Becoming Abigail Read online

  Critical Praise for GraceLand by Chris Abani

  • Winner: 2005 Hemingway/PEN Prize

  • Winner: 2005 Silver Medal, California Book Awards

  • Winner: 2005 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award

  • Finalist: 2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize

  • Shortlisted for the Best Book Category (Africa Region) of the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize

  • 25 Best Books of 2004: Los Angeles Times

  • Best Books of 2004: San Francsico Chronicle

  • Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection

  • New York Times Book Review Summer 2004 “Vacation Reading/ Notable Books” Selection

  “Extraordinary . . . This book works brilliantly in two ways. As a convincing and unpatronizing record of life in a poor Nigerian slum, and as a frighteningly honest insight into a world skewed by casual violence, it’s won­derful . . . And for all the horrors, there are sweet scenes in GraceLand too, and they’re a thousand times better for being entirely unsentimental . . . Lovely.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “Chris Abani’s GraceLand is a richly detailed, poignant, and utterly fascinating look into another culture and how it is cross-pollinated by our own. It brings to mind the work of Ha Jin in its power and revelation of the new.”

  —T. Coraghessan Boyle, author of Drop City

  “Abani’s intensely visual style—and his sense of humor— convert the stuff of hopelessness into the stuff of hope.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “GraceLand amply demonstrates that Abani has the energy, ambition, and compassion to create a novel that delineates and illuminates a complicated, dynamic, deeply fractured society.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “A wonderfully vivid evocation of a youth coming of age in a country unmoored from its old virtues . . . As for the talented Chris Abani, his imaginary Elvis is as memorable as the original.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “GraceLand teems with incident, from the seedy crime dens of Maroko to the family melodramas of the Oke clan. But throughout the novel’s action, Abani keeps the reader’s gaze fixed firmly on the detailed and contradictory cast of everyday Nigerian life. Energetic and moving . . . Abani [is] a fluid, closely observant writer.”

  —Washington Post

  “Abani has written an exhilarating novel, all the more astonishing for its hard-won grace and, yes, redemption.”

  —Village Voice

  “Ambitious . . . a kind of small miracle.”

  —Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “It is to be hoped that Mr. Abani’s fine book finds its proper place in the world . . . [Abani’s] perception of the world is beyond or outside the common categories of contemporary fiction and he is able to describe what he perceives compellingly and effectively . . . [Abani captures] the awful, mysterious refusal of life’s discrete pieces to fit.”

  —New York Sun

  “An intensely vivid portrait of Nigeria that switches deftly between rural and urban life.”

  —Boston Globe

  “Singular . . . Abani has created a charming and complex character, at once pragmatic and philosophical about his lot in life . . . [and] observes the chaotic tapestry of life in postcolonial Africa with the unjudging eye of a naïve boy.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Abani masterfully gives us a young man who is simultaneously brave, heartless, bright, foolish, lustful, and sadly resigned to fate. In short, a perfectly drawn adolescent . . . Abani’s ear for dialogue and eye for observation lend a lyrical air . . . In depicting how deeply external politics can affect internal thinking, GraceLand announces itself as a worthy heir to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Like that classic of Nigerian literature, it gives a multifaceted, human face to a culture struggling to find its own identity while living with somebody else’s.”

  —Minneapolis Star-Tribune

  “GraceLand is an invaluable document.”

  —San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Remarkable . . . Chris Abani’s striking new novel, GraceLand, wins the reader with its concept—an Elvis impersonator in Nigeria—and keeps him with strong storytelling and characterization . . . GraceLand marks the debut of a writer with something important to say.”

  —New Orleans Times-Picayune

  “GraceLand paints an often horrific and sometimes pro­ found portrait . . . Though a work of fiction, GraceLand also serves as a history far more powerful and fantastic than any official account of Nigeria’s teetering progress toward democracy.”

  —Seattle Weekly

  “The book’s juxtaposition between innocence and bleak survival is heartrending . . . Sharp, graphic, and impossible to dismiss.”

  —Seattle Times

  Becoming Abigail

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Akashic Books

  © 2006 Chris Abani

  ePUB ISBN-13: 978-1-936-07020-6

  ISBN-13: 978-1-888451-94-8

  ISBN-10: 1-888451-94-7

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2005934817

  All rights reserved

  Cover photo by Pierre Bonnard, © 2005 Artists Rights Society (ARS),

  New York/ADAGP, Paris

  Akashic Books

  PO Box 1456

  New York, NY 10009

  [email protected]

  www.akashicbooks.com

  Table of Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  I

  Now II

  Then III

  Now IV

  Then V

  Now VI

  Then VII

  Now VIII

  Then IX

  Now X

  Then XI

  Now XII

  Then XIII

  Now XIV

  Then XV

  Now XVI

  Then XVII

  Now XVIII

  Then XIX

  Now XX

  Then XXI

  Then XXII

  Now XXIII

  Then XXIV

  Then XXV

  Then XXVI

  Now XXVII

  Then XXVIII

  Now XXIX

  Then XXX

  Now XXXI

  Then XXXII

  Now XXXIII

  Now XXXIV

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Chris Abani

  Novels

  Masters of the Board

  GraceLand

  Poetry

  Kalakuta Republic

  Daphne’s Lot

  Dog Woman

  Hands Washing Water

  For Blair.

