Black Sisters Research Articles

A Realist Interpretation of Chika Unigwe's On Black Sisters' Street

This paper is a realist interpretation of Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street. The text is considered for study here because it dwells on the popular, the modern and social issues that define realist works. The paper involves realism of subject-matter and social realism as its theoretical tools for the evaluation of the research subject. Realism of subject-matter deals with themes that are common to society while social realism looks at the poor social conditions of the middle and lower classes. The paper is a qualitative research and it is based on a content analysis of the select text for study. The paper probes the ugly life of four young girls in Nigeria who are trafficked into Antwerp, Belgium, to work as prostitutes and earn income for their traffickers. The girls suffer from sexual abuse and deceit from their parents and older men. They undergo hardship as a result of lack of proper parental care, unemployment, insecurity and poor social services which make them frustrated. All of these make their lives vulnerable. Therefore, the study concludes that, well placed individuals, parents, civil society organizations and the government should make efforts to improve and secure the lives of vulnerable young women in Nigeria in order to help them escape from their vulnerabilities. Also, the novel’s authentic representation of life and society and its focus on character more than plot, including its attention to the lower class, the social and the contemporary issues fits it into the realist agenda.

Crossing the Lines of Race and Gender: The Quarrel on the Integration of the First Black Dominican Sisters in Natal

Black women expressed the desire to enter religious life in a Dominican Congregation of the Catholic Church of Natal for the first time in 1923. Since all the sisters of the two congregations they wanted to join (initially the Dominican Sisters of Oakford and, later on, the Dominican Sisters of Newcastle) were white, the question was raised of how the black candidates would relate to white sisters. Should they be fully incorporated into the congregation, simply attached to it or kept apart in an independent congregation of black sisters? The decision was in the hands of the women leading these congregations, of the local bishop and of the apostolic delegate sent by Rome to oversee the life of the church. This paper looks at the manner in which race and gender shaped the history of the black sisters in the Dominican Congregations of Oakford, Newcastle and eventually Montebello in inter-war Natal. It argues that, for different reasons and according to different timeframes, the leadership of the Congregations of Oakford and Newcastle ended up consenting to a model of segregation under the control of white sisters. In the Congregation of Newcastle, at least, the black sisters themselves favoured integration.

LINGUISTIC NUANCES AND CREATIVE TECHNIQUES IN CHIKA UNIGWE'S SELECT NOVELS

This paper examines the practical application of linguistic and creative tools in Chika Unigwe’ s On Black Sisters’ Street and Night Dancer. This study relies significantly on the notion of stylistics, with its creative and linguistic naunces, to enhance a more holistic understanding and appreciation of the select texts. Based on linguistic evidence, the novels reveal the physical and psychic effects of the postcolonial realities on the post-colonial subjects. The descriptive system of the texual analysis shows that the artistic values of the novels are illuminated primarily through the language and creative techniques employed by the author in the select novels. Unigwe’s creative manipulation of languages in the select texts shows that most Nigerian writers in particular have eventually arrived at a linguistic compromise between the target and the indigenous languages as well as pidgin. This does not just reflect the dexterousness of the author as a story teller with exciting linguistic, stylistic, and structural awareness but indeed, the nature of Nigeria as a dense linguistic ecology. The author’s skillful manipulation of the English language in such a way that it still encapsulates the indigenous knowledge and culture, as well as the striking creative techniques employed makes her message vigorous and captivating to the readers since they invoke clear mental pictures, code variation, linguistic appositioning/substitution, transliteration, narrative framing and other stylistic peculiarities, all for linguistic foregrounding, artistic beauty and signification. It is the opinion of this paper that more African writers, especially young and developing writers should creatively use the languages both foreign and indigenous at their disposal not just to suit the African milieu or experience but to promote the indigenous languages, and also widen and deepen the aesthetic taste of their artistic productions.

Writing an(Other) Europe: Challenging peripheries in Chika Unigwe’s fiction on Belgium

ABSTRACT Nigerian-born author Chika Unigwe situates a substantial part of her oeuvre in contemporary, multicultural Belgium, a location rarely explored in postcolonial literatures despite its colonial history and sizable migrant communities. This article demonstrates how, in her short fiction and her novels The Phoenix (2007) and On Black Sisters’ Street (2009), Unigwe’s literary portraits of the country, based on the perceptions and experiences of Nigerian migrants living there, challenge traditional centre/periphery dichotomies. Her characters, who are mainly young Nigerian women, move across boundaries between Africa and Europe, the big city and the provincial town, the city centre and the suburbs, the touristic historic centre and the red-light district, their mobilities characteristic of contemporary globalized societies. The fictions are analysed to highlight the equivocality of centres and peripheries and the permeability of the borders that separate them, as well as the resilient mobility of Nigerian migrants in Belgium.

