The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between literature(s) and liberty(s) through the work and personal experience of Chris Abani, an outstanding postcolonial migrant writer who is increasingly acquiring an international (or post-national) status and citizenship.
Abani himself experienced imprisonment and political persecution in Nigeria, as described in the poignant collection of verses Kalakuta Republic (2001)—which Harold Pinter defined as “the most naked, harrowing expression of prison life and political torture imaginable”—and was forced to migrate to the UK in search of not only political asylum but also greater freedom of expression and self-fulfillment. These liberties are never achieved by the characters of his novels (Graceland, 2004; The Virgin of Flames, 2007), and novellas (Becoming Abigail, 2006; Song for Night, 2007) populated by outcasts, individuals reduced to human trade, bodies without rights or recognition, negotiating their right to belong in a hostile country, society or community, striving for survival in the dangerous underworlds of Lagos, London or Los Angeles.
Nonethelss, Abani’s prose and verse also show how the presence of foreigners, aliens, migrants, refugees, asylum seekers and blacks in modern societies, at the heart of old and new empires, displaces the idea of centre and periphery and contributes to re-writing borders and reshaping identities. This apparently hopeless humanity—bearing shrewd and sarcastic nicknames, such as King of Beggars, Redemption or My Luck—also emanates an insuppressibly vital energy, and their despair is sublimated into poetic expression, as are the themes of displacement, exile and suffering in Abani’s latest poetry collection, Hands Washing Water (2006).