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Overview
On Black Sisters Street tells the haunting story of four very different women who have left their African homeland for the riches of Europe—and who are thrown together by bad luck and big dreams into a sisterhood that will change their lives.
Each night, Sisi, Ama, Efe, and Joyce stand in the windows of Antwerp’s red-light district, promising to make men’s desires come true—if only for half an hour. Pledged to the fierce Madam and a mysterious pimp named Dele, the girls share an apartment but little else—they keep their heads down, knowing that one step out of line could cost them a week’s wages. They open their bodies to strangers but their hearts to no one, each focused on earning enough to get herself free, to send money home or save up for her own future.
Then, suddenly, a murder shatters the still surface of their lives. Drawn together by tragedy and the loss of one of their own, the women realize that they must choose between their secrets and their safety. As they begin to tell their stories, their confessions reveal the face in Efe’s hidden photograph, Ama’s lifelong search for a father, Joyce’s true name, and Sisi’s deepest secrets—-and all their tales of fear, displacement, and love, concluding in a chance meeting with a handsome, sinister stranger.
On Black Sisters Street marks the U.S. publication debut of Chika Unigwe, a brilliant new writer and a standout voice among contemporary African authors. Raw, vivid, unforgettable, and inspired by a powerful oral storytelling tradition, this novel illuminates the dream of the West—and that dream’s illusion and annihilation—as seen through African eyes. It is a story of courage, unity, and hope, of women’s friendships and of bonds that, once forged, cannot be broken.
Synopsis
Chika Unigwe is the winner of the 2012 Nigeria Prize for Literature for On Black Sisters Street.
On Black Sisters Street tells the haunting story of four very different women who have left their African homeland for the riches of Europe—and who are thrown together by bad luck and big dreams into a sisterhood that will change their lives. Each night, Sisi, Ama, Efe, and Joyce stand in the windows of Antwerp’s red-light district, promising to make men’s desires come true—if only for half an hour. They offer their bodies to strangers but their hearts to no one, each focused on earning enough to get herself free, to send money home, or to save up for her own future. Drawn together by Sisi’s murder, the women must choose between their secrets and their safety.
This first paperback edition of On Black Sisters Street celebrates once again the U.S. publication debut of Chika Unigwe, a brilliant new writer and a standout voice among contemporary African authors.
Editorials
Fernanda Eberstadt
Despite the horrors it depicts, On Black Sisters Street is also boiling with a sly, generous humor. Unigwe is as adept at conveying the cacophony of a Nigerian bus as she is at suggesting the larger historical events that propel her characters. On Black Sisters Street marks the arrival of a latter-day Thackeray, an Afro-Belgian writer who probes with passion, grace and comic verve the underbelly of our globalized new world economy.—The New York Times
Library Journal
In Nigerian-born Unigwe's second novel, the main character's murder propels the narrative forward in order to answer the question of how she died. Her death also spurs the other three main characters to share their stories. All four women are prostitutes in Belgium, and all came from poverty in Africa, lured by the false promise of European riches. The murder of one causes the three others to share their tales, each more heartbreaking than the last. This is a novel of desperation, sexual exploitation, and, ultimately, sisterhood. There's little hope here, though the ending suggests that the surviving women endure and finally make a life on their own terms. Unigwe has a talent for capturing the dashed dreams of young women who are stronger than they imagine. While the revelations about the murder are unsurprising, and the details about the red light district not particularly vivid, the women's personal stories are wrenchingly memorable. VERDICT Recommended for readers who enjoy novels about the struggle to survive amid African turmoil, such as those by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.—Evelyn Beck, Piedmont Technical Coll., Greenwood, SCKirkus Reviews
Four African women hoping for brighter futures find opportunity—and tragedy—working as prostitutes in Belgium.While standing in the windows of Antwerp's red-light district (and sexually servicing up to 15 men a day) might not be anyone's idea of a dream job, it does offer the young immigrant roommates at the heart of this page-turner a chance at a better life. Although their personal motivations differ, they are united by their obligation to Dele, a portly, powerful Nigerian "businessman." Based in Lagos, he offers them passports and travel expenses with the stipulation that they send him a hefty cut of their earnings each month to pay off their considerable debt. Once in Antwerp they are placed under the care of "Madam," a hard-nosed African woman with questionable loyalties. Sisi, the most educated of the group, leaves behind a good man, Peter, whose modest ambitions don't mesh with her big dreams. Efe sacrifices her own happiness to support her young son L.I., who lives back home with her younger sister, while moody Ama flees an abusive stepfather. The youngest, Joyce, was born Alek in Southern Sudan. A survivor of wartime atrocities, including rape, she follows Polycarp, a kindly seeming Nigerian soldier, back to Lagos. But their romance sours when Polycarp's mother forbids him from marrying the refugee. He then goes to Dele and pays Joyce's way to Belgium, where she, unlike the other women, initially believes she will be working as a nanny. In spite of her reluctance, her beauty soon attracts a devoted clientele, while she plots to someday open a boutique back in Africa. Sharing a modest apartment, the women bicker and bond until Sisi meets Luc, a white banker, in a Pentecostal church. He pursues her, offering a way out from the brothel. But Sisi's belief that she can escape Dele's considerable reach proves to be a fatal mistake, with far-reaching consequences for the others. In her English-language debut, the Nigerian-born Unigwe convincingly exposes an unfamiliar world without sentimentality.
Capable drama that puts a human face on the scourge of human trafficking.