesome descriptions, the author averts the possibility of denial or abstraction on the part of readers who must confront the trauma the girl is experiencing.²⁷ The power of Abani’s novella, then, lies in his forcing the audience to acknowledge Abigail’s exploitation, and, by implication, that of trafficked minors in the developed world.²⁸

As for the tortures Abigail suffers in London, they showcase indirectly the character of the pimp/trafficker—like in Darko’s novel, a callous African man. Interestingly, both African authors treat traffickers with little sympathy, providing no motivation or insight into their lives other than their cruelty and greed. The writers’ commentary on patriarchy and exploitation in their home countries is evident. These representations suggest that women (particularly poor, uneducated females or children) still constitute the most vulnerable group in African societies, while the unequal economic development between first and third world provides the grounds for a lucrative business where some African men seize the opportunity for profit and act as intermediaries satisfying a demand. As an indictment of their own culture’s role in the exploitation, both Darko and Abani represent African traffickers as unscrupulous and cruel, yet both works make it clear that the global economic context plays a crucial role and that those who will ultimately pay for sex with African women and girls are anonymous men from the global North—the ones with purchasing power. In economic terms, trafficked women satisfy an increasing demand in more affluent nations, so African traffickers import them into Europe for some men to consume them, while authorities prosecute them for supplying the service. The unchanging variable in these narratives is that consumers for the most part remain anonymous. In Abani’s novella, the majority of the men or boys who have had sex with Abigail, with a few exceptions, are conspicuously absent from the text, although readers can assume that they have contributed to Abigail’s progressive descent into alienation and death.

As far as the technicalities of the crime, much like with Mara in Beyond, Peter traffics Abigail into England with a “fake passport” and a “forged visa,” so, for legal purposes, Abigail “was a ghost” (110). Under these circumstances, she initially remains under her trafficker’s control. Yet once the British police find Abigail, her illegality does not translate into immediate criminalization and deportation because her age pigeonholes her in the category of “victim.” Instead, the child is placed under the care of the government social services—and readers may wonder if a detention center would have offered a wiser alternative to the male social worker’s house.

The affair with Derek disturbs. Presented from Abigail’s point of view, the author leads readers to suspend judgment and see this as a chosen relationship where the child is finally getting the love and acceptance she craves. Abani gives his audience glimpses of some redeeming moments for Derek, such as when, after the rescue, he waits patiently for Abigail to start talking without pushing her, staying by her side holding her hand while she sleeps. He seems genuinely caring and concerned for her well-being. He understands her love of literature and brings her a book that touches the girl’s toughened heart. Yet the fact that Abani depicts a British social worker having sex with a rescued child exposes the social worker’s lack of professionalism, while the broader context points to the problems of rescue work and the perilous status of former victims in Western nations (Crowhurst 222). Abani’s ability to involve readers in the child’s confused and traumatized mind generates both aversion towards Peter (the African trafficker) and sympathy towards Derek (the British social worker), even though both men are actually taking advantage of the child sexually. Abigail’s subjectivity leads readers to forgive Derek, if only reluctantly, yet when looking at their affair from a detached perspective (like that of the legal system at the end of the story), Derek becomes just another egotistical abuser in the child’s life.

The fourteen-year-old shows clear signs of psychological damage, which any moderately competent social worker would not miss. Derek has even seen the results of Abigail’s self-mutilation in his own house, when one night after having sex with him, the girl heats a needle and uses her skin as a canvas to burn a map of indelible blisters all over her body. Abani’s inclusion of the girl’s self-injury scene at the social worker’s place is no minor detail—arguably, it only reinforces Derek’s predator status. Since early on, Abigail’s representation discloses symptoms of acute trauma (psychiatrists explain that children wound their bodies as a coping mechanism for the hurt they cannot verbalize, for the psychological wounds to provoke a tangible pain more manageable than the emotional one, and for the numbing effect of the endorphins released by the body to soothe it).²⁹ It makes sense that Abigail would not discern the impact of her actions when harming herself, but readers can safely assume that any person in Derek’s field would identify the pathology and know better than to take advantage of a child’s conspicuous mental instability and hunger for a paternal figure.

