Finding the Girl Next Door on Black Sisters Street

It is this spectacle of “prostitutes in display windows,” that first caught the attention of Nigerian author Chika Unigwe, who lives in Belgium with her family.  “[W]hen I learned that many of the African ones in Antwerp were from Nigeria, I had to find out more. Why? How?” she told Sunday Trust literary editor Abubakar […]

It is this spectacle of “prostitutes in display windows,” that first caught the attention of Nigerian author Chika Unigwe, who lives in Belgium with her family.  “[W]hen I learned that many of the African ones in Antwerp were from Nigeria, I had to find out more. Why? How?” she told Sunday Trust literary editor Abubakar Adam Ibrahim last September.
Her process of discovery included donning thigh high boots and skimpy clothing and mingling with sex workers on the streets of the red light district. “Walking those streets, being in a cafe surrounded by prostitutes and clients, I could feel what it felt like to be ‘a new girl’ in that sort of situation,” she told Ibrahim. The result was a novel first published in Dutch as Fata Morgana in 2007 and later published in English as On Black Sisters Street in 2009, which won the prestigious $100,000 NLNG (Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas) award in November 2012.
On Black Sisters Street (Random House 2009) tells the story of a university graduate Sisi who is under pressure from her family to succeed. Fed up with not being able to find a job, she is tempted into dreams of making quick money in Europe that she can use to fund another livelihood. Once in Antwerp, however, she finds that the only way she can bear the degradations of sex work is to make up for herself multiple identities, wandering the streets telling strangers impromptu fictions about her life. She lives in a house with three other women who have also travelled from Nigeria to Belgium. The women share space in the house on Zwartezusterstraat, Black Sisters Street, but do not really know much about each other until in a moment of grief, each narrates the tale of how she came to Antwerp. The story of Sisi leads us forward into the future; the stories of the other girls, Efe, Ama, and Joyce take us back to the past, a pendulum rhythm that carries us into the mystery at the heart of the novel.
Their stories take us to Lagos, Enugu, even the Sudan, but their narratives converge when the girls describe meeting Dele, the fat, rich Lagos-based pimp, with “breasts, which were almost womanly” and a gold-edged business card that lures girls into his web. He tells one of the girls that he would make her a second wife, “But na Christian I be. And I be good Christian. One man, one wife.”  Dele has European partners. The quiet stammering handyman Segun meets them at the airport when they arrive in Belgium. He doesn’t seem to be good with anything but a hammer. And there is the short, round Madam who has “tufts of hair curled comfortably into one another” on her chin. All business, Madam charges each girl 550 Euros a week for a room in her house. 
You’d expect a book that narrates the lives of four women involved in the sex trade to be a harsh, heart-wrenching read. In some parts it is. But it is also tender and warm, even sometimes funny. Though the characters On Black Sisters Street are prostitutes in Europe, Unigwe deftly turns our attention from their current profession to their past in Nigeria. And it is the Nigerian spaces that feel the most alive: the descriptions of buses and Mama Put joints, the pidgin dialogue and Igbo phrases. We get to know the characters as young girls with dreams: Intelligent Sisi with her head for school hopes to pull her family out of the poverty imposed by her father’s dead-end civil service job. When Efe’s mother dies her father is so crippled by grief that she is left to raise herself and her siblings on her own. But like any teenager she dreams of wearing the latest fashions. Ama gets a pink princess dress and a party for her 8th birthday. But, she learns that beautiful appearances can conceal terrible secrets.  Joyce grows up in Sudan among books and cows, dreaming of being a doctor till the Janjaweed militia arrives. Each girl is betrayed by her dreams and each carries within her emotional wounds that she must hide under a bright smile in the show window where she is on display. 
Because we know the women’s stories, their personalities and their dreams, the description of their first encounters with commercial sex are all the more horrifying. On her first night at “work,” Sisi finds herself repeating to herself over and over “This is not me. I am not here. I am at home, sleeping in my bed. This is not me. This is not me. This is somebody else. Another body. Not mine.”
For a book about prostitutes there are actually fewer descriptions of their sex work than you might expect. We know what they do but it is not the central focus of the narrative. In fact, I couldn’t find the word “prostitute” more than two times in the novel. Our eyes are lifted from their bodies to their loves, their memories, their souls. They drudge away in sex shops, but they also wander around the city, host memorial parties for deceased loved ones, and go to church. They have made mistakes, they have trusted the wrong people, but they nevertheless struggle to make meaning of their lives.
Unigwe’s novel explores the ambiguities of a world where women may freely choose to go into prostitution, thinking it is a temporary measure to help them get ahead, yet end up being owned like slaves by those who arrange their travel abroad. Conservative readers who demonize prostitutes see that these women are girls next door, not nymphomaniacs. Liberal readers who idealize the legalization of the sex trade are confronted with a complicated reality. While European legalization has brought in tax revenue and cut down on the abuse of European prostitutes, it has also entrenched powerful sex trafficking networks of illegal immigrants vulnerable to abuse.
The only problem I can think of with the book is that, perhaps in her attempt to make readers sympathetic, Unigwe paints her characters as a little bit too middle-class. While the girls’ families are certainly not wealthy, I didn’t get a sense that they suffered grinding poverty. We don’t hear, for example, of struggles to pay the rent—even if Efe’s father is a labourer and Sisi’s family has to share a toilet with other tenants. While Joyce is initially described as a rural milkmaid, her parents’ house has an indoor kitchen and books on the shelves. The girls are, for the most part, remarkably innocent before they go to Belgium. Would we be quite so sympathetic if they were portrayed as “runs girls” in Lagos before going abroad? 
Despite these questions, I came away from On Black Sisters Street thinking, “Yes, this deserves the NLNG.” It is a stunning novel. Ultimately, however, I am haunted not by the fictional characters but by the memory of a bright pretty girl I met once. After describing to me her ideal career in Nigeria, she told me she was considering going to Europe. She had an auntie who had arranged everything. When I questioned her, she admitted she knew what kind of work it was. She didn’t want to be a prostitute, she said, but she was worried about money. Her family was depending on her. She had heard stories with happy endings… maybe a rich European man would fall in love with her and marry her.
Unigwe’s novel made me think of her again, this talented, pretty young girl. I wonder if I did enough to convince her not to go.