Becoming black in Belgium: The social construction of blackness in Chika Unigwe’s authorial self-representation and On Black Sisters’ Street

Abstract

In the satirical column entitled “Zwart worden in zeven lessen” (Becoming Black in Seven Lessons), the Nigerian-Belgian writer Chika Unigwe considers black identity as a social construction and coming to Europe as an entry to a social imaginary, a discursive space where subjects are already imagined, constructed and treated as “black” by hegemonic discourses. Using Becoming Black in Seven Lessons as a starting point, in this essay I explore the social construction of black identity in relation to, on the one hand, Unigwe’s authorial self-representation as an ethnic minority writer in Flanders (the Dutch language region of Belgium) and, on the other hand, the identity negotiations of the African immigrant women in the Flemish city of Antwerp in Unigwe’s second novel On Black Sisters’ Street. Central to this inquiry will be the question of how the author Unigwe on the one hand and the African sex workers in On Black Sisters’ Street become black in Belgium and how they negotiate a sense of self vis-à-vis the already pronounced social order. I argue more specifically that their self-representations reveal the mediation of dominant historical images and Western symbolic meanings and their attempts to wrest control of the construction of their bodies away from the distorted visions of dominant culture. Without conflating Unigwe’s situation as a black middle-class author in the Flemish literary field with the position of the four Nigerian women working in the sex industry described in the book, parallels can be drawn between them, as I wish to contend, in the ways in which their agency is established in the performance of cultural configurations of black identity which have seized hegemonic hold.

Introduction

The Nigerian-Belgian writer Chika Unigwe (2010) wrote the satirical column entitled “Zwart worden in zeven lessen” (Becoming Black in Seven Lessons), inspired by the Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina’s piece “How to Write about Africa” (2005), and which is also digitally available as “How to be an African”, albeit in revised form. In this column, Unigwe writes that before coming to Europe she had no clear idea of what it meant to be black, suggesting that she did not experience race to be the defining social identity in Nigeria. She goes on to describe with great irony what she has learned about blackness since living in Europe. “I now learn that being black means that I am perceived as a charity project. That I must be grateful for the opportunity granted to me to be in Europe” (Unigwe, 2010; my translation). These lessons further include dressing in an authentically African way, always to be prepared for police control or to be able to dance. Stating that blackness has no connotation on its own, but is assigned meaning from the outside, Unigwe’s Becoming Black in Seven Lessons reminds us of the social construction of blackness.

In this essay, I explore the social construction of black identity in relation to, on the one hand, Unigwe’s position and authorial self-representation as an ethnic minority writer in Belgium/Flanders and, on the other hand, the identity negotiations of the African immigrant women in the Flemish city of Antwerp in Unigwe’s second novel On Black Sisters’ Street (2009). Central to this inquiry will be the question of how the author Unigwe and the African sex workers in On Black Sisters’ Street become black in Belgium and how they negotiate a sense of self vis-à-vis the already pronounced social order. Deploying Becoming Black in Seven Lessons as my interpretative lens, I argue more specifically that the author’s and the sex workers self-representations reveal the mediation of dominant historical images and Western symbolic meanings and their attempts to wrest control of the construction of their bodies away from the distorted visions of dominant culture. Although Unigwe’s situation as a black middle-class author in the Flemish literary field should of course not be conflated with the position of the four Nigerian women working in the sex industry described in the book, parallels can be drawn between them, as I wish to contend, in the ways in which their agency is established in the performance of certain cultural configurations which have seized hegemonic hold.

Since it is fundamental to this concept of blackness that it acquires its meaning and connotation for a large part by the social context, it is important to outline how Unigwe as a self-represented “Flemish author of African origin” is socially constituted in the given context of multicultural Flanders. Therefore, I will outline some of the dominant discourses, policies, and practices surrounding ethnic minority authors in Flanders and relate Unigwe’s self-representation to the notion of “strategic exoticism” (Brouillette, 2007; Huggan, 2001). My primary concern in this section is the tension between Unigwe’s acute awareness of the social construction of blackness and her ostensible acceptance of the position as ethnic minority author in the Flemish literary field, while at the same time participating as an African diasporic author in a transnational literary field, which arguably makes her one of the most successful Flemish-language authors abroad. In a similar vein, my analysis of On Black Sisters’ Street builds on recent studies in postcolonial autobiography and explores how cultural discourses that hypereroticize the black female body determine the way in which the four African sex workers in the red-light district of the Belgian city of Antwerp become African sex workers, while the book formally and thematically resists these popular cultural perceptions in favour of rendering more diverse, subtle representations of the women.