Navigating diaspora: An experience of female characters of African descent in selected novels by African female writers

The emigration of female characters of African descent in Adichie’s Americanah, Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers, Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street and Darko’s Beyond the Horizon from Africa to Europe and the United States of America is initially filled with hope for their perceived utopian world. Leaving what was their home for the better part of their lives, places they would easily identify with, to alien borders in which they would have to restart their lives excited them. This feeling results from a state of ‘double consciousness’, described by postcolonial theorists as a perception of the world divided between two antagonistic cultures. The female characters’ perception of the first world as ideal counters their perception of Nigeria, Ghana and Cameroon as homes which have not provided a sense of fulfilment to their lives, thus prompting emigration from their respective indigenous homes to the first world. This paper entails an analytical discussion of the relationships among female characters of African descent and other characters as a way of negotiating their stay in diaspora. This paper is guided by concepts of Sisterhood as argued by Rosezellle and bell hooks; and concepts of postcolonial theory including unhomeliness and othering as articulated by Bhabha and Spivak.

Transnational sex trade: prostitution, identity crisis, and memories in On Black Sisters Street, by Chika Unigwe

Transnational sex trade: prostitution, identity crisis, and memories in On Black Sisters Street, by Chika Unigwe

White and Black Women under the Same Roof? The Early History of Montebello’s Black Sisterhood (1922–1939)

In 1922 four young Zulu women expressed the desire to join the Oakford Dominican Sisters, a congregation of mostly German Catholic religious women based in Natal. They were accepted to the novitiate in 1926 and subsequently took vows. This raised the issue of whether they should be fully part of the Oakford congregation or form a separate congregation for black sisters only under the guidance, at least for a while, of white sisters. In other words, should the Oakford congregation follow the segregation model in use in other Catholic religious congregations and most Protestant churches in southern Africa? The paper describes the battle that opposed, on this issue, the black sisters and their novice mistress, Sr Euphemia Ruf, on one side, and Archbishop Jordan Gijlswijk, the envoy from Rome, who wanted to maintain the unity of the congregation, on the other side. In the end, the argument that Zulu people were ‘too different’ from white people to live with them prevailed and a separate congregation of diocesan right, based in Montebello, where the black novitiate for black sisters had been established, was created in 1939.

Mobility Trope: Travelling as a Signature of the Afropolitan Female Quest for Existential Subjectivity in Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street

Abstract The mobility trope is a key aesthetic feature in Afropolitan fiction and it crystalizes as the act of travelling which has become an important subject-matter in postnationalist African fictions by women such as Chimamanda Adichie, Noviolet Bulawayo or Chika Unigwe as a way of intervention on the debate of the Afropolitan female quest for existential subjectivity in 21st century African fiction. This is against the backdrop of negative essentialism and the exertions of patriarchy evident in the representation of African women’s in 20th century African fiction. Drawing from the foregoing, this paper interrogates Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street (Hence OBSS) to demonstrate how the writer deploys mobility trope which manifest as travelling as a signature of the Afropolitan female quest for existential subjectivity. I argue in this paper that, though existing studies on OBSS portray Efe, Sisi, Ama and Joyce as exported commodities in neoliberal sex market, their relocation however opens up a new vista to understanding their motivation and quest for new subjectivity, empowered fluid agency, individual autonomy and translation into Afropolitans. This is within Achille Mbembe’s phenomenological criticism of Afropolitanism and a methology that is based on qualitative content analysis of the text—OBSS. On the long run, the identity which travelling confers on the female characters is fluid, as they represent an African being in a globalized world and a strong sense of cultural mobility.

‘Actually what is happening is that these constructs are being built for us’: appraising the status and future of race in progressive political struggle

ABSTRACT It is widely accepted that race is socially constructed. Despite this, deference to race witnesses scholarship and activism becoming complicit in the reification of race and the reproduction of its effects. Gilroy describes ‘‘the pious ritual in which we always agree that ‘‘race’’’ is invented but then are required to defer to its embeddedness in the world and to accept that the demand for justice requires us nevertheless innocently to enter the political arenas it helps to mark out’. This article engages this contention through reflection on the political deployment of race in Southhall Black Sisters. Empirical data and postracial theory extend the analysis to examine an applied postracialism and to consider whether we have arrived at a new antiracist conjuncture. Ultimately, this theoretically informed and empirically engaged article examines the role of race in antiracist politics and reflects on its future as a tool for performing such principled labor.

