Chika Unigwe
Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters Street is the story of four African women who leave their respective homelands for Belgium with hopes of improving their lot in life. They harbor dreams of freedom, of sending money home to their families, and of saving money to establish themselves anew. Reality sets in as soon as they arrive in Antwerp. Sisi, Ama, Efe, and Joyce find themselves trapped as sex workers, flaunting their skimpily clad bodies in the windows of Antwerp’s red-light district, trying to entice men to procure their services.
The four women are heavily in debt to the ruthless man who arranged their transportation to Belgium and to the madam who houses them in Antwerp while holding a tight grip on their activities. Although they share an apartment, they share little else with each other, maintaining their distance. But when one of the women is murdered, the remaining three form a bond as each shares her story, revealing who she is and how she ended up in her current situation.
The women come from different backgrounds, but they have in common the need to escape from poverty, sexual assault, violence, sexual exploitation, and the brutality that plagues their homelands. Although educated, Sisi cannot obtain employment since her poverty denies her access to the contacts essential for gaining meaningful employment. Efe is abandoned by her affluent, married lover when she becomes pregnant with his child. Ama is a victim of child sexual assault who is thrown out of her home by her mother and stepfather when she confronts him with his sexual abuse. And Joyce witnesses the murder of her family before being gang raped by the Janjaweed militia in Sudan.
The focus is on Sisi. Her murder is intermittently foreshadowed; her story weaves its way through the novel, interrupting the fragmentary revelations of the other three women. Their stories are horrific. The violence, carnage, atrocities, and sexual assaults they experienced are described in graphic detail. Their betrayal by family members and/or former lovers lead them to seek desperate solutions for their desperate plight.
Chika Unigwe does not initially portray the women sympathetically. They snap, snarl, and ridicule one another, withdraw into themselves, and are distrustful. But when they reveal their true identity and describe the horrors they experienced, their sense of isolation diminishes. By contextualizing their experience, Unigwe generates understanding for her characters’ qualities—their lack of trust, toughness, isolationism, resilience, and determination to survive. Sisi’s death forces them to recognize they need to rely and support one another as they are the only family they have left.
Told in direct, unadorned language through a series of flashbacks, Chika Unigwe allows the grim details of these women’s lives to speak for themselves. Although we may not entirely sympathize with the questionable choices they make, we can at least recognize the desperate and appalling circumstances that left them feeling they had little option but to pursue the course they did.
Recommended.