Becoming a black writer in Flanders

In Becoming Black in Seven Lessons, Unigwe contends that one is not born black or “African”, one becomes black or “African” in Europe. Unigwe writes:

get rid of any hang-ups you might have about Africa being a continent. It is a country, and so when people ask if you speak African, or eat African, do not get all worked up trying to explain how a homogenous Africa only exists in a lazy imagination. (Unigwe, n.d.: n.p.) ¹

Coming to Europe means entering a social imaginary, Unigwe implies; a discursive space where subjects are already imagined, constructed, and treated as “African” by hegemonic discourses. The act of being recognized as such becomes an act of identity formation. Being perceived as black African animates one into existence, constitutes one within a possible circuit of recognition, within the terms of language and only there one’s social existence becomes possible. Becoming Black in Seven Lessons, then, sees black identity as a form of discipline, as a set of norms, narratives, and everyday performative roles and acts. It is what you do at particular times, rather than who you are.

Unigwe’s ideas about blackness as a social construction resonate forcefully with a postcolonial and critical race theoretical tradition in which scholars have not only in various ways uncovered the colonial roots of postcolonial perceptions of black Africa as Europe’s ultimate “other” but also sought for multiple ways to resist these. When Frantz Fanon enters the white world of Europe and discovers himself as a black man with an inferiority complex, his socio-psychoanalytical analysis concludes that one is black to the degree to which one is being perceived as “wicked, sloppy, malicious, instinctual. Everything that is opposite to these Negro modes of behaviour is white” (Fanon, 1967: 192). Becoming Black in Seven Lessons transposes Fanon’s insights to the twenty-first century predicament of blackness in the heart of Europe and in so doing suggests that these are still actual.

At the same time, however, Unigwe’s contemporary focus also involves a translation to a new context, more specifically Flanders, the Dutch speaking region in Belgium. In so doing, she brings into mind Stuart Hall’s contention that if blackness is “something constructed, told, spoken, not simply found”, it could be “pluck[ed] out of its articulation and [be] rearticulate[d] in a new way” (Hall, 1987: 45), through which new processes of identification could occur. Following Hall, we need to consider the particular sociocultural context in which constructions of blackness are narrated, by means of which these stories could subsequently be told anew. To bring Unigwe’s imagination of blackness more closely into purview, then, it is worthwhile to reflect on how hegemonic discourses of race and ethnic identity operate in the literary field in Flanders and how they inform Unigwe’s authorial position.

Chika Unigwe, who speaks Igbo and English, has Dutch as her third language. Before making her appearance on the Flemish literary scene in 2005, she had already successfully debuted with English language publications in Nigeria and Britain. Her poetry was published in Nigeria (Unigwe, 1993; 1995), her short stories won the 2003 BBC Short Story Competition and a Commonwealth Short Story Award and were published in Wasafiri and a number of anthologies of contemporary African writing, and she wrote two children’s books, Ije at School’ (2001) and A Rainbow for Dinner (2003). After her debut in Flanders, Unigwe has continued to publish Dutch as well as English short stories, essays, and translations and editions of her writings. ²

Published in 2005, Unigwe’s first novel, De Feniks, was announced as “the first book of fiction written by a Flemish author of African origin”. ³ De Feniks is set in the Belgian city of Turnhout and explores themes such as grief, illness, and loneliness and through the central character’s eyes, it exposes shortcomings of Belgian society, such as its pervasive unwelcoming atmosphere and the superficiality of many of its inhabitants. The novel was received as a hopeful trendsetter for ethnic minority writing in Flanders, but also met with criticism. ⁴ Reviewers commented on the fact that the novel was originally written in English and only afterwards translated into Dutch, a remark indicating the monolingualism, or at least the significance of Dutch as a primary language in nation-based paradigms of literature dominant in Flanders, even if the author is of African origin. ⁵ Additionally, in his review of De Feniks, Flemish literary critic Marc Cloostermans (2005: n.p.) complains that the Nigerian protagonist Oge did not have “a particularly interesting view on our country”. Unigwe’s general portrayal of Belgium in the novel does not satisfy the reviewer’s expectations of a Nigerian-born writer: “To draw our attention to this kind of banalities, we really did not need a Nigerian writer”. According to this argument, Unigwe, as a Nigerian-born author, is to present the Flemish audience with an interesting, new, “Nigerian” perspective on Belgium and if she by the mouth of her characters fails to deliver this, one of the main reasons to read her work becomes obsolete. As described above, the reception of De Feniks indicates not only that Chika Unigwe was eagerly awaited as a Flemish author of African origin, but also that, clearly, a range of ideas was already circulating among reviewers about such a writer.