Domestic violence through the window of the COVID-19 lockdown: a public crisis embodied/exposed in the private/domestic sphere

COVID-19 has been recognized globally as a public health crisis, which has directly led to the deaths of more than 40,000 people in the UK (World Health Organization, 2020). The lockdown measures in the public sphere have created a window into the existing violence in the domestic sphere, as increasing incidents and reports have propelled what is more often thought of as private violence into the public gaze. The COVID-19 lockdown in the UK has made visible a collapse of the public and private sphere, blurring the boundaries between the two. As work and childcare have moved within the home, the structural inequalities of austerity have been exposed and the widening gender, class and racial cracks of society are illuminated in lockdown. Our paper draws upon an intersectional cultural and materialist analysis to explore how the cultural and economic bricks of the public and private sphere have been layered through the tools of i) representation and marginalization in the public sphere; ii) the division of labor through the devaluing of care-giving and precarious work; and iii) the location of public and private legal issues. Through this critical intersectional analysis, we explore how the material construction of the public and private sphere is being dismantled in the long-term everyday crisis interventions of domestic violence support groups, Refuge, Women's Aid and Southall Black Sisters, and in relation to the authors' local interventions with CLOCK.

On writing transnational migration in On Black Sisters’ Street (2009) and Better Never Than Late (2019): An interview with Chika Unigwe

ABSTRACT This interview with Nigerian writer Chika Unigwe, conducted by email over the course of three months in early 2020, addresses the ethics and aesthetics of representing sex trafficking and transnational migration in her award-winning novel On Black Sisters’ Street (2009) and her latest short story collection Better Never Than Late, which appeared in the US in 2020. The author discusses the discourse on migration and trafficking in both works, bringing much-needed nuance to the conversation. She pays particular attention to issues of “agency” and “vulnerability”, as well as authenticity, stereotyping, the “white gaze”, the publishing industry, and the recent controversy on Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt (2020). Drawing from her own personal story, Unigwe also talks in depth about the stylistic choices she made in depicting the immigrant experience in the global north and the difficulty of representing rape and trauma in fiction.

Birmingham Black Sisters: Struggles to end injustice

This article provides a critical reflection on Birmingham Black Sisters’ (BBS) experiences of fighting racism and sexism during the 1980s, having lain dormant for three decades and now attempting to regalvanise, the article explores some of the key tensions they faced and reflects on the possibilities for future activism. The article is based on both individual contributions from BBS members, who loosely maintain contact today, as well as BBS archives (minutes and reflection) and material from a publication of one of the male dominated organisations with which BBS was involved. The views expressed here, however, are the sole responsibility of the authors. We first outline the political context in which BBS was formed in the 1980s, why we came together and what we achieved. We then highlight some of the contradictions this presented, and how these unfolded then, and their impact on us today.

Religion, the secular and the left

This article outlines four common ways that religion and faith are managed within left-wing organising. The first (indifference) sees 'religion' and 'faith' as a set of traditional practices that will naturally disappear as modernity prevails. The second (hostility) sees religion in terms of oppressive institutions which need to be excised from public life. The third (limited welcome) takes religion as a racial category, highlighting links between Christian-Secular supremacy and colonial domination, but does not engage with religious content. The fourth (incorporation) recognises that spiritual practices can sustain collectives in effectively challenging oppression. These approaches are discussed through two contrasting examples of leftist organising. The first is Southall Black Sisters, for whom challenging patriarchy includes challenging its expression in religious institutions, and secular spaces are seen as a necessary part of creating collectives. The second is the role of spirituality and religion in community responses to the Grenfell fire – in particular the shared walking in silence; this has been crucial to the community's ability to maintain strength and experience solidarity in the face of incredible and ongoing injustice. In trying to understand how the left should go about building solidarities and alliances, the authors assert the value of localised and contingent readings of 'religion' and 'the secular'.

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

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.

Ambiguous agency in the vulnerable trafficked body: reading Sanusi’s Eyo and Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street

The narrativization of the trafficked body in the novels of Abidemi Sanusi and Chika Unigwe allows for a contemplation of Europe in African migrant imaginaries as both promise and failure. Sanusi’s Eyo is a narrative of a ten-year-old girl who is trafficked to the United Kingdom as a human sex slave. The novel draws attention to the tensions that define her being/unbeing in Europe and beyond, even after a brave escape from her traffickers. This precarious existence is enhanced in Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street, whose main characters exist in Europe selling their bodies while existing in states of continuous vulnerability. In reading these two novels side by side, this article explores the discursive meanings of trafficked bodies and how traumatic existence allows for an engagement with Europe as illusory in the imaginaries of African women who cross borders into Europe. The article argues that while the female characters are vulnerable, they retain an ambiguous agency contained within their ability to survive and remain resilient in the face of atrocities for borders crossers. The narrative form of the novel allows for an exploration of what this agency looks like in the face of extreme vulnerability.

