Dialectics of Trauma in Girl-Child Trafficking in Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail and Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street

Abstract

This work presents a comparative feminist analysis of Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail (2006) and Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters' Street (2009), arguing that their distinct narrative strategies constitute complementary and necessary modes of critiquing the transnational trafficking of African girls. It posits that Abani’s fragmented, lyrical novella performs a poetics of interior collapse, immersing the reader in the disintegrating psyche of a single victim to frame exploitation as the culmination of intimate, familial betrayals. In contrast, Unigwe’s polyphonic novel constructs a sociology of collective endurance, mapping the deliberate economic and transnational architecture of the trade to portray trafficking as a systemic, capitalist machinery. Through a sustained examination of narrative form, bodily agency, and systems of power, this study demonstrates that a dialectical reading of these texts, one focused on psychological fragmentation and the other on socio-economic chorus, provides a more holistic literary understanding than either can offer alone. The comparison reveals the crisis as both a profound, soul-destroying personal trauma and a calculated function of global patriarchal capital, advocating for a critical approach that holds the interior and the systemic in constitutive tension.