City, identity and dystopia: Writing Lagos in contemporary Nigerian novels1

Abstract

This article aims to explore the poetics and politics of urban spaces and identities in an African metropolis by studying how novels such as Chris Abani's Graceland (2004 Abani, Chris. 2004. Graceland, New York: Farrar. [Google Scholar]), Sefi Atta's Everything Good Will Come (2005 Atta, Sefi. 2005. Everything Good Will Come, Northampton: Interlink. [Google Scholar]), Helon Habila's Waiting for an Angel (2002 Habila, Helon. 2002. Waiting for an Angel, New York and London: Norton. [Google Scholar]), and Okey Ndibe's Arrows of Rain (2000 Ndibe, Okey. 2000. Arrows of Rain, Oxford: Heinemann. [Google Scholar]) map the geography of the city and portray its people and the myriad of ways they negotiate selves and identities in the spaces they inhabit. The article demonstrates how the novels of the city configure urban identities as woven not only through the rich cultural textualities that people live in but also through emerging subjectivities of crisis that configure responses to contemporary realities experienced as dystopian. Within these dystopian spaces, shaping identities becomes fundamentally political: the article traces how, across the range of the novels studied, disillusionment with received imaginings of postcolonial nationhood and identity engenders a mood of inertia and complacency, but also contains a potential for shaping re‐configurations of identity and spaces of critical response to the urban crisis.

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