Persistence of memory

TWO years ago, Chris Abani landed on the local literary scene with the much-heralded “GraceLand,” a meaty, absorbing novel that took place in his native Nigeria. Set in a slum perched on stilts above a Lagos swamp, “GraceLand” followed a teenage boy named Elvis Oke as he struggled to find his way into manhood. It was a traditional coming-of-age story, but it was far more than that.

Elvis taught himself to dance like his legendary namesake, performing on the beach for European tourists. He dodged his drunken father and fell under the sway of a mysterious revolutionary beggar king and a smooth hustler named Redemption. As you peeled back the novel’s layers, you found a meditation on mourning; an attempt to unravel the tangles of violence and culpability in a compromised world; an account of postcolonial Africa’s tortured relation to the West; and a sorrowful song about fathers, sons and fallen heroes.

It was not, though, Abani’s literary debut. That came two decades earlier, when he was still a teen. “Masters of the Board” received a different sort of greeting. The Nigerian government smelled subversion and jailed the young author for six months -- the first of several prison stints that culminated in a death sentence for treason in 1990, when the authorities took offense at one of his plays. Abani was ultimately released and sought refuge in England, where, heralded by Harold Pinter, he published “Kalakuta Republic,” a collection of harrowing poems about life (and too many deaths) in one of Nigeria’s most infamous prisons.

Finding his place in a long line of literary refugees, from the Mexican revolutionary Ricardo Flores Magon to Bertolt Brecht and Theodor Adorno, Abani landed in Southern California. His latest book, a slim and painful novella titled “Becoming Abigail,” is, not surprisingly, about memory, loss and all the cruel disjunctions of exile. Not for a moment, though, does Abani allow himself that most tempting stupefacient of exile, nostalgia. There is little comfort to be found in the past, only further dislocation. “This memory,” Abani warns in the book’s first full sentence, “like all the others was a lie.”

Alone in London and far from all she knows and loves, Abani’s protagonist recalls Igbo rites in which the newly wealthy exhume and rebury their ancestors in a grander fashion than they had originally been laid to rest. Even the dead can get a second chance. The past is gone but always changing. Time is discontinuous. “Why did these people know nothing of this?” Abigail asks. “Of the complexities of life and how you can never recapture the way a particular shaft of light, falling through a tree, patterned the floor in a shower of shadows. You just opened your heart because you knew tomorrow there would be another shaft of light, another tree, and another rain of shadows. Each particular. Not the same as yesterday’s. Not as beautiful as yesterday’s. Only as beautiful as today’s.”

In many respects, “Becoming Abigail” could not be more different from its predecessor. Where “GraceLand” was sprawling, “Becoming Abigail” is compact -- not only in length and scope but also in style. If in “GraceLand” Abani’s prose was concrete and matter-of-fact, here it is diaphanous and poetic. His lyricism is elliptical, almost evasive. Syntax breaks down. Sentences collapse and take on the slow, staccato beat of trauma: “Sometimes there is no way to leave something behind. Something over. We know this. We know this. We know this.”

But trauma and loss -- “something over” -- are Abani’s subjects here. His Abigail is born to it. Her mother, whose name she bears and whom she uncannily resembles, dies while giving birth to her. Abigail grows up in the shadow of her mother’s death, her very identity cast in question by loss. She spends her childhood in mourning, learning everything she can about her mother. She holds funerals for decapitated dolls. She kills birds with stones taken from her mother’s graveside, shrouds the birds in strips of lace torn from her mother’s wedding dress and cremates them. Abigail scars words onto her flesh, first with caustic cashew sap, later with hot needles, hoping somehow to mark her body as her own. (In one of Abani’s prison poems, he wrote of inmates who branded their names into their flesh as “a welt to remind them of who they really are.”) A cousin convinces Abigail’s father to let him smuggle her out of Nigeria to England. The father, who can’t face losing a second Abigail, hangs himself before she goes. The cousin takes her to London, but instead of caring for her, he forces her into prostitution. Things get worse from there.

It’s not all bleak. “Becoming Abigail” has its Proustian moments. Abigail luxuriates in thoughts of rain, the “way it would threaten the world gently, dropping dark clouds over the brightness of an afternoon, wind whipping trees in dark play. Then the smell; carried from afar, the lushness of wet, moisture-heavy earth....” She remembers her one lover, “[c]upping his big face between her small hands, a pair of rare, black butterflies sitting on an outcrop of chalk.”

But you’ll find no madeleines here. Perhaps the most poignant moment in the book is Abigail’s memory of sitting at her hanged father’s feet as his urine pools on the concrete floor. “She soaked her hands in him. Brought them wet and shiny in the sunlight to her face. Smeared. But water is just that. Nothing left behind but the prickle of his evaporation and the faint fragrance of loss.”

If you’re paying attention, the end comes as no surprise. It is devastating nonetheless. “Becoming Abigail” is a hard, unsparing book, cruel in its beauty, shocking in its compassion. *