Identity, Isolation, and the Igbo

So, I have not posted in awhile, mainly because my internet has been in and out. However, I have read two books during that time! Both are books by Chris Abani, and I have to say, I think I found one of my new favorite books, and it is rare for me to label a book a favorite.

First up was "Becoming Abigail". I was truly surprised at how different the style of writing was in this novella as compared to "Graceland". There is much less pure narrative going on, and a lot more poetry. Which is to say, I loved it, because I love poetic language. Yet many of the themes Abani touched on in "Graceland" are still present in this work--loss of a mother figure, conflicts with father, isolation, culture clashes, sexuality, temporal jumps back and forth. This particular novella focuses heavily on identity and the body. It centers around Abigail, an Igbo girl from Nigeria whose mother (also named Abigail) dies after giving birth to her. She always feels a bit of resentment from her father as if she killed his wife and her mother, and the fact that she appears almost physically identical to the Abigail of her namesake further complicates her issues of identity. In this story her cousin takes her to live in England, apparently as a kind gesture to "save" her, but in reality he sells her into prostitution and sexual slavery. Along the way she falls in love with her white married social worker, and they have a brief affair before being found out. Abigail often burns her own skin and this self-mutilation serves as a means to escape her body, but also as a way to demarcate physical differences between her and the mother whose ghost she struggles to break free from--and so simultaneously it is a means to accept her own body for what it is and make it palpable. There is also a lot in this story about memory, and how much is truth, and how much is made up. Do we ever have purely "true" memories? Along those lines, do authors have the responsibility to tell "truth" in memoir? Is this even possible?

I think the only way to give justice to this beautiful novella is to quote some of my favorite parts and let you see for yourself.

"Sometimes there is no way to leave something behind. Something over. We know this. We know this. We know this. This is the prevalence of ritual. To remember something that cannot be forgotten. Yet not left over. She knew this. As she smoked. She knew this. This. This. This. And what now?"

"Why did these people know nothing of this? Of the complexities of life and how you can never recapture the way a particular shaft of light, falling through a tree, patterned the floor in a shower of shadows. You just opened your heart because you knew there would be another shaft of light, another tree, and another rain of shadows. Each particular. Not the same as yesterday's. Not as beautiful as yesterday's. Only as beautiful as today's. Even the dead knew this."

"None of the men who had taken her in her short lifetime had seen her. ...They never weighed the heft of her breast the way she did, had, from the moment of her first bump. Sitting in her room, the darkness softened by a tired moon straining through dirty windows, she had rolled her growing breast between her palms like dough being shaped for a lover's bread. 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. And when she washed in the shower the next day, the color would bleed, but the wax left a sheen, the memory of night and her reclamation. 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."

There is so much more beautiful prose in this novella. I love the way Abani uses metaphor, and repetition. The way he can write from the mind of an adolescent woman so convincingly. His focus on memory and the body.

I thought I had read my favorite book by him. But then I read "Song for Night", another novella, and I was truly blown away. Wow. I didn't think I was going to enjoy this one because it is a war story and I'm not really one for "action" books. Instead I found a deeply moving, introspective, poetic novella about a young boy and his comrades who serve as mine diffusers in the civil war in Nigeria. It is about the war, and the situation in the country, but it isn't--underneath it all, it's a story about adolescence, love, betrayal, haunting, memory, pain, survival. However the boy's adolescence and coming of age is of course heavily colored by the fact that he is a child soldier, and that makes for a disturbing and melancholy storyline--just the type I enjoy, ha. The story opens with a discussion on silence. The opening line is, "What you hear is not my voice". This is foreshadowing for what is to come, but I won't discuss that so as not to be a plot spoiler. I will tell you that what the boy is literally talking about is the fact that he and his unit can no longer talk--their throats were cut by the army so that they had no more voices, rendering them unable to scream if they stepped on a mine and blew up--reminiscent of a certain scene in "Slumdog Millionaire". Consequently each chapter is titled with a different aspect of sign language that the children use to communicate, such as "Memory is a Pattern Cut into an Arm" and "Truth is Forefinger to Tongue Raised Skyward". I find this beautiful, and it really speaks to the themes of communication, language, and human connection found in the novella.

Again, this book speaks best for itself, so all I shall do now is quote some excerpts for you.

"There is a lot to be said for silence, especially when it comes to you young. The interiority of the head, whih is a misnomer-misnomer being one of those words silence brings you-but there is something about the mind's interiority no less that opens up your view of the world. It is a curious place to live and makes you deep beyond your years and familiar with death. But that is what this war has done."

"The next day, as one of us was blown up by a mine, we discovered why they had silenced us: so that we wouldn't scare eachother with our death screams. Detecting a mine with your bare toes and defusing it with a jungle knife requires all your concentration, and screams are a risky distraction. What they couldn't know was that in the silence of our heads, the screams of those dying around us were louder than if they still had their voices."

"I remember a group I saw once. Children without arms or legs or both, men with only half a face, women with shrapnel-chewed scars for breats--all of them holding onto life and hope with a fire that burned feverishly in their eyes. If any light comes from this war, it will come from eyes such as those."

"This is how we sign this: forefinger poniting to the sky while the whole body gyrates. For Ijeoma and me, play is a veiled thing, our own private language within a private language, sweeter for being secret. Rock, paper, scissors: one tap on our gun's stock, two taps, three. One tap. One. One tap. Two. A loss. Two taps. One. A win. Two taps. Two. A draw. Endlessly we play, never looking at eachother but smiling into the distance, hearts racing with the aniticpation. Then a steady hand, palm flat. Silence. Still we smile as we scan for the danger, our hearts beating. One. One. Two. Two. Two. Two. Three. Three. Three."

There are so many, many more amazing, quotable parts. Like the entire novella. Seriously. This is one the most physically grotesque books I have read, especially of Abani's, full of decapitated people and cannibalism and brute rape, and yet I find this to be one of the most poetic and beautiful novellas I have come across. Haunting. Now there's some foreshadowing for you. Read it.

Next up is what I think is Abani's last book at the bookstore (last time I was there)--"The Virgin of Flames". Just glancing at this novel (it is longer than the last two) tells me that it takes place in Los Angeles and it appears very different from any of his previous works. I am excited to read about my hometown, although I'm sad to leave the poetics of the last two novellas behind. I'll report back when I have something to say. Until then--