"Bearing Gifts of Words": Multilingualism in the Fiction of Flemish-Nigerian writer Chika Unigwe

This article shows how Chika Unigwe's fiction presents a literary challenge to the "monolingual paradigm" (Yildiz 2012) that has obscured historical and contemporary realities of multilingualism. Rather than denounce the paradigm's homogenizing tendencies, Unigwe envisions, through and in her monolingual fiction, a globalized postcolonial world in which linguistic pluralism is the standard practice. In On Black Sisters' Street (2009), the novel in which Unigwe's creative use of multilingualism is at its most powerful, Unigwe does not simply imagine a postmonolingual world; she also invites her readers to actively engage in her multilingual text and presents her polyglot characters' linguistic agility as an example for the open-minded readers to which her writing aspires.