Unigwe’s debut as well as reviewers’ responses to it should be seen against the background of a literary field which had already for years been involved in extensive discussions about the absence of immigrant and ethnic minority writers in Flanders, whose work is conventionally, though not unproblematically, categorized under the umbrella term allochtone literatuur (“allochthonous literature”). ⁶ Many critics observed that in Flanders ethnic minority writing had been absent, a phenomenon that they negatively compared to neighbouring countries such as France, the Netherlands, or Germany where during the last decades a growing number of texts written by authors from ethnic minority backgrounds had been published. To put it more specifically, that Flanders did not “have” ethnic minority writers was (and up to today still is) perceived as a problematic lack, an absence in need of clarification, a problem that requires solving. In framing the absence of ethnic minority authors as a problem, in various ways interlocutors projected onto the desired category of ethnic minority writers their own ideas about the nature of Flemish society and about what Flemish literature should be. By token, clarifications for the absence of ethnic minority writers were sought in a perceived failure of multiculturalism in Flemish society. Or, following the assumption that in the twenty-first century global world most modern national literatures in Europe have developed into culturally diverse bodies of literature, if Flanders wanted to be entitled to possess a modern national literature in its own right (which the region up to today only arguably enjoys) it was urgently in need of ethnic minority writers. When Unigwe debuted as the “first Flemish author of African origin”, then, she certainly had expectations to fulfil.

The perceived non-existence, rather than emergence, of ethnic minority writing in Flanders prompted government intervention and subsidy policies aimed at the publication and promotion of texts written by writers of ethnic minority and immigrant descent. In 2000, then Flemish Minister of Culture, Bert Anciaux, announced that diversity and intercultural relations would be among the main issues addressed by his cultural policy programme and this remained so during the two successive terms of his tenure. Anciaux formulated his rationale for doing so as follows:

New inhabitants of Flanders should have opportunities for emancipation. They should be able to participate in the diversity of the cultural scene, where they should take up a self-evident position. Then new cultural expression forms will emerge in an equally self-evident fashion, which will fundamentally enrich Flemish society. (Anciaux, 2000: 30; my translation)

The fragment above reminds of “a politics of recognition” in Charles Taylor’s sense of the term, referring to the question of whether the institutions of liberal democratic government make room — or should make room — for recognizing the worth of distinctive cultural traditions (Taylor et al., 1994). According to this logic, efforts should be made to support ethnic minorities to enter the cultural scene in Flanders from which they are by and large absent so that their presence could become self-evident. The latter social objective — emancipating ethnic minorities — is subsequently connected to a cultural advantage for Flemish society; it is hoped that the participation of ethnic minorities in the cultural domain will stimulate cultural innovation and “enrich” Flemish society. The verb verrijken — “to enrich” or “to make rich”, metaphorically denotes “to supplement”, while it may possibly also invoke an economic register of benefit.

Anciaux’s policy programme was translated into practice by the Flemish Literature Fund (Vlaams Fonds voor de Letteren), an autonomous governmental institution that promotes Dutch-language literature in Belgium and abroad, particularly the literary production by Flemish authors. The Flemish Literature Fund stipulated a so-called “intercultural literature programme” (intercultureel letterenbeleid), aiming to improve contacts between the Flemish literary world and authors living in Flanders who do not principally have Dutch as their mother tongue and to facilitate access to the literary field for debuting authors belonging to ethnic minority communities. One of the most acclaimed and successful initiatives that was launched to achieve the latter purpose is the literary writing contest “Colour the Arts” (Kleur de kunst), organized by the Flemish Community and non-profit organization KifKif. Literary masterclasses, workshops, and info-sessions were organized and aspiring debuting ethnic minorities were invited to attend introductory sessions to the literary publishing world and to apply for creative writing courses. ⁷ The effects of these workshops on authors of ethnic minority descent making their debut are difficult to estimate, as debuting always depends on a range of factors. In any case it is known that Mustafa Kör, who debuted with his novel De lammeren in 2007 and Rachida Lamrabet, who debuted with Vrouwland in the same year, participated in such workshops. The former works are just two recent examples of a steady, though so far still rather submerged, trend of debuting authors with an ethnic minority background in Flanders for approximately the past decade, while the still relatively absent category of “allochthonous literature” in Flanders continues to be an issue that keeps intriguing the public debate. ⁸

Chika Unigwe’s appearance on the Flemish literary scene cannot be seen as a direct consequence of the intercultural literature programme, and neither did she participate in one of the above mentioned initiatives and workshops organized for ethnic minority writers. However, it is worthwhile to explore in greater depth the ethnocultural paradigm which is at the core of the intercultural literature programme, as it inescapably informs the institutional and ideological framework in which Unigwe, as an ethnic minority author, positions herself and in which her writings circulate.

First, one of the pivotal elements in the Flemish Literature Fund’s “intercultural literature programme”, as well as the various initiatives and efforts launched in this context, is that most efforts are focused on aspiring authors of ethnic minority descent or writing in a foreign language. The overt focus on the creative writing practices by ethnic minority individuals reconfirms white Flemishness as the norm and serves to reproduce a problematic cultural division between “allochthons” (allochtonen) and “authochtons” (autochtonen) among aspiring writers. It is worthwhile noting that in public debates on multiculturalism similarly, an ethnocultural paradigm characterized by a cultural binary between authochtony/allochthony and Flemish versus non-Flemish has been prevalent, even though academics and public intellectuals have repeatedly and in various ways criticized the binary for excluding ethnic minorities from imaginations of Flanders (see, for example, Abou Jahjah, 2003; Arnaut, 2009; Blommaert and Verschueren, 1998, Fraihi, 2004; Maly, 2009). For instance, in Debating Diversity, Jan Blommaert and Jef Verschueren examine the “tolerant” rhetoric which has found its way into public discourse and argue that it disturbingly resonates with the discourse of radical racist and nationalist groups, in that their discourses similarly draw on a binary between autochthons and allochthons and share an ideology of “homogenism”, a view of society in which differences are seen as dangerous and centrifugal and in which the “best” society is suggested to be one without intergroup “differences” (1998: 194).