That Abigail stays in the male social worker’s house also brings attention to the inadequate resources devoted to dealing with trafficked survivors in destination countries.³⁰ In reality, what to do with sex-trafficked children presents a difficult problem for state authorities, since subsequent action depends on the country’s priorities and the resources allocated to them.³¹ If illegal immigrants are regarded as an unwanted group of disposable people, little will be invested in their welfare (Salman Rushdie, among other postcolonial writers, has written forcefully about the despondent situation of immigrants from poor countries in England).³² Authorities generally alternate between confining rescued victims in hospitals, if they are obviously hurt, or prisons. The survivors’ illegality complicates their already perilous situation, since their status will eventually result in deportation. In the story, Abigail “was being held” at a hospital that “felt more like a correctional facility” to her, while readers find no specific references to how long or why she has been staying in Derek’s house, other than to continue their affair; in fact, we don’t even know when or where this dangerous liaison started (109). Readers also notice that everything comes to light because Derek’s wife catches them having sex in their kitchen, not because the state services intervene or bother to follow up on Abigail’s progress.

The narrative thus implies that the British state contributed to Abigail’s final breakdown much as the German government enabled Mara’s exploitation in Darko’s tale. The question remains, however: why does Derek, an agent of the British state system, sexually exploit Abigail in this novella? The narrative seems to absolve Derek’s pedophilic desires (perhaps he loves her) rather than condemn their unequal power relation (perhaps he takes advantage of her) as readers remain inside Abigail’s mind, and she clearly loves him. Yet beyond Derek’s weaknesses, what the narrative hints, most importantly, is that an underage trafficking victim does not generate enough concern or care from the state authorities who should have helped her heal (after all, the child has just been “rescued” from an appalling ordeal). Here, the sexual abuse has only changed hands: from an African trafficker, to a British social worker—the first one raped her by force; the second one seduced her into consensual sex. Once confronted with Derek’s wife accusations, the legal system does work, yet, ironically, in Abigail’s mind the state’s actions only suffocate her and push her further down into depression. Derek and Abigail are forbidden to see each other again, and despite Abigail’s incessant pleas to the court that this was “her” decision, Derek goes to prison (117).

As the tension grows through the pages, readers understand that Abigail’s has been a life of loss: she lost her mother at birth, and with that her father, who never emotionally recovers and ends up killing himself; she loses her innocence at ten when a cousin rapes her and threatens to kill her if she ever tells anyone; she loses her freedom and dignity at her trafficker’s house; she loses her lover because the laws do not allow for that relationship to prosper. In the end, rather than remain once again in the hands of the British social services or other exploitative men, Abigail decides to take control of her body, the only possession she has. In this way, where the legal system has deemed her a victim, Abigail becomes an agent. And yet, like Mara’s, such agency seems trivial when looking at the broader context of her exploitation. Indeed, Abigail does not meet a conventional happy ending: haunted, traumatized, and scarred, she determines to put an end to a life of abuse and neglect. The narrative ominously closes with Abigail standing at the sphinxes by the river Thames, “contemplating the full measure of her decision” [my emphasis] (119).³³

Conclusion

Both Beyond and Becoming, though admittedly tough to read because of their occasional crudity, are fruitful representations of coerced trafficked victims’ situations from the perspective of postcolonial “hybrid” writers who have experienced life in both the global South and the global North without becoming Spivak’s “native informants” for the West. The authors bring attention to the undeniable role patriarchal African cultures play in the exploitation of women, but they also uncover how first-world states contribute to the exploitation of third-world victims of sex trafficking through inefficient and xenophobic laws in destination countries. These novels highlight a contradictory reality, where “Africans themselves become the latest natural resource exported to the West” to perform an increasingly demanded service (in this case, provide sex) but, once there, are criminalized and punished for not legally belonging (Novak 43). By narrating the stories of women sexually exploited as a result of their transnational migration, these authors attempt to awaken audiences to the effects of “illegality” and “citizenship” for those caught in it, revealing the cracks within schizophrenic societies whose legal institutions, through exclusion and domination, attempt to enact a façade of coherence that quickly collapses in the presence of imported sex slaves. Novels like the ones analyzed then unsettle assumptions about nationhood or even national security (are these women/children a threat?), forcing readers to confront and address the hidden, less appealing symptoms of globalization.

Darko looks especially at patriarchy in her own culture and how female exploitation can be taken to extremes when women are removed from their communities (in terms of family and home country) because they lose all protection by remaining outside the law and thus depend entirely on their African and European traffickers. The women’s illegality is actually the condition that ensures their silence and subordination. Readers notice that, during most of the narrative, Darko emphasizes Mara’s victimhood by painting an utterly oppressive picture of a woman who has no choice but to comply with exploiters because of her poverty and citizenship status. Mara’s situation only improves slightly once she acquires a fake visa, which grants her a certain degree of autonomy. Abani, for his part, centers his novella in Abigail’s subjectivity and the sexual abuse she receives in her native country, which leads readers to understand why she ends up choosing such an unsettling relationship with the British social worker. By crafting a social worker as a final agent of (veiled) exploitation in Abigail’s life, the author sheds light on the difficult situation of rescued children in destination countries, while he exposes a bureaucratic system that does not assign importance to illegal survivors but rather treats them as a problem the state needs to get rid of.³⁴ Echoing Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of the “homo sacer,” Mara and Abigail show that trafficked women are regarded as (un)wanted intruders in the developed world, bringing attention to the contradictions of the current discourse on migration which implies that some lives are worth living (legal citizens’) and others are disposable (illegal migrants’).³⁵

