Naijamerican Eyes on Lagos

I originally presented this at Other Desires: The African City at Columbia University (the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation) on April 8 (my birthday). I figured I'd post my talk here, too. Enjoy. :-)

Lagos, the city where nothing works yet everything happens.

Lagoon, an American white woman in the wrong place at the wrong time

A bustling metropolis, Lagos is situated on the Gulf of Guinea and has one of Africa’s busiest ports. There are between 18 and 22 million residents in the megacity of Lagos, Nigeria. It’s the 18^th biggest city in the world and the largest city in Africa.

It will literally ensnare you with its near-impossible traffic, locally known as “go-slow”.

From the beauty and wealth of Lagos’ Victoria Island...

 To the potential of Eko Atlantic...

 To the slums of Ajugunle (nicknamed “the jungle” for a reason)...

Lagos is one of those cities that has a noisily beating heart and a vibrant soul.

Lagosians often complain and complain about the city's chaotic nature, but many will also say in the same breath that they’ll never fully leave Lagos. The most they'll do is come and go and come and go. Even if you visit just once, you don’t leave Lagos the same person you came as; it affects you.

Of course, Lagos has been the setting and character in many novels by Nigerian writers, as well. Some of my favorites:

Graceland by Chris Abani, which tells the story of a Nigerian teenager named Elvis, who is trying to get out of the ghettos of Lagos.

Black Ass by A. Igoni Barrett, a satire set in contemporary Lagos where a Nigerian man wakes up a white man...except for his black ass.

Every Day is for theThief by Teju Cole, a story about a man returning to Lagos after being in New York for 15 years and all the wahalathat ensues.

None of these stories could have happened in any other city. Lagos had to be part of the narrative.

My own obsession with Lagos did not start from research; it started with terror.

I didn’t come to Lagos as a tourist. Much of my family lives in the southeast and in Abuja, but I have family living in Lagos, too. So I came to Lagos as a Naijamerican (meaning a Nigerian American, a child of Nigerian immigrants. "Naija" is slang for "Nigerian", implying an intimacy and familiarity with Nigeria. Also, "Naijamerican" is one word, implying a hybridized new individual whose parts cannot be separated) visiting family. 

This meant that nothing was explained to me, as would be explained to a tourist.  I was expected to be silent and take all that was handed to me, like a good Nigerian child. 

I’d grown up accepting and embracing my Nigerian heritage, all parts of it, and this meant that I intuitively knew that whatever I saw when I arrived in Lagos was a part of me. 

Thus, when crazy things happened, I was always conscious of the fact that I too was Nigerian and therefore did not have the detached “luxury” of being able to say “Wow, these people are nuts.” My family was “those people”, so I was “those people.”

Coming to Lagos as one who embraced both her American-ness and Nigerian-ness resulted in a special form of vulnerability and openness when I arrived there. I was seeing things in double vision, as a foreigner and a citizen, an outsider and in insider. This is the Naijamerican paradox. This made my first experience of Lagos...troubling.

I was about sixteen years old when I arrived in Lagos for the first time with my family. I'd been coming to Nigeria with my family for years. Usually, we’d land in Port Harcourt and then drive to my parents’ villages in Imo State.

This time, we landed at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport. 

Leaving the airport that day reminds me of the scene in the Hayao Miyazaki animated film Ponyo when Sosuke and his mother leave the nursing home and drive into a tsunami; they get there, but not after some...excitement. 

Between leaving the airport and arriving at the hotel I breathed air that made me both cough with discomfort and flare my nostrils to inhale more deeply. I watched a taxi driver nudge a regally dressed woman with his car as she crossed the road (he didn’t think she was moving fast enough). I glimpsed a most likely dead body lying in an alley.

There was spitting, cursing, hissing, and shouting.

I saw a man driving a van using a horsetail to whip cars so he could pass by.

Okada (motorcycle taxis), danfo, cars, SUVs, trucks, squeezing, zipping, and forcing their way through the clogged streets.

It’s the only place where the contradictory phrase “rapid moving traffic” makes sense.

No rules of the road and everyone trying to rule the road at the same time.

Clusters of tenement houses, locally called you-face-me-i-face-you…or sometimes more cynically  called you-slap-me-I-slap-you.

From skyscrapers to shacks.

A maelstrom of people.

Everyone was hustling.

No one had time.

Fast fast fast.

Someone shoving bread into my window. It smelled good, but I didn’t have any naira yet.

Note, two things:

1. I was raised in the quiet predominantly white, somewhat (sometimes viciously) racist south suburbs of Chicago, where the deer and coyotes play. 

 2. At this time, I’d never been to New York City.
 

At some point during this 30 minute drive, I closed my eyes.

By the time we made it to our hotel, I was trying to squeeze myself under the seat. The rest of my time in Lagos wasn’t much different.

I didn’t return to Lagos for over a decade, but I was always thinking and talking about it. When I did return, it was with the mind, ears, nose and eyes of a writer. When I left, I knew I’d write about Lagos.

Lagos is Afrofuturist and mystical in its energy. 

from Lekan Jeyifo’s Lagos 2060 collection
Lekan was also on the conference panel with me.

It is both apocalyptic and heavenly. For Nnedi the Naijamerican Writer, it is the exact place aliens would want to invade.

Lagoon (Simon and Schuster) 

So, when I wrote Lagoon, which is about aliens coming to Lagos, I knew something was haunting the roads. I knew the story being set in Lagos meant water would play a prominent role, both clean and profoundly polluted. I knew there would be Nollywood level drama. I knew the water goddess Mami Wata hung out around the Fin Bank.

The Finn Bank (or whatever it's now called)

I knew there would be glorious chaos when they arrive…and since I set the story in 2010, I knew the president would be missing. And last but not least, I knew the story needed to be told from the point-of-view of many. 

As both an outsider and an insider, seeing  Lagos with my double vision, this all made perfect sense to me. 

But the story goes deeper.

It is in the dirt, the mud, the earth, in the fond memory of the soily cosmos.

It is in the always-mingling past, present, and future.

It is in the water.

It is in the powerful spirits and ancestors who dwelled in Lagos.

It is in the heads and hearts of the people of Lagos.

Change begets change.

-from Lagoon, Chapter 13, "Udide Speaks"