‘She is the meteor and I, her space’: Co-Becoming and Biopolitical Trauma in Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail

In this article, I focus on the ethics of representation with regard to traumatic experiences of forced migration in Becoming Abigail (2006), a lyrical novella by Nigerian author Chris Abani. I argue that through his formal choices, Abani advances a radical humanism grounded in Igbo cosmology in order to preserve and sustain Abigail’s humanity against the violence of the imperial global border regime and the British state in particular. What I show is that the novella prevents Abigail from being read as a victim because she is co-constituted with Abani who writes himself into her, thus preventing the readers unfettered access to her full subjectivity, instead bringing us to the limits of our own. By foregrounding a common corporeal vulnerability which is articulated by Abigail and her relationship with her cousin Mary, also an illegal migrant, Abani rejects the posture appeal which often accompanies human rights claims—which necessarily posit the individual in a position of vulnerability vis-à-vis the state—instead exposing the contradictions inherent within the system which creates that disjunction between migrants and their humanity in the first place. By showing how Abigail ‘becomes’ through others, the novella is at once able to represent the negation of her humanity, while also contesting it. Igbo cosmology, and not the logic of the state, becomes vital to the ways in which Abigail resists her dehumanisation by the biopolitical, thereby inaugurating alternative ways of being and becoming human.