AISCLI Summer School
World Cultures & Literatures In English
Citizenship and Human Rights in
Contemporary Nigerian Literature
Giulia D’Agostini
18 September 2014
giuliadago@gmail.com
• Generations of Nigerian literature
• A central theme in contemporary Nigerian/postcolonial literature:
between citizenship and human rights (Hannah Arendt, Giorgio
Agamben)
• Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail
Nigerian literature
Earlier authors (“first-” and “second-generation” authors)
•
•
•
•
•
Chinua Achebe
Wole Soyinka
Flora Nwapa
Buchi Emecheta
Ken Saro-Wiwa …
Themes
• The colonial encounter and pre-colonial order
• A state that does not become a nation
• Post-independence disillusionment
Nigerian literature
Younger novelists (post-2000, “the children of the postcolony”):
•
•
•
•
•
•
Chris Abani
Chimamanda Adichie
Helen Oyeyemi
Chika Unigwe
Helon Habila
Sefi Atta …
Themes
• Migration and global inequality
• Violent encounters with the State (dictatorships 1980s and 1990s)
• The democratic failure of the Nigerian state
…increasingly through the lenses of human and citizenship rights
Citizenship and Human Rights
Definitions and relationship
Hannah Arendt, “The Decline of The Nation‐state and
the End of the Rights of Man,” in The Origins of Totalitarianism:
• Denaturalisations during and after World War I
 Statelessness. Two solutions: repatriation or naturalisation
• Unwanted human beings
• How to deal with them? Or, how to re-exile a refugee?
 Police
• Citizenship and concentration camps
• What of human rights?
Citizenship and Human Rights
The supposedly ‘natural’ rights, to which a human being should be
entitled for the sole reason of being human, “proved to be
unenforceable […] whenever people appeared who were no longer
citizens of any sovereign state” (293). The human being deprived of
political status, the “man who is nothing but a man,” was destined to
lose “the very qualities which ma[de] it possible for other people to
treat him as a fellow-man” (300): in other words, “the world found
nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human” (299).
The human being who is not a citizen of a sovereign state does not have any
“right to have rights”  his/her very inclusion in the human family, his/her
humanity, is put in question
Citizenship and Human Rights
Arendt’s “abstract nakedness of being human”
and Giorgio Agamben’s “bare life”
Homo Sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita, 1995 (Homo Sacer:
Sovereign Power and Bare Life)
1) bios; 2) zoē; 3) bare life
1) political existence; 2) animal existence, the fact of birth; 3) what
becomes of the human being when s/he is deprived of political life
Homo sacer: an emblem of bare life, the human who is stripped bare
of political existence (cf. the refugee, the human being in the
concentration camp, the stateless, …). Between human and animal,
between life and death. Can be killed with impunity.
Chris Abani
Narrative production
•
•
•
•
•
GraceLand (2004)
Becoming Abigail (2006)
Song for Night (2007)
The Virgin of Flames (2007)
The Secret History of Las Vegas (2014)
 Works that explore what happens to the human in very complex,
even extreme, situations
 Often abstracting tendencies (most evident in Song for Night)
Becoming Abigail
Abigail’s story
• Haunted by the ghost of her mother, who died in childbirth
• Guilt, desire to create memory of her and frustrating invisibility
(ambiguous relationship with a beloved father)
• Scarification
• At 14, she is taken to London by Peter
• Peter attempts to force her into prostitution
• Resistance and new love – a love that the state cannot accept
• Encounter, and confrontation, with the state (GB)
Becoming Abigail
Form
•
•
•
•
•
Novella
Lyrical prose
Often grotesque imagery
Disturbing images of the human reduced to sub-human life
And yet, “I really believe that we are never more beautiful than
when we’re most ugly” (Ted Talk)
• Fragmented narrative:
 “Now” chapters where Abigail is sitting by the Thames
 Alternate with “Then” chapters telling her story from birth
Becoming Abigail
Animalisation
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 ever deeper cold.
Without hands, she rooted around her skin with her nose. Feeling
the brandings, for the limits of herself. […]
Without hands, she bit at the itches from blood vessels dying in the
cold. From the intimacy of dirt. Bending. Rooting. Biting. Her shame
was complete.
[…] [A] girl slowly becoming a dog. (91-92)
Becoming Abigail
Animalisation
Fifteen days, passing in the silence of snow.
And she no longer fought when Peter mounted her.
Wrote his shame and anger in her. Until. The slime of it threatened
to obliterate the tattoos that made her.
Abigail. […]
One night.
Unable to stand it anymore, she screamed. Invoking the spirit of
Abigail.
