Writing an(Other) Europe: Challenging peripheries in Chika Unigwe’s fiction on Belgium

ABSTRACT

Nigerian-born author Chika Unigwe situates a substantial part of her oeuvre in contemporary, multicultural Belgium, a location rarely explored in postcolonial literatures despite its colonial history and sizable migrant communities. This article demonstrates how, in her short fiction and her novels The Phoenix (2007) and On Black Sisters’ Street (2009), Unigwe’s literary portraits of the country, based on the perceptions and experiences of Nigerian migrants living there, challenge traditional centre/periphery dichotomies. Her characters, who are mainly young Nigerian women, move across boundaries between Africa and Europe, the big city and the provincial town, the city centre and the suburbs, the touristic historic centre and the red-light district, their mobilities characteristic of contemporary globalized societies. The fictions are analysed to highlight the equivocality of centres and peripheries and the permeability of the borders that separate them, as well as the resilient mobility of Nigerian migrants in Belgium.

KEYWORDS:

• Belgium
• Europe
• city
• migration
• Nigerian diaspora
• periphery

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This is being increasingly rectified in the last decade as a growing number of postcolonial studies has looked into the legacy of Belgium’s colonialism – for example, Demart (2013), Goddeeris (2015), Verbeeck (2020), and, with specific interest in literature, Parent and Bragard (2019).

2. This includes some notable monographs devoted to London and Paris in postcolonial literature, such as Amine (2018), Ball (2004), and McLeod (2004).

3. This approach is also adopted by Nigerian American writer Teju Cole (2011) in Open City, though with significant variations, as the novel’s Nigerian protagonist, a race-conscious psychiatric resident based in New York, navigates Brussels like a middle-class flâneur who is more interested in his own intellectual and existentialist considerations than in the lived experiences of migrants in the city (Bekers 2021).

4. Published two years earlier in Dutch translation as Fata Morgana, the novel won Africa’s largest literary prize, the NLNG Nigeria Prize for Literature (2012).

5. The story titles point to the differences between the two versions: while “Retail Therapy” zooms in on the temporary relief the world of shopping offers the Nigerian sex worker, “Anonymous” (reprinted in 2010) focuses on the anonymity granted by cities, which is particularly relevant for illegal immigrants as they do not exist in official records.

6. Only one of these excursions ends in disappointment, when Sisi is discovered by one of her pimp’s men in a shop and returned to the flat in the red-light district that she has been forced to inhabit (Unigwe 2009b, 259).

Additional information

Funding

Patricia Bastida-Rodríguez’s contribution was supported by the Spanish National R&D Programme, project RTI2018-097186-B-I00 (“Strangers”) financed by MCIU/AEI/FEDER, EU, and by the R&D Programme of the Principado de Asturias, through the Research Group Intersections (grant number GRUPIN IDI/2018/000167).

Notes on contributors

Patricia Bastida-Rodríguez

Patricia Bastida-Rodríguez is senior lecturer in English at the University of the Balearic Islands. Her research interests include contemporary women’s writing, postcolonial studies and feminist theory. She has published widely in these fields and co-edited books such as De-Centring Cultural Studies (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013) and Nación, diversidad y género. Perspectivas críticas (Anthropos, 2010). She is a member of the research team in the project “Strangers and Cosmopolitans: Alternative Worlds in Contemporary Literatures”, as well as Vice Chair of SELICUP (Spanish Society for the Study of Popular Culture). She is also a member of the editorial boards of Atlantis and Oceánide. For more information, see https://personal.uib.eu/pbastida.

Elisabeth Bekers

Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Bekers is senior lecturer of British and postcolonial literature at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Her research focuses on literature from the African continent and diaspora. She is the author of Rising Anthills: African and African American Writing on Female Genital Excision, 1960–2000 (U Wisconsin P 2010) and co-editor of several volumes and special issues, including City Portraits (JLIC 2019), a bilingual book on Brussels and literature Brussel schrijven/ Écrire Bruxelles (ASP-VUB Press 2016), Imaginary Europes (Routledge 2016/pb 2019; Journal of Postcolonial Writing 2015) and a Matatu volume on Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe (Rodopi 2009). She is co-director of the international research project Imaginary Europes and the Platform for Postcolonial Readings for junior researchers and manages the Black British Women Writers network and website.