ariel: A Review of International English Literature

This essay intervenes in current debates over human rights-oriented approaches to literature through a reading of Chris Abani’s two novellas. As opposed to critics who want to either embrace or unmask human rights in literature, we argue that Abani mediates between these two poles through close attention to the ways in which literary form and aesthetic can craft a shared ethos between reader and text. In depicting the short lives of a child soldier and sex trafficked young girl, he emphasizes the limits of the law: the gap between the human subject and the legal person whose legal claims are recognizable. At the same time, his narratives are not sentimental, and they challenge readers to extend a recognition of shared humanity across facile divides of right or wrong behavior. If, as Abani posits, we cannot become fully human without the courage to unmask ourselves, then the endeavor of human rights must also submit to a similar unmasking of its foundational paradoxes, limitations, pretentions, and complicities precisely in order to live into or embrace the fuller manifestation of justice toward which it gestures. More specifically, we examine the interplay of lyric and narrative voices within the context of the novellas to show how Abani deploys temporal and aesthetic constructions in response to the limits of normative human rights (legal instruments and official discourses). Rather than calling upon the reader’s responsibility and fostering literary humanitarianism (which has been extensively critiqued as paternalistic by scholars such as Joseph Slaughter and Elizabeth Anker), Abani’s delicate balance of lyric and narrative generates a more complicated ethos of reciprocity between the reader and the subjects whom the text calls into being as characters.