And with her teeth tore off Peter’s penis. (95-97)
*
 Resistance even from within a dehumanised space
Becoming Abigail
The grotesque and the beautiful
Abigail ran out, half-naked, the severed penis clutched in her hand.
Though the streets were crowded, only a few people noticed this
gorgon with bloody mouth and hands, and the grisly prize she held up
as a torch as she ran. (99)
*
• Hyperbolic
• Shows Abigail’s invisibility
• The grotesque and the beautiful
 The very idea of beauty is reconfigured
Becoming Abigail
Even the name she gave, Abigail Tansi, drew a blank. It was like she
didn’t exist. And she didn’t, because Peter had used a fake passport
and a forged visa to bring her into the country and she was registered
everywhere under that fake name, a name she had forgotten.
She was a ghost. (110)
Becoming Abigail
The ghostly
• Her mother: a traumatic past that’s forever coming back, asking to
be addressed
• The main character’s spectrality:
• Invisibility in her father’s eyes: no one has ever really seen her
• Invisibility of the victim of human rights abuses
• Condition of invisibility of the undocumented migrant before the
law
• A metaphorical rendering of bare life, as a form of (sub)human
existence (cf. tropology of animalisation)
• Caught between life and death, humanity and animality
Becoming Abigail
Trafficked
Trafficking Protocol, 2000: not a human rights instrument, it has the
purpose of promoting international cooperation in the fight against
organised crime.
• (a) [...] the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or
receipt of persons, by means of threat or use of force or other
forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the
abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or
receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a
person having control over another person, for the purpose of
exploitation. […]
Becoming Abigail
• Abigail conforms perfectly to the definition of the victim of
trafficking provided in Art. 3 of the Trafficking Protocol:
– Transported to the UK “for the purpose of exploitation”;
– Deceived as to her destiny there;
– Abused with the purpose of being rendered subservient.
• What is more, she is a child (< 18): “(c) The recruitment,
transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of a child for the
purpose of exploitation shall be considered ‘trafficking in persons’
even if this does not involve any of the means set forth in
subparagraph (a) of this article”
• Yet, she is not an uncomplicated victim: her love story with Derek
 Derek, “this man-child who was her social worker” (54)
Becoming Abigail
Eroticism
Abigail was giving. For the first time, she wasn’t taken. And she wept
for her joy and for the loss of Derek’s wife upstairs dreaming the
dreams of love amidst all that floral wallpaper, as though in an English
country garden. Abigail, this Abigail, only this Abigail, always this
Abigail, felt herself becoming, even in this moment of taking. (52,
emphasis added)
Becoming Abigail
Erotic love
• Self-realisation: a girl becoming a woman, re-appropriating her
own body
• A way to counter invisibility, spectrality
BUT the state sees only victimisation
 Derek is charged with sexual abuse of a minor
Paradox
• Abigail’s case is apparently perfectly dealt with in terms of human
rights protection
• But Abigail perceives it as a form of violence, as the paternalistic
disregard of her own will – even though she recognises that it is
difficult to tell a “vegetarian lion” from the others
Becoming Abigail
She had loved him so completely, and he her. But what are the limits
of desire? The edges beyond which love must not cross? Those were
questions she had heard discuss in these last few days. Discuss as if
she were a mere ghost in their presence. Called this thing between
Derek and her wrong. How could it be? (78)
*
Derek was fired from his job and brought up on charges for the
abuse of a minor. Nothing Abigail did helped. Her impassioned
denial. Her letter saying it was her fault. Her choice. But they said
they were doing this to protect her. That she didn’t know what
choice was. But she did. She who had been taken and taken and
taken. And now the one time she took for herself, the one time she
had choice in the matter, it was taken away. (117)
Becoming Abigail
‘Protection’: Yet another form of spectrality
• Abigail must remain confined to the role of the passive, ghostly
victim who can receive protection provided that she remains such –
a passive object of intervention – no agency, no choice
• She has to remain a victim, a child, even if she feels herself
becoming a woman
• BA exposes one of the greatest contradictions inherent in the
human rights project: human rights need bare life
Infantilisation and victimisation = spectralisation
• Abigail’s sacrifice and the ambiguous reassertion of her agency
savage-victim-savior
Makau Mutua, the savage-victim-savior “damning metaphor”
• Human rights, humanitarianism and the reproduction of a colonial
rhetoric (Enlightenment origins)
• Without victim, there is no savage nor savior the human rights
ideological enterprise collapses
• This doesn’t mean rejecting its potentialities, but acknowledging its
implications and perfectible nature
AISCLI Summer School
World Cultures & Literatures in English
Thank you!
giuliadago@gmail.com