At the same time, the narratives illuminate that sex trafficking continues because the demand in more affluent countries persists and grows. While in these works consumers remain for the most part elided, unmistakably, Mara and Abigail’s bodies bear the marks of their occluded presence (in different ways: Mara’s clients mutilate her as part of the “service” they pay for, whereas Abigail self-mutilates because of her traumatic past and present of abuse). Darko and Abani hint that their female protagonists have experienced torture and rape in the global North, but as Said has analyzed in Orientalism (1978), those European men who despise them also desire them, providing enough reason for traffickers to continue to import African girls into the “overdeveloped” world (Gilroy 220).

As noted above, the post-independence global economic configuration has generated more social divisions, especially after free market policies were forcefully implemented in the 1960s in third-world countries. With these changes came the vital need to migrate in search of survival. Denise A. Segura and Patricia Zavella observe that the “magnitude and intensity of transnational migration has created tremendous transformations in the economic, political, social, and cultural spheres” that demand solutions and approaches other than punitive ones for illegal immigrants (2).³⁶ In the case of sex-trafficked women, sociological studies prove that all the penalties only turn them into the easy prey of traffickers and consumers, so novels like Becoming and Beyond highlight the need to think of alternatives. By listening to former sex slaves’ claims that capturing and prosecuting them for prostitution, or rescuing and placing them in detention centers or hospitals while awaiting trial does not help, but traumatizes them more, one can see that the authorities have been missing the point. Bebe Loff and Jyoti Sanghera remind readers of the importance of asking “trafficked people themselves about the problems they face and involve them in finding solutions [as well as being] aware of the [ … ] risks that come from being a non-citizen or illegal alien” (566). For it to be effective, then, action should originate from those affected, not be imposed from above. Only when these women’s voices are heard and governments begin to pay attention to what they need (instead of the authorities’ subjective assessment of their needs), will we see real change and some hope for them on the horizon.

Not coincidentally, both works’ ends are bittersweet: Mara remains an exploited prostitute hooked on drugs, and Abigail will likely put an end to her life. The protagonists of these tales claim agency and act in what they consider to be their best interest given their constrained possibilities, but their outcomes do not bring much relief. Still, thus far, we have followed the wretched lives of sex trafficked victims/survivors. In a more daring stylistic move, however, the novel analyzed in the next chapter will only show their deaths.

NOTES

1.  Nancy Fraser explains that in the so-called Third World “neoliberalization was imposed at the gunpoint of debt, as an enforced programme of ‘structural adjustment’ which overturned all the central tenets of developmentalism and compelled post-colonial states to divest their assets, open their markets and slash social spending” (557).

2.  This refers to Ghana in the 1990s, at the time of Darko’s Beyond. As of now, Ghana is showing signs of economic recovery. Nigeria, on the other hand, is undergoing political and economic chaos. See John Mulholland reporting on Ghana for the Guardian and “Violence in Nigeria: The Worst Yet” in The Economist in this bibliography.

3.  The US, for example, has implemented a program to grant visas to trafficked victims (T non-immigrant visas), but those are only offered to subjects willing to testify against traffickers. Although these visas would seem potentially helpful, their restrictions actually turn them into a mixed blessing, especially since the recounting of traumatic experiences has been proven to be psychologically harmful. Cathy Caruth notes in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996) that “modern neurobiologists point out [that] the repetition of the traumatic experience in a flashback [for instance, during trial] can itself be retraumatizing; if not life threatening, it is at least threatening to the chemical structure of the brain and it can ultimately lead to deterioration”; Caruth adds that “this would also seem to explain the high suicide rate of survivors[,] who commit suicide only after they have found themselves completely in safety” (63). Coinciding with Caruth’s diagnosis, Chris Abani’s work under analysis features a survivor’s probable suicide, so, evidently, the solution needs to be reconsidered. Some trafficked women, understandably, do not wish to re-live the whole process, while the T visa does not allow for them to work and earn a living during the trial period, forcing them instead to remain in government shelters that many victims experience as virtual prisons (and where cases of rape by the authorities have been reported).