A second feature of the intercultural literature programme is that it establishes a connection between writing and ethnocultural identity, which in effect culturalizes the writings of ethnic minority authors. In the newspaper column entitled “Wij spreken pas als jullie luisteren” (We only speak when you listen), Moroccan-Flemish writer Jamila Amadou (2004) argues that ethnic minority writers have been absent from the literary field since they reject the only position in the Flemish literary field available for allochtonous writers, namely, to be a spokesperson for his or her ethnocultural community. In a similar vein literary critic Tom Van Imschoot (2009; my translation) observes that “the text of an allochtonous writer, […] even if he [sic] writes about the autochthonous majority, stands for the minority perspective and as such may or may not enrich Flemish literature […]”. At stake is an ethnocultural understanding of what an allochtonous literary voice precisely must sound like, which is limiting.

Third, since the access to the literary field of the individuals who are targeted in these policies is indeed made to depend on their cultural and linguistic background, the “burden” of multicultural literature in Flanders rests on the shoulders of the underrepresented target group. Debuting authors, in other words, receive a task. Whether or not they achieve, is made to depend not on anything or anyone except for themselves, their individual talent, and eventually their degree of success in gaining access to the literary field. At the same time, policy makers — a group by and large composed of white males — are situated in the institutional positions from which they specify the ways in which the underrepresented group should render Flemish literature multicultural, while at the same time they are alleviated from all responsibility, for example, to implement structural changes in the literary field so as to make it more inclusive in terms of gender, race, or class.

These specific features characterizing hegemonic discourses on multiculturalism and ethnic minority writers in Flanders as sketched out above, raise the question of why Chika Unigwe would represent herself as the writer of “the first book of fiction written by a Flemish author of African origin”, a self-representation which, given its explicit emphasis on Unigwe’s foreign origin, hardly facilitates her access to the mainstream Flemish literary canon. Recently, in the wake of the publication of Unigwe’s recent Dutch novel Night Dancer (2012), journalist Kathy Mathys (2011) asks Unigwe, in an interview with the Flemish newspaper De Standaard, culturalist questions such as whether children growing up without a father are nowadays still stigmatized in Nigeria or whether Unigwe is amazed about the ways “the Belgians” mourn, given that Nigerian funeral scenes described in her novel are completely different. In the course of the interview, Unigwe interconnects her writing with the Igbo language: “I have always been conscious to create an Igbo-atmosphere in my stories. My three novels have the rhythm of the Igbo language” (2011; my translation). In rather unexpected ways, Unigwe’s response resonates with Becoming Black in Seven Lessons, where Unigwe ironically writes: “If you are a writer, never forget to acknowledge the fact that your writing style derives from the great story-telling traditions of your people”. In instances like this interview Unigwe does not overtly criticize and at times even complies with culturalist readings of her work, which may seem surprising in light of her satirical piece Becoming Black in Seven Lessons (2010). While Becoming Black in Seven Lessons suggests Unigwe’s acute awareness of commonplace ideas of blackness affecting her life and (as we may also assume) her writing in a European society like Flanders, to a certain extent her modes of self-representation in meta-literary texts — such as interviews and book blurbs — do not counter nor explicitly question these ideas. It distinguishes her from other ethnic minority writers in Flanders, such as the Moroccan-born Rachida Lamrabet, who vehemently refute ethnic or cultural labels or references to “allochthony” that could serve to distinguish them and possibly exclude them from imaginations of what “home-grown” Flemish literature is and should be in the future.

For an understanding of Unigwe’s authorial self-representation, it seems useful to build on the notion of “strategic exoticism” as put forward in the studies by Graham Huggan (2001) and Sarah Brouillette (2007) on the intersections between postcolonialism and the global literary market place. ⁹ In The Postcolonial Exotic Graham Huggan defines a “global alterity industry” in which cultural difference is processed through exoticism, “a mode of aesthetic perception [that] effectively manufactures otherness even as it claims to surrender its immanent mystery” (2001: 13). For Huggan, the most noticeable feature of writing by authors such as Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy is the way in which they balance their ostensibly anticolonial politics against their commercial viability as globally successful postcolonial novelists and their work “is designed as much to challenge as to profit from consumer needs” (Huggan, 2001: Xi). Sarah Brouillette critiques Huggan’s notion of strategic exoticism as it implicitly distinguishes between those consumers “who seek mythic access to exotic experience” and those “who actually have access to the reality that the other consumer can only ever wish to possess” (2007: 19). Instead Brouillette convincingly finds it

more fruitful to understand strategic exoticism, and likewise general postcolonial authorial self-consciousness, as comprised of a set of literary strategies that operate through assumptions shared between the author and the reader, as both producer and consumer work to negotiate with, if not absolve themselves of, postcoloniality’s touristic guilt. (Brouillette, 2007: 7)