  And my nieces: Chinwendu, Nkechi, Natasha, Ibari, and Kelechi.

  Lay It As It Plays

  I

  And this.

  Even this. This memory like all the others was a lie. Like the sound of someone ascending wooden stairs, which she couldn’t know because she had never heard it. Still it was as real as this one. A coffin sinking reluctantly into the open mouth of a grave, earth in clods collected around it in a pile like froth from the mouth of a mad dog. And women. Gathered in a cluster of black, like angry crows. Weeping. The sound was something she had heard only in her dreams and in these moments of memory—a keening, loud and sharp, but not brittle like the screeching of glass or the imag­ined sound of women crying. This was something entirely different. A deep lowing, a presence, dark and palpable, like a shadow emanating from the women, becoming a thing that circled the grave and the mourners in a predatory man­ner before rising up t
o the brightness of the sky and the sun, to be replaced by another momentarily.

  Always in this memory she stood next to her father, a tall whip of blackness like an undecided but upright cobra. And he held her hand in his, another lie. He was silent, but tears ran down his face. It wasn’t the tears that bothered her. It was the way his body shuddered every few moments. Not a sob, it was more like his body was struggling to remember how to breathe, fighting the knowledge that most of him was riding in that coffin sinking into the soft dark loam.

  But how could she be sure she remembered this correctly? He was her father and the coffin held all that was left of her mother, Abigail. This much she was sure of. However, judging by the way everyone spoke of Abigail, there was nothing of her in that dark iroko casket. But how do you remember an event you were not there for? Abigail had died in childbirth and she, Abigail, this Abigail, the daughter not the dead one, the mother, was a baby sleeping in the crook of some aunt’s arm completely unaware of the world.

  She looked up. Her father stood in the doorway to the kitchen and the expression she saw on his face wasn’t a lie.

  “Dad,” she said.

  He stood in the doorframe. Light, from the outside security lights and wet from the rain, blew in. He swallowed and collected himself. She was doing the dishes buried up to her elbows in suds.

  “Uh, carry on,” he said. Turning abruptly, he left.

  The first time she saw that expression she’d been eight. He had been drinking, which he did sometimes when he was sad. Although that word, sad, seemed inadequate. And this sadness was the memory of Abigail overwhelming him. When he felt it rise, he would drink and play jazz.

  It was late and she should have been in bed. Asleep. But the loud music woke her and drew her out into the living room. It was bright, the light sterile almost, the same florescent lighting used in hospitals. The furnishing was sparse. One armchair with wide wooden arms and leather seats and backrest, the leather fading and worn bald in some spots. A couple of beanbags scattered around a fraying rug, and a room divider sloping on one side; broken. Beyond the divider was the dining room. But here, in the living room, under the window that looked out onto a hill and the savanna sloping down it, stood the record player and the stack of records. Her father was in the middle of the room swaying along to “The Girl from Ipanema,” clutching a photograph of Abigail to his chest. She walked in and took the photograph from his hands.

  “Abigail,” he said. Over and over.

  “It’s all right, Dad, it’s just the beer.”

  “I’m not drunk.”

  “Then it’s the jazz. You know it’s not good for you.”

  But she knew this thing wasn’t the jazz, at least not the way he had told her about it on other countless drunken nights. That jazz, she imagined, was something you find down a dark alley taken as a shortcut, and brushing rain from your hair in the dimness of the club found there, you hear the singer crying just for you, while behind her a horn collects all the things she forgot to say, the brushes sweep­Chris ing it all up against the skin of the drum. This thing with her father, however, was something else, Abigail suspected, something dead and rotting.

  “Shhh, go to bed, Dad,” she said.

  He turned and looked at her and she saw it and recognized what it was. She looked so much like her mother that when he saw her suddenly, she knew he wanted her to be Abigail. Now she realized that there was also something else: a patience, a longing. The way she imagined a devoted bonsai grower stood over a tree.

  Now & Then

  Now

  II

  She thought it might rain but so far it hadn’t and though a slight breeze ruffled the trees, it wasn’t cold. Even down here on the embankment, the night was as crisp and clear as a new banknote. She suddenly wished she had seen a London fog, the kind she had read about; a decent respectable fog that masked a fleeing Jack the Ripper or hid Moriarty from Sherlock’s chase. She stopped walking. She was here.

