Fictionalizing the new Nigerian migrant narrative: Bisi Ojediran’s <i>A Daughter for Sale</i>

Abstract

There has always been the diaspora element in Nigerian literature, probably beginning from the 18th century slave narratives produced by the likes of Olaudah Equiano. The connection between the 'local‘ and the 'international‘ in the national literature was tenaciously pursued by Nigerian writers in the 20th century, especially as it concerned the unravelling of the globalist aspects of the emerging African modernist sensibilities. Among other 'modern‘ examples of the increasing prominence of the outside world on the Nigerian social reality as reflected in Nigerian fiction are Obi Okonkwo‘s representations of the intersections between the local and the foreign in Achebe‘s No Longer at Ease and Ada‘s resiliently  'gendered‘ global self in Emecheta‘s Second Class Citizen. But it is the subject of sex-trafficking that has exploded the Nigerian 'transatlantic‘ narrative, becoming in the process, one of the foundational directions of the country‘s 21st century imaginative writing. Among the writers whose enterprises have helped to inscribe this consciousness are Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo (Trafficked), Jude Dibia (Unbridled), Chris Abani (Becoming Abigail), and of course, Bisi Ojediran (A Daughter for Sale), the subject of this paper. Ojediran‘s novel, despite its very robust imaginative stature as some kind of detective masterpiece, is perhaps the most well researched novel on the subject. What does Ojediran‘s A Daughter for Sale contribute to the emerging world canon of the literature, and indeed art on sex trafficking? What does it say about the postcolonial condition of Africa, especially as it affects the emergent social reality of sex trafficking? How does Ojediran‘s novel engage those other Nigerian/African narratives on the subject in an intertextual conversation?