Similarly, one may also assume that while being confronted with the expectations and limitations of the position of ethnic minority writer in Flanders available to her, Unigwe strategically acts out the exoticism to which she and her work are relegated. At the same time, this position allows her to launch her work and partake successfully in a transnational literary system that transcends far beyond the localized Flemish literary field. The African suffix to her self-label as a Flemish author may not make Unigwe’s entry to the canon of Flemish literature easier, but there is also no reason to believe that this is something that Unigwe aspires to, since her English language writings and translations transcend the localized book market in Flanders and the Netherlands and circulate in a transnational field of African diasporic writing. In so doing, Unigwe’s fiction illustrates Rebecca Walkowitz’s assumption that literature of migration “reflects a shift from nation-based paradigms to new ways of understanding community and belonging and to transnational models emphasizing a global space of ongoing travel and interconnection” (2006: 533).

After her breakthrough as a novelist in Belgium in 2005, Unigwe has so far written three more novels which were initially published in Dutch by Meulenhoff–Manteau, Unigwe’s publisher based in Antwerp, and only afterwards published in English, despite the fact that she has continued to publish short stories in English language journals and anthologies that are not available in Dutch translation. ¹⁰ Unigwe’s rather impressive list of international accolades, including making the longlist for the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature and winning the Nigeria prize for Literature in 2012, suggests that her work resonates not only locally but also internationally, as is also indicated by Elisabeth Bekers’ entry on Unigwe in the Dictionary of African Biography (2011: 101–3). Unigwe’s oeuvre is shelved under black, African, Nigerian (diasporic) writing and considered to be part of a wider stream of prose written by a new generation of Nigerian (diasporic) writing that also embraces authors such as the Anglophone writers Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Helen Oyeyemi (Norridge, 2012; Nwakanma, 2008). Unigwe, then, participates as an ethnic minority writer in the Flemish literary circuit but is also able to transcend this small and localized literary market perhaps more easily than any other Flemish writer, and to use this position as a spring board to participate in an Anglophone African diasporic literary field, which enjoys a much broader, not to say global, readership.

Becoming black in Antwerp’s red-light district: Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street

In what follows, I explore how Unigwe’s second novel On Black Sisters’ Street destabilizes homogenous definitions of African diasporic womanhood. More specifically, playing with conventions of postcolonial autobiography and the short story cycle, On Black Sisters’ Street renders an account of how four African sex workers in the city of Antwerp strategically relate to exoticist definitions of African womanhood that are central to the sex industry, while it is simultaneously conveyed that their personal histories surmount these.

On Black Sisters’ Street recounts how four African women desperately seek to escape their miserable living conditions and respond to the lure of a better life in Europe. Sisi is an ambitious university student unable to find suitable work. Efe is a teenage single mother struggling to raise her son without support from his father. Ama has escaped an abusive childhood only to find her dream of escaping Nigeria crushed by a dead-end job. Joyce, without family, home, or money, is abandoned by her boyfriend. In a house on “Zwartezusterstraat” in the city of Antwerp, the women share their lives under the watchful eyes of their madam and her menacing assistant Segun. However, as illegal workers in Belgium, the women hide their true names and family histories from each other. It is only when Sisi tries to escape the prostitution world and is murdered that Ama, Efe, and Joyce work through her death by gradually revealing their painful histories to each other and to the reader.

Composed of fictional autobiographies of the four women, On Black Sisters’ Street invites us to consider the continued relevance of autobiography as a central explanatory category in understanding postcolonialism and its relation to subjectivity. The latter exercise has precisely been the focus of a series of recent studies that examine autobiography’s philosophical resistance to universal concepts and theories and explore its intersections with the postcolonial enterprise to rethink norms of experience and knowledge (Hornung and Ruhe, 1998; Huddart, 2008; Innes, 2007; Moore-Gilbert, 2009; Whitlock, 2007).

On Black Sisters’ Street firmly situates the life narratives of four African women within today’s geopolitical power relations. The women’s narratives include tragic episodes of poverty, war experience, sexual abuse, and families torn apart in their home countries, which made them vulnerable to the call to enter the global women’s traffic network run by Oka Dele. On arrival in Belgium, they soon find out, however, that they have escaped their circumstances for a mirage — or “fata morgana” to use the Dutch title of the novel — of a better and wealthier life in Europe, and soon see their dreams shattered. That On Black Sisters’ Street draws on life writing to portray the experiences and memories of the four protagonists may not seem entirely unexpected. In their reinterpretation of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks as an autobiographical narrative, Innes and Moore-Gilbert suggest that, to Fanon, the autobiographical mode to a certain extent emanates from colonial oppression. In the face of colonial oppression colonized subjects are driven “to ask the question constantly ‘Who am I?’” (Innes, 2007: 58; Moore-Gilbert, 2009) From this perspective, it is not surprising that On Black Sisters’ Street also deploys the (fictional) autobiographical mode so as to recount the four women’s deprived circumstances.