4.  To this day, Darko has published Beyond the Horizon (1995), Spinnweben (1996), The Housemaid (1998), Verirrtes Herz (2000), Faceless (2003), and Not without Flowers (2006), the last two novels published in her native Ghana.

5.  Sheldon X. Zhang explains that “[n]umerous jobs are readily available to illegal migrants, as these jobs have been rejected by the native workforce because the pay is too low, the working conditions are too harsh, or, as in prostitution, the endeavor is itself illegal” (105).

6.  To be clear, Darko did not emigrate to Germany for prostitution.

7.  Jamie Martin explains that in “the 1980s and 1990s, the IMF became the handmaiden of the Washington Consensus [after Bretton Woods], insisting that the world’s diverse national economies be reshaped according to its austere rules”—which ultimately impoverished already vulnerable populations even more (“Were We Bullied?”).

8.  One of the character’s choice is ambivalent, as she apparently believes she will be working as a nanny and not a sex worker, but she consents to her trafficking to Europe.

9.  This plot twist feels rushed (and less convincing) within the context of a novel in which the author paints throughout an utterly oppressive picture of her female main character. Still, it is not unbelievable or implausible. Darko also resorts to detectivesque themes in another of her novels, The Housemaid (1998).

10.  See Gayle Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex” in this bibliography.

11.  See María Frías’s “Women on Top: Prostitution and Pornography in Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon” in this bibliography.

12.  Lacan explains that the ego is fundamentally divided. The ego is subordinate to the laws of language and, at the same time, it does not know what it desires because it was alienated from its jouissance when it left the Real and entered the Imaginary. In other words, what a person really wants is often repudiated and censored. For a good introduction to Lacan’s thought, see Žižek’s Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (1991) in this bibliography.

13.  See Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in this bibliography.

14.  On several interviews, Darko clarifies that Mara does not represent herself or her experience in Germany, but that of other African women she met there, who were forced to prostitute themselves by husbands or boyfriends. Much of the material for Beyond comes from the stories Darko heard from their first-hand accounts.

15.  Unigwe’s On Black Sisters Street also resorts to the same trope; the narrative is ambiguous about how much families back in Africa actually know about the young women’s jobs in Antwerp.

16.  In “Transnational, Transcultural Feminisms? Amma Darko’s Response in Beyond the Horizon,” Mary Ellen Higgins argues that in fact Darko “updates” Fanon’s analysis because she shows African men and women who wish to seduce people of their same race (Akobi wants his African lover Comfort, and Vivian wants her African husband Osey) (316–17). In Darko’s novel, white people are only used by Africans to obtain residence papers, whereas Africans remain objects of desire.

17.  For an analysis on the situation of African women who get control of their sexuality and finances working as prostitutes in Europe see María Frías’s “Women on Top: Prostitution and Pornography in Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon” in this bibliography.

18.  Prostitution is legal in Germany. Those sex workers who choose to legally register pay taxes but they also have access to benefits like health care (or protection in case of violence as they can call the police). Readers can assume that Mara does not enjoy legal protection or health benefits, so she must remain “underground.” Thus Mara’s situation cannot be interpreted in the same way one would analyze the status of legal sex workers.

19.  Throughout his career, Abani has won several awards for his literary production; among them, the Lannan Literary Fellowship in Poetry in 2003, a Hellman/Hammet Grant in 2003, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction.

20.  Offering a critical view, Adesanmi and Dunton wonder whether “the third generation novel, like its predecessors, has been hijacked by Western mechanisms of legitimation and validation, with the attendant consequence of a new canon being formed and consolidated by Euro-America around the works of writers such as [Helon] Habila, [Ngozi] Adichie, [Chris] Abani, [Sefi] Atta, and [Uzodinma] Iweala” (IX). (Chika Unigwe and Unoma Azua are also considered part of the so-called “third-generation” Nigerian writers).

21.  During his youth in Nigeria, Abani was involved in politics, which resulted in his incarceration on three different occasions (in 1985, 1987, and 1990) for allegedly inspiring left-wing, subversive activity against the government. Like Elvis, his main character in GraceLand (2004), Abani experienced torture during his time in jail. Abani’s book of poetry Kalakuta Republic (2001) deals more specifically with his imprisonment and torture.

22.  In this respect, England has been notorious for the “imprisonment” of children of illegal immigrant parents awaiting deportation. The lasting psychological damage that such measures cause innocent youngsters (i.e. post-traumatic stress disorder) have been addressed and debated in England’s High court, which pressured the current coalition government into action. As an attempt to solve the problem, Nick Clegg, England’s Deputy Prime Minister since the 2010 general elections, promised an end to the detention policy and more humanitarian treatment for illegal children, but, arguably, ingrained racist attitudes towards immigrants will have to transformed before any significant change occurs. For a relevant analysis of the provision of state services to sex-trafficked migrants in another European country (Italy), see Isabel Crowhurst in this bibliography.

