Maximum City: Chris Abani’s Virgin of Flames
By David Platzer
African narratives in the west, they proliferate. I really don’t care anymore. I’m more interested in the stories we tell about ourselves…The question is how do I balance narratives that are wonderful with narratives of wounds and self-loathing and this is the difficulty that I face. I’m trying to move beyond political rhetoric to a place of ethical questioning. I’m asking us to balance the idea of our complete vulnerability with the complete notion of transformation or what is possible.
– Chris Abani, speaking at TED Global (Tanzania, 2007) (http://www.ted.com/speakers/chris_abani.html)
Set in a Los Angeles by turns luminescent and terrifying, Virgin of Flames follows the exploits of Black — a thirty-four year old guerilla artist — as he clandestinely undertakes work on a large-scale mural of the Virgin. Born Obinna (meaning “father’s heart” in Igbo) to an Igbo father and Salvadoran mother, Black was orphaned as a teenager following an abusive and chaotic upbringing. While he has found a community in East LA– comprised of supportive though often exasperated friends — he remains plagued by self-doubt, anger, and often persecutory memories of his past. As the novel begins, Black also finds himself haunted by a hallucinatory and exceedingly chatty manifestation of the Archangel Gabriel, one that appears alternately as a fifteen foot tall gargantuan and as a small pigeon. Though he occasionally offers wan attempts at spiritual insight, this Gabriel more often than not is glib, and sometimes cruel. At one point, annoyed at Black’s refusal to engage with him, he complains, “Well, you know. I’m bored. Usually when I appear I get to dictate a holy book or two, but you are boring.”
Pursued by his past and, now, a bratty archangel, Black has also become infatuated with a transvestite Mexican stripper, Sweet Girl, whose club he frequents while he discretely (though obsessively) photographs her outside it. He is accompanied on some of his rambles by Bomboy Dickens, a Rwandan refugee who has made himself a small American fortune — which proudly includes a Lexus — by operating a successful underground halal abattoir (despite himself being Christian). Even if often flippant, he is likely the merriest amongst a cast of often anxious characters. But Bomboy too has suffered a traumatic past. We learn midway through the novel that as a young, orphaned child, he was forced to use a machete to kill and maim Tutsi women and small children hiding in a refugee camp, a memory that occasionally flares up painfully for him. Rounding out the central cast of characters in the novel is Iggy, a nurturing though melancholic psychic who took Black in many years prior, and above whose Ugly Store (her “shop”), Black still lives (in an unusual “space ship” that he has built on her roof). While the propulsive and often exciting plot becomes too complicated to recount in full here — and includes other rich characters, such as Ray-Ray a stilt-walking African-American dwarf waiter addicted to the high offered by inhaling formaldehyde — it is surprising and unexpected throughout. Building to a sharp climax in which LA itself is swallowed up in a chaos at once apocalyptic and, quite possibly, redemptive, the finale echoes Nathaniel West’s classic Los Angeles novel, Day of the Locust, but with John Coltrane’s Love Supreme as its soundtrack.
It should be clear by now that maximalism, in terms of form and ambition, characterize Abani’s ferociously bold novel. The narrative itself is aggressively rich, while the layers of cross-cultural detail each character accrues is sometimes astonishing. Virgin of Flames is a novel in which subtlety of any type is brashly eschewed in favor of the most spirited and least expected twist. For instance, not only is Iggy a psychic, she happens also to be a psychic who practices her trade suspended in the air through meat hooks micro-implanted in her back. Not only that, but she also renders her visions through tattoos that she inks on the backs of her customers. (We’re told several times that she offers a henna option for squeamish). And not only is her improbable practice wildly successful, it has become so successful in fact that Paris Hilton has recently become a client. And so on and so forth. The novel is so thick with rich incident and lyrically loquacious phrasings that at times the core of its considerable power — a complex wrangling with an “ethical questioning” of identity, desire, and community– feels swallowed in a morass of the just plain over-the-top. Consequently, the novel can at times be difficult to keep up with, and even to follow.
Yet even if its extravagances at times render it an uneven and difficult text, the scale of its ambition more than makes up for the occasional misfirings of those excesses. There is a powerfully unsettling force to the novel, one that demands its readers to question their expectations. The novel demands its readers to engage in their own ethical questioning, even if this is a difficult process. In a recent essay about his craft in Witness magazine, Abani characterizes the “core…of [his] aesthetic” as the “belief in a deeper humanness that is beyond race, class, gender, and power even as I know that is not possible.” In Virgin of Flames, this manifests in events, themes, and characters that refuse to match any of the stereotypical or familiar outlines that particular national, religious, ethnic, sexual, or historical identities often produce. While each character in the novel is tendentiously idiosyncratic on this score, the figure of Bomboy, Black’s occasionally exasperated friend, is a great example. A Rwandan refugee who has suffered through the most horrific of war traumas, Bomboy is nonetheless defined in the novel not by his past, but by his ambition and by his exceptionally eloquent flair as an ironist. At one point, trying to calm Black down after Black has had an overly excited encounter with Sweet Girl, Bomboy tries to convince him to just drink a Guinness, saying: ” ‘Guinness, my friend, is the truffle of alcohol. Truly decadent but packing a velvet punch to floor you.” That a reader could be surprised by this demands questioning of what it is we expect from, for instance, the figure of the child soldier, and the kinds of cultural-ethical work these expectations undertake.
In that same essay from last year, Abani says: “In making my art, and sometimes when I teach, I am like a crazed, spirit- filled, snake-handling, speaking-in-tongues, spell-casting, Babylon-chanting- down, new-age, evangelical preacher wildly kicking the crutches away from my characters, forcing them into their pain and potential transformation. Alas, or maybe not, I also kick the crutches away from my readers. And many have fled from the revival tents of my art, screaming in terror.” Given its brash excessiveness, one could certainly be forgiven wanting to flee from Virgin of Flames. But such a premature escape would be a pity. Facing the novel’s terrors head-on is ultimately a deeply rewarding and enriching experience.
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David recently received his MA in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara. This fall, he will begin work on a PhD in Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. He can be reached at: platzerd@gmail.com.