Voicing the memories and experiences of four African women in Flanders, the novel offers a dreary portrayal of the submerged world of illegal prostitution in the red-light district of Antwerp city. It describes the descent into disorientation and denial of worth that they face — a recurring theme in many autobiographical works by postcolonial women (Innes, 2007: 58). Employed as sex workers, the women must pay Dele back in monthly instalments her fee of 30,000 Euros, the costs, the costs of their exportation to Belgium. With their fake passports withheld by Madam and living under her close surveillance, the four women are almost literally imprisoned in the house in the red-light district but also objectified in the position of black sex workers satisfying white men’s sexual desires. “As for liking black women, Oga Dele had told her [Efe] that they were in great demand by white men, tired of their women and wanting a bit of colour and spice” (Unigwe, 2009: 84). ¹¹ Primarily, the women are socially constructed through exotic, sexualized codes of black womanhood.

On Black Sisters’ Street centres on the experiences and voices of the women, who are usually observed from the outside, as sexual spectacles sitting under red spotlights behind the windows of the Schipperskwartier of Antwerp. On first sight, the novel offers the reader a voyeuristic glance into these women’s lives, and seems to draw from the kind of tragic sensationalism with which recent accounts of victimized Muslim women allow Western readers a peek behind the veil (Whitlock, 2005). Although lengthy scenes describe how the women are confronted by all sorts of deprivations, violence, and abuses both in Nigeria and in Belgium, the novel’s aim is not to deplore the miserable fate of black sex workers who are victims in Dele’s women’s trafficking network as well as in the male-dominated Western sex industry. Rendering her account of the journey to Belgium, Ama says: “I made this choice, at least, I was given a choice. I came here with my eyes wide open” (114). The four women are indeed not victims, as the novel conveys, but agents in a transnational world making choices, strategic choices that are restricted by circumstance.

If they want to be successful as sex workers, the women are to abide by gendered and racialized norms and codes of behaviour. On Black Sisters’ Street is not so much an account of four African sex workers as an exploration of how they become black sex workers: “Blue bra sprinkled with glitter and a matching G-string, boots up to her thighs, she stood behind the glass, and prayed that no one would notice her” (134). The novel clearly suggests the constructed nature of black sexualized womanhood by describing how the four women dress up and act out the role behind the window that is expected of them. If it is true, in the terms of Eva Pendelton, that “sex work is drag in that it is a mimetic performance of highly charged feminine gender codes” (Pendelton, 1997: 183), to which we may also add racial codes, then the novel portrays the four protagonists in the process of performing these highly charged exoticist codes of black femininity.

It is worthwhile considering at this point whether Brouillette’s conceptualization of “strategic exoticism” is not only illuminating for Unigwe’s authorial position in the Flemish field but also for how her novel relates the four African diasporic sex workers’ position in the Antwerp sex industry. The four protagonists cannot generally be seen to change or subvert the normative scripts they must follow; until Sisi’s failed attempt to escape at the end of the novel, the women almost conscientiously do, say, and behave according to what Madam and others tell them. The disruptive potential, however, resides not in the women’s rewriting of the codes of black sex workers, but in the narration of how they act out these codes. Unigwe juxtaposes scenes of the women’s performance as black sex workers to self-reflexive fragments that explicate their doubts, uncertainty, embarrassment, or feelings of freedom, while being disguised and text portions in which the women are seen to take an emotional distance or critically comment on their behaviour. Unigwe describes what goes on in the heads of the women, while they try to the best of their capabilities to please the men that approach them. In so doing, their work is revealed to the reader as a strategic lie. Joyce piously scrubs the make-up off her face on request of a regular customer who calls her “Etienne’s Nubian princess”. She is ready to change the script and to change costume, as it were, whenever this is desired. Her ultimate goal is not, however, to please white men’s desire. The latter is but a means to achieve economic purpose and upward social mobility. Or in the terms of Ama: “the men she slept with were […] just tools she needed to achieve her dream. And her dream was expansive enough to accommodate all of them” (169).

