By FERNANDA EBERSTADT
Published: April 29, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/books/review/book-review-on-black-sisters-street-by-chika-unigwe.html?ref=books
Opponents of immigration often prefer to ignore the tragic forces that
compel people to risk death in order to reach our lands of plenty, not
to mention the horrors that often await the "lucky" few, once they do
arrive. Imagine an Underground Railroad in which the conductor robs
and rapes his passengers, and the station porter, once they've
disembarked, ushers them into a new form of slavery. This unholy
traffic in impoverished strivers, imported to service needs Westerners
don't want to think about, is the subject of Chika Unigwe's novel "On
Black Sisters Street."
Unigwe, who was born in Nigeria, now lives in Belgium. In a rich mix
of schoolmarm British and pidgin English, spiked with smatterings of
Igbo and Yoruba, she tells the stories of four African sex workers
sharing an apartment in Antwerp's red-light district. But it is only
when Sisi, the rebel among them, is murdered, that her three
housemates emerge from their self-protective anonymity to share their
family histories.
The person who has brought these women together, it turns out, is
Dele, a "big man" back in Lagos whose wealth comes from selling
African women to Western European brothels. "Every month I send gals
to Europe. Antwerp. Milan. Madrid. My gals dey there. Every month,
four gals. Sometimes five or more," he boasts to Sisi when she first
visits his office. "You be fine gal now. Abi, see your backside, kai!
Who talk say na dat Jennifer Lopez get the finest nyansh? . . . As for
those melons wey you carry for chest, omo, how you no go fin' work?"
Dele's offer is brutally upfront: the fee he charges his "gals" for
spiriting them into the longed-for West is 30,000 euros, a debt that,
combined with the rent they will owe "Madam," will take many years to
repay. Yet each of these four women accepts Dele's hard bargain,
simply because their alternatives are worse.
Ama, raised in a middle-class milieu in which ladies debate the
respective merits of houseboys versus serving maids, has been kicked
out of her home for revealing that her saintly seeming stepfather,
assistant pastor at the Church of the Twelve Apostles of the Almighty
Yahweh, had been raping her since she was 8 years old. It is as much a
revolt against human hypocrisy as material need that drives Ama to
become one of those lewd women the pastor likes to curse from the
pulpit.
Efe, who at 16 was knocked up by the local hair-weave merchant, goes
abroad so she can support not only her baby but the three siblings who
depend on her. Determined to give her beloved son a better life, Efe
aims to amass enough money to open a whorehouse of her own one day.
The woman who calls herself Joyce, in fact born Alek, is a Sudanese
refugee who was gang-raped as a child by the janjaweed militia and
witnessed the massacre of her family. Alek has been coaxed into
prostitution by Polycarp, the Nigerian peacekeeper she had hoped to
marry. It's a testament to Unigwe's ability to convey human complexity
that Polycarp, to ease his conscience at having jilted her, is paying
off her debt to Dele, an anomaly that gives her unique privileges in
the brothel hierarchy.
The dead Sisi, however, is the woman whose story is in some ways the
most wrenching. Hers is a tale not of incest, rape or genocide but of
the accumulated disappointments that can grind even the most
determined soul into defeat. In the scattered chapters revealing the
events that lead to Sisi's murder, we learn how her father, a bright
and ambitious village boy, was obliged by his parents to give up his
studies and become a lowly clerk in order to help his nine younger
siblings through school. "I had bookhead, isi akwukwo. I could have
been a doctor. Or an engineer. I could have been a big man," Sisi's
father fumes. Education is everything, her parents teach the girl.
"Face your books, and the sky will be your limit." They place all
their hopes in their only daughter, whose brilliant academic career
will surely win her an important job. Together the family members
dream, laugh and squabble about the kind of company car and driver
Sisi will have, the sort of big house she will live in, with a high-
walled garden.
Once she has graduated, however, Sisi discovers that without the right
connections, her business degree won't get her an interview for even
the humblest job. It's from a kind of defiant determination "to grab
life by the ankles and scoff in its face" that she decides to make her
fortune as an Antwerp "window girl," enticing men into her booth for
paid sex. It is from defiance, too, that she makes the fatal decision
to flee the brothel, stop her monthly payments to Dele and start a new
life with her gentle Belgian boyfriend.
Unigwe has a deep understanding of poverty and its hungers. She
insists that we regard her four central characters as cool-eyed
gamblers, not passive victims, as women willing to play "the trump
card that God has wedged in between their legs" in exchange for the
material goods they crave, the chance of coming home rich enough to
buy their families cars, apartments and businesses. She makes you feel
a wrenching sympathy for Efe's willingness to lose her virginity to a
fat, smelly old man because she hopes he will give her mauve lipstick
and "good-quality hair extensions." When Sisi, newly arrived in
Belgium, is greeted with a paper-bag lunch of orange juice, bananas,
supermarket rolls and jam, Unigwe shows her calculating just how much
this feast would cost in Nigeria, "how it was enough to feed her
family. . . . The magenta-colored spread delighted her taste buds. She
could get used to this, to living like this. The life of the rich and
the arrived."
Unigwe conveys both what is miraculous about the West to foreign eyes
and what is awful — how people live and die alone, unmourned, without
the sustenance of family and neighbors. And she shows us how the women
who survive their pact with Dele choose to deploy their hard-won
wealth. While Efe stays put, running her own brothel, Joyce and Ama
prefer to build their businesses back home.
Despite the horrors it depicts, "On Black Sisters Street" is also
boiling with a sly, generous humor. Unigwe is as adept at conveying
the cacophony of a Nigerian bus as she is at suggesting the larger
historical events that propel her characters. "On Black Sisters
Street" marks the arrival of a latter-day Thackeray, an Afro-Belgian
writer who probes with passion, grace and comic verve the underbelly
of our globalized new world economy.
Fernanda Eberstadt's latest novel, "Rat," has just been released in
paperback.
A version of this review appeared in print on May 1, 2011, on page
BR12 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Cash for Dreams.
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