Trafficking black women in Chris Abani's Becoming Abigail and Chika Unigwe's On Black Sisters' Street

In the last two decades human trafficking for sexual exploitation has become the focus of many narratives which investigate the condition of black women in sex slavery. Chika Unigwe’s novel On Black Sisters’ Street (OBSS, 2010) and Chris Abani’s novella Becoming Abigail (BA, 2006) explore the spectral and ghostly world of sex trafficking for sexual exploitation, bringing to light the atrocities committed by this illegal trade. The present work examines the two literary texts from a postcolonial angle, and confirms that trafficking African women for sex work is a form of modern slavery which dehumanizes black women by reducing them to mere ghostly figures, denying them any possibility to claim their right to have rights. In particular, the discussion notes that the current trade of trafficking black women for sex work is based upon the old practice of objectifying, or commodifying, the black woman’s body. The process of reducing African women to mere passive sex objects for men’s pleasure places women and girls in the vulnerable position of being illegally exploited by a huge system whose key players are both African traffickers and European criminals. In Europe these sex trafficked black women are further exploited by a political and legal apparatus which seems to legitimize the human trafficking networks by adopting some procedures that are actually unable to respond adequately and effectively to the social-cultural and political crisis presented by Uniqwe’s and Abani’s black female characters. This thesis suggest that, in the fictional space of the novels, the narration of the traumatic experiences of trafficked women allows them a sort of redemptive agency, while readers are given an inside critical perspective on human trafficking discourse.