The constructed, performative dimensions of black female sex workers’ identity may suggest an illusion of a “behind” where the women act out their real and true core selves. However, we are soon made aware that in their daily lives too the women’s identities consist of a series of provisional narratives. In this sense, Unigwe’s concept of identity overlaps with the specific form of decentred models of personhood, which Bart Moore-Gilbert generally identifies in postcolonial autobiographies (Moore-Gilbert, 2009: xxi). More specifically, On Black Sisters’ Street inherently connects the issue of storytelling to constructions of black womanhood. Narrating their histories to each other — life writing being a formal way to underscore the narrative dimension of identity — the women change the story about themselves alongside the rapidly changing circumstances that have occurred to them. Sisi and Joyce have changed their names and are originally called, respectively, Chrisom and Alek; the latter, as she reveals, is Sudanese, not Nigerian as she made everyone in the house believe. Alek refers to the UN refugee camp she lived in for a while as “a collection of sad stories” (194). On arrival to Belgium, Sisi is determined to “shed her skin like a snake and emerge completely new” (98). Madam invents the story of an escape from Liberia that Sisi must tell about herself in the immigration office. Reiterating one of Unigwe’s points in Becoming Black in Seven Lessons, Madam further adds: “White people enjoy sob stories. They love to hear us killing each other, about us hacking each other’s heads off in senseless ethnic conflicts. The more macabre the story the better” (121). Sisi agrees to be Liberian, “in the next months she would be other things. Other people. A constant yearning to escape herself would take over her life” (121). While the performance of sexualized definitions of black womanhood is central to the four women’s lives as sex workers, their family histories emphasize their identities as a series of narratives invented strategically to suit the circumstances.

On Black Sisters’ Street complicates and refutes unilateral definitions of black womanhood, which in the terms of the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, are vulnerable to “the danger of a single story”, suggesting that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding. In so doing, Unigwe’s concept of identity also embraces “contingency, indeterminacy and conflict” (Anderson, 2001:108; quoting Paul Gilroy, 2000: 128). It deploys a range of narrative techniques refuting the static and single-sided ideas about female blackness with which the four women are confronted during their work in the red-light district. On Black Sisters’ Street draws on various genres in its depiction of the life stories of the Nigerian women. In the women’s stories, elements of the coming-of-age novel and the Bildungsroman are evident. Aspects of the detective novel are incorporated in the “whodunit” search for an explanation for Sisi’s death, features of travel writing in Sisi’s jaunts about Antwerp disguised as a tourist, and magical realism in Sisi’s flight from her body after death to visit her parents curse Dele’s family. On Black Sisters’ Street integrates and interweaves these generic traditions in a composite form.

On Black Sisters’ Street is not a novel prioritizing a single authorial voice nor does it present a teleological journey of one protagonist. As suggested above, it could be seen as a fictional autobiography, or rather as a series of fictional autobiographies, as it focuses on not one but the interspersed life narratives of four women. Its form could also be described as a particular type of short story cycle, a “narrative of community” in Sandra A. Zagarell’s sense of the term (1988; Harde, 2007). Zagarell advances a theory of a women’s genre that denotes a text’s ethos and subject matter, a privileging of community over self and a concern with process rather than linear narrative’s conflict or progress. Though Zagarell’s focus is on nineteenth-century women’s short story cycles, her insights are fruitful to twentieth-century narratives of community [which] “may be inspired most strongly by writers’ own racial, ethnic, class, and or cultural traditions, and the changing roles of gender” (Zagarell, 1988: 527). Zagarell’s view of the short story cycle reverberates in unexpected ways with the “relationality of subjectivity” that Moore-Gilbert identifies as one of postcolonial autobiography’s central features (Moore-Gilbert, 2009: xx).

Reading On Black Sisters’ Street as a narrative of community reveals how On Black Sisters’ Street structurally resonates with ongoing mobility and circular movements of migration, rather than with linear–chronological notions of progress and plot development. The chapters entitled “Zwartezusterstraat” render an account of events that occur in the present, and are geographically situated in the city of Antwerp — more precisely in the house in Zwartezusterstraat (Black Sisters’ Street). These chapters are interwoven with chapters focusing on the individual life stories of the women and bring into view their separate, idiosyncratic pasts and futures. Eventually, Ama and Joyce return to Nigeria, Efe stays in Belgian prostitution but moves up on the social scale as she now employs African women. Sisi’s ghost leaves her body and travels back to Nigeria too. Their individual stories follow the ongoing movement back and forth between Nigeria and Belgium. Similarly, the basic storyline prioritizes circularity and ends where it begins, with an account of Sisi’s death.

Additionally, Innes argues that postcolonial autobiographical writing often plays a significant role in establishing the subject’s sense of location and belonging (Innes, 2007: 64). In the case of On Black Sisters’ Street, it is through the short story cycle structure that a community of women is instantiated, one which is composed through the focus on individual autobiographical experiences. The fragmented life stories of the four women are narrated in the first person, which are interspersed by the third person narration of Sisi’s migration to Europe and the events leading up to her death. The movement between individual stories, set in divergent geographies and dissimilar timeliness, creates a weaving effect that rejects essentialist notions of black female identity, while simultaneously insisting on a commonality of experience. “Their different thoughts sometimes converge and meet in the present, causing them to share the same fear. But when they think about their past, they have different memories” (40). On Black Sisters’ Street is a polyphonic collage of individual stories creating a mosaic portrayal that defies the essentialist vision of the exotic African woman. Its mode of narration reflects the multidimensional mobility of African migrant women.

