The Travelling Bodies of African Prostitutes in the Transnational Space in Chris Abani’s Becoming Abigail (2006) and Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street (2009)

This chapter proposes to contribute to the opening up of perspectives on the complexities of contemporary African literature. It is one of the aims to show that these writers, unlike what Harry Garuba argues, showcase as many political claims as their literary forefathers and that they are not less "ideological" or political. Black prostitutes are deprived of agency, as they are abused and silenced by the patriarchal societies they evolve in. Yet, the two novels refuse simplistic dialectics, and some of these women, although they are undoubtedly abused, are also able to reclaim their own bodies and their own voices. The fruitful metaphor allowed by such a word links the body to the earth, and more particularly the uprooted and dislocated body of these prostitutes as being easier to abuse, especially when these travelling bodies find themselves on a passage to Europe.