23.  I am not suggesting that Mahasweta Devi’s “Douloti the Bountiful” or Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail treat their female characters as nationalistic fetishes. While Mahasweta’s writing style has little in common with Abani’s, both authors bring attention to the predicament of the trafficked woman’s subjectivity above all, while they grant their characters strength. Douloti’s circumstances differ considerably from Abigail’s (for example, while Abigail reads and enjoys Chinese poetry in translation—and thus readers infer she is educated—Douloti is illiterate and carries her father’s bond debt, which makes her situation far more constrained). Coincidentally, both girls are trafficked at age fourteen.

24.  In “Women on Top: Prostitution and Pornography in Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon,” María Frías notes that “[m]ale African writers such as Armah, Farah, and Soyinka have associated the exploited African women’s bodies with the Mother Africa trope. These authors have equated African women’s bodies with colonial and postcolonial corruption, and have tended to resolve the stories with unhappy endings” (8).

25.  Liu observes that “the female body is ultimately displaced by nationalism, whose discourse denies the specificity of female experience by giving larger symbolic meaning to the signifier of rape” (44).

26.  See Francesca Giommi, page 177, in this bibliography.

27.  See Amy Novak’s “Who Speaks? Who Listens: The Problem of Address in Two Nigerian Trauma Novels” (2008) in this bibliography.

28.  Despite the tenor of the sexual aggression, Abani does not dilute the violence and thus prevents readers from approaching the subject of sex-trafficked minors from a safe distance (as, for example, García Márquez’s sex trafficking tale analyzed in the previous chapter, whose main character, coincidentally, is also fourteen years old).

29.  Readers can assume that even an entry-level social worker would know this. For a detailed description of such pathology, see Digby Tantam’s Understanding Repeated Self-Injury (2009) and Steven Levenkron’s Cutting: Understanding and Overcoming Self-mutilation (1998) in this bibliography.

30.  Closer to the end of the story, the narrator refers to Abigail “[b]ack at the hospital,” so it is unclear whether Derek has removed her only temporarily from a hospital, or if the girl was living in Derek’s house on a more permanent basis while awaiting a foster home, for example (Abani 117). In any case, that the male social worker can take her from the hospital to his house shows that Abigail’s mental health is not of primary concern for the state authorities who should have looked into her situation. See Crowhurst for a related analysis of state services for immigrant sex-trafficked women in Europe.

31.  The British social system’s flaws have been openly criticized in the media, which denounced that the abuse of some children has escaped authorities for too long (with some children even dying). On February 1, 2011, the social affairs correspondent for the Guardian reported that “[c]hildren’s services should be subject to random, unannounced inspections and Ofsted [Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills] should lose powers to evaluate the failings of key workers in abuse cases,” based on what “an independent review of England’s child protection system has found” (Ramesh). The main problem identified by Professor Eileen Munro in “an interim report for education secretary Michael Gove [is that] the safety of children is being compromised because social workers spend too much time on paperwork and focusing on targets driven by the requirements of Ofsted evaluations” (Ramesh). Ramesh was specifically addressing negligence due to excessive bureaucracy and inefficiency, not social workers sexually abusing trafficked children, but it reveals problems with the system that Abani incorporates into his story.

32.  See Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands (1981) in this bibliography.

33.  This London spot bears an association with suicide. Abani’s final location choice is relevant because it suggests that Abigail will probably kill herself.

34.  Of course, I am not suggesting that all social workers follow Derek’s pattern, but that the system in England has serious problems for which it has been widely criticized. See Ramesh in this bibliography.

35.  See Girogio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998) in this bibliography. Drawing from archaic Roman law, the Italian philosopher here develops the notion of the “homo sacer” to designate those individuals deemed outlaws by the state, who can thus be killed with impunity (12).

36.  See Segura and Zavella for an excellent study of migration from so-called developing to developed nations. The editors focus on the US-Mexican border, examining the policies adopted to stop illegal immigration and showing how the numbers of preventable deaths have risen to an alarming degree because the safest crossing paths have been militarized, leaving only the extremely dangerous areas as an option for potential immigrants. Regarding the laws on healthcare for illegal migrants once inside the US, Segura and Zavella note that preventing illegal immigrant mothers from accessing prenatal care has caused a considerable rise in birth problems and deaths. The US government places the blame on the migrants who subject themselves to the perilous conditions of migrating illegally, but the subtext is that these people’s lives are expendable.