The Pedagogies of Sex Trafficking Postcolonial Fiction: Consent, Agency, and Neoliberalism in Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street

mass media largely relies on victimizing and disempowering tropes echoing abolitionist imagery ... postcolonial literary analyses tend to showcase and privilege moments of agency akin to pro-sex work rhetoric.... This article seeks to intervene precisely here by pointing to the inadequacy of traditionally invoked concepts such as “consent” and, tightly associated to it, “agency” as primary foci of analysis when explaining contexts that can allow for extreme exploitation such as transnational sex trafficking.... the anti-prostitution/abolitionist model has become emblematic of the mainstream fight against sex trafficking in the US.... In response, postcolonial scholars who are apprehensive about abolitionist policies that generally construct trafficked individuals as unable to act or speak in their best interest have tended to embrace the opposing camp’s rhetoric.... the latter position is not unproblematic either and needs to be examined, as it maintains the binary by only inverting hierarchies: where one stresses victimhood, the other highlights agency, sometimes at the expense of overlooking appallingly oppressive contexts.... In her award-winning novel On Black Sisters’ Street, the Nigerian-born writer Chika Unigwe clearly shows the pitfalls of transferring the analytical model that currently dominates the pro-sex work/anti-prostitution debates into, to borrow Homi Bhabha’s famous phrase, a similar but not quite framework.

As pretas minas do Rosário nas margens da liberdade: mobilidade social e heranças da diáspora. (São João del-Rei, séculos XVIII e XIX)

O presente artigo tem por objetivo analisar os processos de mobilidade social das irmãs pretas forras da Costa da Mina e seus investimentos em bens materiais e simbólicos da irmandade do Rosário de São João del-Rei, entre a segunda metade do século XVIII até meados dos Oitocentos. Nossa arguição procura demonstrar que, apesar do afastamento das atividades formais da agremiação, essas mulheres construíram estratégias de inserção e espaços de poder importantes dentro da irmandade. Todavia, o alcance deste protagonismo nos altos escalões da confraria reporta-se não só ao agenciamento situacional na diáspora atlântica, mas às “heranças e recordações” re-significadas na experiência da sociedade escravista no Novo Mundo. Para tanto, foram utilizados os testamentos das irmãs forras e a documentação confrarial, tais como: livros de compromissos e os assentos de matrículas.

Human trafficking: Commercial sexual exploitation and forced domestic labour in African literature

Abstract Just like social occurrences such as human sacrifice and slavery enhanced retardation of progress in Africa in the past, trafficking is another social occurrence addressed in contemporary African literature that impedes progress and tarnishes the image of the victims. Human trafficking is rampant in Africans and some part of the world in this 21st century. This paper examines how Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo’s Trafficked (2008) and Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters′ Street (2009) highlight social occurrences and how they contribute to the spread of girl trafficking in Africa. It also explores how both men and women are partners in trafficking, forming trafficking networks that lure girls from Nigeria to Europe and make huge profits from their misery. These pimps use ‘juju magic’ and rituals as a threat to exert complete control over the girls and also to ensure their compliance. The trafficked girls share their life experiences by telling their tales of woes exposing the shame that accompanies the sex trade and the stigmatization they suffer in the society. Their experiences are presented by the authors to highlight the trafficked girls′ pains, misery and struggle for freedom in order to appeal to everybody in the society to fight against human trafficking. The paper also examines how these exploited and depressed trafficked girls that have lost their self-esteem can still live fulfilled lives if government agencies and nongovernmental organizations come to their rescue.

Translation Section

Translation Section

Migration and Identities in Chika Unigwe’s Novels

Monumental dispersals caused by the phenomenon of migration greatly affect the identities of people. Much like the process of globalization, migration is highly sexualized and gendered. To this extent, it is necessary to centralize women and their peculiar experiences in migration discourses and theories. Beyond the usual focus on the economics, politics and sociology of migration, which at any rate do not often adequately address gender-specific migratory experiences; this study takes a literary route that considers the fictional representations of migrant women in two of the novels of Chika Unigwe: The Phoenix (2005) and On Black Sisters’ Street (2008). The focus here is to underscore the validity and significance of gender as an imperative analytical premise in contemporary literary debates particularly by African migrants. In demonstrating how the inflections of gender portend different outcomes for men and women, the study significantly uncovers how the woman’s body is simultaneously the site of physical and symbolic migration. The essay traces the movement in transition and the impact of these and new environment on the bodies of female migrants and how the embodied motifs of migration ultimately alter the identities and realities of migrant African women in particular. In all, the essay hopes to expand some of the current theorizations on the new directions in the development of the fictional representations of Nigerian women as well as to contextualize the role of the emigre author in these developments.