  The sphinxes faced the wrong way, gazing inward con­templatively at Cleopatra’s Needle rather than outward, protectively, but Queen Victoria had ruled against the expense of correcting the mistake. The obelisk, an Egyptian souvenir, had been a gift from Mohammed Ali. She wasn’t sure who he was, but she was pretty sure he wasn’t the boxer. Abigail looked at the cold smiles of the sphinxes. Like them, she was amused at the ridiculous impotence of the phallus they stared at. A time capsule was buried beneath the stone tumescence containing, among other things, fashion photos of the most beautiful women of the nineteenth century.

  She stood gazing out at the dark cold presence of the Thames. Breaking open a packet of cigarettes she fumbled clumsily to light one. She didn’t smoke. With her first drag she imagined she could see the ghosts of those who had also ended it here. At the Needle. Suddenly afraid she smothered a sob, choking on the harshness of the tobacco, eyes tearing. Like the loss of her virginity.

  None of the men who had taken her in her short lifetime had seen her. That she wore bronze lipstick, or had a beautiful smile that was punctuated perfectly by dimples. That she plaited her hair herself, into tight cornrows. That her light complexion was a throwback from that time a Portuguese sailor had mistaken her great-grandmother’s cries.

  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 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. None of them knew she had cracked her left molar falling out of a mango tree like a common urchin. Or that in his fear for her safety and the shame of her tomboy nature, her father beat her. Nor did they know that since then, the lushness of mangoes stolen and eaten behind sacks of rice in the storeroom brought her a near sexual release.

  But then neither had she really seen them. She tried to. Staring. Watching from the corner of her eye. Trying to piece them together. But they gave nothing, these men. They were experts at hiding themselves, the details of their lives. Even when they walked hand in hand with her in public, it was never the luxuriating of one person in the presence of an equal. No. They led her, pulled her behind their chest-thrust-forward-see-how-lucky-I-am-to-get-such-a-pretty-young-thing walk. They never undressed with her, or for her. There was always a furtive shame to their nudity, and a need to be done quickly, to hide it, theirs and hers, behind clothes again. And this thing that was shameful about them, they put on her, into her, made hers. They left her holding it, like the squish of a tree slug in the mouth, slimy and warm. Something you wanted to spit out and yet swallow at the same time. And though there had only been a few men, sometimes she felt like there had been whole hordes.

  She had been ten when her first, fifteen-year-old cousin Edwin, swapped her cherry for a bag of sweets. The caramel and treacle was the full measure of his guilt. Then while stroking her hair tenderly, he whispered softly.

  “I will kill you if you tell anyone.”

  Then

  III

  And even light can become dirty, falling sluggish and parchment-yellow across a floor pitted by hope walked back and forth, the slap of slipper on concrete echoing the heat gritting its teeth on the tin roof, the sound sometimes like rain, other times like the cat-stretch of m
etal expanding and contracting.

  And there was also the business of reading maps. Her favorite thing. The only things she read. Other than old Chinese poetry in translation. Fragments, memorized, came to her. Mostly from Emperor Wu of Han. Dripping melancholy and loss; she couldn’t get enough. The poem: Autumn Wind . . . I am happy for amoment/ And then the old sorrow comes back/ I was young onlya little while/ And now I am growing old/ . . .

  She was lying face down over a large map spread out on the living room floor, studying it intently. She ran her fingers meditatively over the spine of the Himalayas, while peering at the upside-down fish that was New Zealand. There was something in the way the Amazon basin curled up, all green and fresh like a new fern unfurling, that reminded her of a story she had read somewhere about a Chinese poet from a long time ago who tried to live his entire life as a poem.

  He was famous for the beautiful landscapes he created in low wide-lipped #1#2 pots—white sand flowing like a bleached sea floating over the loam holding it up, sweeping up to the miniature trees that would inspire the later Japanese bonsai, rocks lounging in the shade, and little pools with the littlest fish. At least that’s what she imagined. There were no pictures to go by, nothing but what her mind could conceive. But it was the story of how he made his tea that stayed with her. Came flooding back as her hands roamed over the smooth green of the map. She mentally went through the process, making a love of it, measured in objects.

  An intricate box made from rice paper that allowed just the right amount of air through, held up by a copper handle; and inside, a shallow pot with a lotus in the center. Then at dusk, the freshest tips of green tea picked and wrapped in the petals of the rare blue lotus from Egypt. The box, hung from the rafters of his veranda, took in all that was night. Dawn: the box taken down; the wait for the lotus petals to unravel slowly with the sun; and a pot of hot water, brought to boil; the leaves, dropped in the pot of water; inhaled, the gentle aroma of green tea, suffused with the longing of lotus.