Furthermore, the women living together in the African microcosm in their house on Zwartezusterstraat are supposed to share Nigeria as their place of origin, but they are not bound by anything except for their situation in the present. As we come to know their individual life stories, it is gradually conveyed that these women have had very different lives and would not be in contact in normal circumstances. The women share no sense of belonging or commonality based on their national or cultural background. When at a party a South-African man addresses her as his sister, Ama vehemently replies that she is not his sister, and turns his back on him. The rejection of family ties is suggestive, also for the mutual relationships among the four protagonists. Though they share the same house, their conceptions of home and family are not defined in national or cultural terms. The house, a spatial metaphor for the four black women’s community in Europe, is a place of conflict that offers no true sense of belonging, it is a cold place without a heart(h) — the conventional symbol of the beating heart of the home, the fireplace, is fake (32).

The women know little about each other and feelings of hostility and suspicion prevent them from developing intimate relations: “They were strangers without words between them” (115). The women shroud their histories in ambiguity or keep them covered. It is “silence which has, again, become the community they share” (39). In the course of narrating their histories to each other, however, they develop a sense of belonging in each other’s company. Through the intimacies of storytelling, the women discover their communal bond and shared predicament, which gradually ignites a sense of home. It is the act of storytelling that constitutes the women’s community in the house, which in the penultimate section, is described:

like a family home. The communal kitchen and the shared living room bound the women. They met there when they yearned for company but could always retire to their rooms for some privacy. It was where they could escape the glare of the Schipperskwartier, live a life that did not include strange men with sometimes stranger requests. (273)

It is Efe who initiates camaraderie among the women through storytelling in lieu of Sisi’s death, because in grief “she feels an affinity with these women in a way she has never done before” (41). Her history involves painful memories of a pregnancy at the age of sixteen, when she was laughed at by the neighbouring women in Lagos who excluded her from the community. The status of outcast, combined with her mother’s premature death and her father’s aloofness towards family intimacy, had ruptured the sense of safety and belonging that are conventionally associated with notions of home. In a similar vein, Joyce, whose family is brutally murdered and whose lover severs their relationship to appease his family, recognizes that “the women in the house on Zwartezusterstraat were the only family she had” (235). In the face of the already pronounced social role of the exotic, sexualized black woman that constitutes their becoming in Belgium, the protagonists of On Black Sisters’ Street do not only negotiate a diverse, narrative sense of selfhood, but also a black women’s community that does not depend on ethnic origins, cultural descent, gender, geographical, or national affiliations, but rather on empathy and understanding, which develop through listening to each other’s distinctive histories and personal memories.

Conclusion

In this essay, I have explored how social constructions of blackness affect and inform the authorial self-representations of the Nigerian-Belgian writer Chika Unigwe as an ethnic minority author in the Flemish literary field. It has been shown how ethno-cultural ideas of authorship are institutionally endorsed, which shape notions of Unigwe’s black authorship and affect the ways in which Unigwe’s oeuvre is read. Unigwe is sharply sensitive to the social construction of blackness, as illustrated by Seven Lessons in Becoming Black, but nevertheless seems to act out the ethnoculturalist authorial role which is assigned to her in Flanders.

It may be argued that taking up the role of black author in Belgium is a form of “strategic exoticism”, a role which does not entirely define nor confine Unigwe, considering that she deploys it to launch her work and participate in a global literary system of African diaspora writing, while transcending the exoticized position as an ethnic minority in the Flemish literary field that is available to her. The writings by Chika Unigwe are written, printed, translated, and read, not only in Flanders, but in multiple places, indicating the growing need to adopt a more transnational perspective if we are to accommodate the several communities in which cultural products like Unigwe’s writings are nowadays produced and received, and in which various authorial positions can be asserted.

In light of this latter point, On Black Sisters’ Street is not only a tale of choices and displacement set against the backdrop of the Antwerp prostitution scene but it also reveals itself to be a book that theorizes its own cultural mobility. While, like Unigwe, on their arrival to Belgium the four protagonists of the book enter a social imaginary in which they perform the already pronounced role of the exotic black woman which is available to them, On Black Sisters’ Street underscores on the one hand how the women perform this role and on the other hand situates their performance in the larger context of their individual biographies, suggesting it is but one out of many strategic narratives they choose to narrate about themselves. Chika Unigwe’s writing — its production, circulation, and reception — transcends far beyond the exotic category of Flemish fiction of African origin, while circulating in multiple transnational contexts. Similarly, On Black Sisters’ Street exposes how black womanhood is not merely about taking up the role of the exotic sexualized black woman in the popular European perception, but also, and perhaps more importantly so, about how women across the limits of cultures and social forces of power and domination, improvise and find spaces to re-describe themselves, while creating their transnational worlds anew.