Nigeria's Third-Generation Literature by Ode Ogede

Author:Ode Ogede
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LITERARY CRITICISM/African, LITERARY CRITICISM/Modern/21st Century, SOCIAL SCIENCE/Ethnic Studies/African Studies
ISBN: 9781000852141
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2023-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

5 Subverted Narrative of Disappointed Expectations: Immigration, Chattel Sex Slavery or Prostitution, Horrors of the Unutterable on the Borderline of Magical Realism (Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters Street)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003290186-5

The topics that preoccupy Chika Unigwe in her complex immaculately executed novel On Black Sisters Street and the style in which she explores them all firmly plant her text within the genre of Nigeria's third-generation fiction. These subjects are the perniciousness of class privilege, traditional gender biases within African societies, Christian fundamentalism, and their intersections with immigration. The text plays out the ways in which these forces work cooperatively with other on-going debacles, introduced by this novel for the first time into the third-generation fiction, such as African internecine wars and the United Nations' posturing on aid promotion and peace-keeping in war-torn regions of the continent, to push African women into the sex slaughterhouses of Europe. The chief narrative form is the personal story told by each of her characters, supplemented by authorial observation and commentary conveyed with intensity of vituperation. It is a style given definition by her central concern to explore the conditions of citizens of the country both in their societies and elsewhere globally, with the aim of throwing light on the fetters of tradition, economic shackles, and other facets restraining especially women, the most vulnerable members of their societies.

On Black Sisters Street, a novel about sexual servitude of the most uncharitable kind, is a stellar example of the destabilized story of unfulfilled dreams. It portrays the ordeals of African women exported to Europe for the purpose of female prostitution under the surveillance of pimps in collaboration with their male clients. These women are taken to Europe knowing little or nothing of the terror they are about to undergo. But the dreadful situation they are soon to be confronted with is that prostitution in Europe with imported African women is a spectacularly abhorrent, life-changing practice. It is a chattel form of slavery which not only takes advantage of every available opportunity to maximize the sexual and economic exploitation of the victims of the trade but also finds striking ways to aggressively snuff out every ounce of dignity from its victims, who are mostly forced against their will into prostitution.

On Black Sisters Street depicts the impact of the worst and most reprehensible form of merchandising of the bodies of African female migrants in Europe—the turning of these women into objects of erotic and lucrative swindling. The unspeakably sordid and horrific events experienced by the four aspiring young Nigerian women are made even more deplorable through the underhand manner in which their troubles were orchestrated by unfavorable conditions in West Africa, even long before these women's expatriation. Problems within Africa itself are thus the fodder feeding the demands of the giant European sex industry. The women are lured away from countries in the throes of economic collapse and imminent political instability by dreams of work in Europe that promises to make their lives better, but their abysmal experiences as prostitutes only spark new anxieties.

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