On Black Sisters Street

"I published this at Cape. She is Nigerian, a professor and a city councillor and she is married to a Belgian. This is her first book in English – she writes in Flemish. It opens in a house on this street and one of the women has been murdered and they are just finding this out. As they mourn her the other women all tell their stories. They are all prostitutes but not escort girls. They are the ones who flash their boobs at me in the windows – not the high end. The stories alternate and as they tell their stories you find out what happened to the murdered woman. One of them is a Sudanese refugee pretending to be Nigerian. She was 15 when her parents were killed and she was gang raped. Then she has an affair with a UN soldier in a refugee camp but his parents wouldn’t accept her and he offers to get her to Belgium where she knows she is going to be a prostitute. She decides to go. Another is the daughter of a religious father who has abused her. They are all trafficked by the same man and one of them is grateful to him for getting her out. I had always wondered who these women were and when I saw this book, I thought; she’s going to tell me. In some ways it’s about the different ways women are hurt, and that’s universal but, a bit like Alice Sebold in Lovely Bones, she talks about deeply troublesome and sexually violent events but she treads so lightly that sometimes the shock of it really hits you in a way that it wouldn’t if she’d been more graphic. They have all made choices and sometimes you feel they made the right choice. One review recently said the men aren’t fairly treated in the book but, actually, a lot of men are shits and I don’t think there’s a problem with showing that. There is some beautiful Nigerian pidgin English in this too. She did a lot of research and spent a lot of time with these women. We often judge them but if you’re father’s dying and you can’t afford medicine but have the option to have sex with these men abroad…"