Every Day Is for the Thief

The narrator returns to Lagos with a strong desire to find the places where a national artistic or literary culture has taken root. He sees Nigeria as a vibrant space that has much more life than the suburbs of America or his new home, and his expectation is that with that vibrancy will come artists who make important, nation-defining statements that transcend Nigeria and allow it to have a place in the global consciousness. While Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, one of the first African novels to find a place in the global literary canon, doesn’t evoke him explicitly, it does bring up fellow writers like Michael Ondaatje, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Tomas Tranströmer, and Vikram Seth, all authors who found global recognition through writing that felt specific to their own cultural experience. The narrator has a vested in this because he sees himself as someone who may step into this tradition—but to do so, he feels that he must connect to his homeland.

What he finds is almost always tempered by the frustrations he has with Nigerian culture and modern life in Lagos. With one exception, the shops he visits are somehow adulterated experiences—the first jazz shop he finds is engaged in piracy, undercutting the ability for musicians to make a living, and the bookstores he wanders into are more interested in religious books and the requisite pop fiction.