Unsettled Subjects: Sex Work in Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street

Abstract

This paper advocates that a reading of Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street must expressly engage the writer’s ambivalence about migration for sex work. The reading approaches OBSS from an angle which concedes the tensions in Unigwe’s depiction of her female characters’ lives between constraint and comfort, violence and possibility. This (re)negotiates the mobile spaces and affective labours of interpretation, sometimes facing obstacles, and at others managing to clear a provisional passage towards ideas that are present in the text, but with less obviousness than others. The discussion notes elements of intersecting identity for the writer and her female protagonists as black immigrants in a predominantly white European space (Belgium), positions which constantly enjoin them to (re)negotiate their respective roles as migrant African women. Acknowledging abuses against her black female sex worker characters while at the same time giving them an emphatic sense of worth, Unigwe humanizes her female protagonists, inviting readers to respond to the women’s moving circumstances, rather than pre-judge them according to their profession. The novel ‘produces vexed implications’ instead of being able to be ‘read as rigidly determinate’ (Omelsky 94). Unigwe undercuts the limitation of telling a ‘single story’ about African female migrants who are sex workers in Antwerp, imagining the complicated delineations of their subjection and agency.