lagos meaning in english literature

lagos meaning in english literature

Exploring the Significance of Lagos in English Literature

1. Introduction to Lagos in English Literature

Within a short time, Lagos began to occupy the center stage in English literature in a manner that still defies description. Lagos became a key verb and noun in several English-language publications. Authors from different parts of England and the world would write about the slave trade in Lagos. To Europeans, for approximately 300 years, the story of Lagos began and ended with slave trade. We are slowly beginning to notice that those who were born and bred in Lagos no longer identify slavery with Lagos. There are more stories about Lagos in English literature than Lagos has either lived in years or we can imagine. Such imaginary or historical incoherence and synonyms like Lagos, Legos, Lexos or Lagoa are acceptable within the margin of creative latitude available to English writers. During the earliest years, the creative strictures that guide the location of published Lagos in space and time are not found to have been influenced by any real or imaginary undergirding of Lagos.

Lagos inaugurated its contact with English literature in a casual and tangential manner. The contact occurred in the year 1553 when Richard Eden wrote The Decades of the New World or West India, Contayning the Navigations, Conquestes, and Other Actes of the Spanyardes, with the Particycous Manerers of the Indyanes, published in 1555. One of the five decades was written by H M, which stands for Humphrey Powel. Eden was what today one would call an editor, and like many people who deal with publishable knowledge, Eden came into contact with luminaries who knew and were involved in events and activities at various levels. Some of these notable personalities include Sebastian Cabot, Sir Albericus Vesputius, Thomas Lok, Goncalo Fernandes, and Thomas Thorne. E.R. Madu and other later writers in Nigeria would rely on this 1555 publication to produce their novels. Lagos was east of the Niger river by approximately 1,000 km and east of the kingdom of Benin by about 800 km.

2. Historical and Cultural Context of Lagos in Literature

However, none of the literary discourses identifying so prominently with Lagos takes on explicitly the historical and cultural contextualization of Lagos in its theoretical concern with questions of knowledge and representation. This chapter addresses these issues by problematizing the initial question and arguing for a theoretical and critical practice grounded in the material realities of the Lagos metropolis and in a consciousness of the political interconnectiveness of knowledge and power. Such questions help to fill the omission and may further illuminate the ongoing transformations of the Lagos reality. Lagos impresses us as a multifaceted reality. Over the centuries, it has been variously depicted from a number of perspectives and themes by different scholars, artists, and artistes as well as writers. It was closer and conversant to many images of ethnography, nostalgia, exile, and schooling. Each writer of Lagosish extract writes from the dictate of the Lagos bestowed upon his sensibility and discernment of persona in him. Largely derivative, Lagos was cast in a thousand and one contrasting images that constitute a treasure trove for literary exploitation.

Lagos says a great deal to me, sitting back within its malignant, nonpareil setting, throwing light around its blackness. Lagos raises all the distinct and beguiling scents of Africa – not the rather dull scents of the natural heartland, but the envenomed scents of an African city. Lagos, black and insensible, an abode of feuds, hatreds, rivalries, of criminations and recriminations, of hurry and scurry and confusion, of corruption, of bric-a-brac. The failures come tumbling one after the other like some perpetual pantomime, laughing, flaunting their bond with corruptions and reveling in the indulgence of sin.

3. Lagos as a Symbol in English Literature

For Chinua Achebe, the primary concern is with language as a mark of identity and culture – the language of life; the choice of English as a means of indicating specific African problems is interesting. It is important to note that Achebe’s novels are peopled with characters from a variety of Nigerian tribes who would tend to speak not to each other. Although this is true in the case of the works of other writers in Nigeria, some have employed “pidgin English” as an ambitious means of making their characters understood to one another in particular circumstances. Although English is frequently used as the language of instruction for children in culturally mixed households, they may insist upon the use of the language from their school experience. Because this sociolinguistic phenomenon occurs in Achebe’s texts, English enters his novels as a symbol.

Achebe’s work did not integrate Lagos in its full symbolism. However, Lagos as a city has been used in English literature to connote all of his meanings. Lagos is significant in “English” literature for several reasons. The significant achievement of English as a world language was not to have originated in England or even to have remained an exclusive English language. It was this Nigeria of modern Africa and Asia where English was spoken as the second official language, including Ceylon, Singapore, India, and a few other countries too. The world’s most widely spoken languages not only helped Nigeria’s unity and modern communication between regions, but English language notes to a large number of persons abroad the best Nigerian writers in prose, poetry, drama, and the high level speech people tended to use among themselves in public.

4. Representation of Lagos in Different Literary Genres

If you have not read any Nigerian works that mention Lagos, then the following fiction titles may tempt you to try one of them: Camara Laye’s The African Child; Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease; Efua Theodora Sutherland’s The Marriage of Anansewa; J. P. Clark’s Song of a Goat and The Wives’ Revolt; Cyprian Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana; Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters; and John Munonye’s Akon. These novels reflect the aspirations of the writers’ societies and their strategies for achieving their nation’s pressing needs such as unity in the wake of colonialism’s demise, a goal that now appears innocent and nave but was considered, until the advent of the present economic dictators and social anarchies, both right and feasible.

Lagos, a city of 8 million people, many of them living in slums, is a recurrent theme in the work of the Nigerian writers who have achieved international recognition. The city has inspired written works that are already considered classics or that would be classics if the field in which they fall, be it poetry, drama, fiction, or essays, were better known or more respected. Lagos has been portrayed as Dickensian or Orwellian. Miserable social conditions including the perpetual lack of precisely described basic amenities of life, governmental repression, and the people’s resilience and capacity for love – these constitute typical elements of the representations of Lagos.

5. Conclusion and Future Implications

Furthermore, analysis draws attention to the homogenizing tendencies of a globally facing, colonial and post-independence Nigerian society and much of this country’s literature, which, in the echoes of a polarizing metropolitan antithesis of city and source that is sounded from this cultural and material knowledge-exchange relationship, both plays and seemingly polices Lagos’s transmutation of its semiotics of power. Lastly, it has been possible to establish that the protagonists are not only Lagoscentric, not only binate within binary doutfitting, but are Molechrita, allegorizing the negotiating spirit of both city and source-Soja orientations, which claim, counter-claim and enable each other, remain central to the continuing evolution of the city’s relation with the rest of Nigeria. Through limiting the checked work to the cogitation of this passage, the study avoids readying itself to, so to speak, arrive at an arrival. While it is always necessary to establish where the salient evidence is and to marshal a scholarly consensus around critical readings first, this study of Lagos as reflected in literature and interpreted by English-language Nigerian studies should be seen as an existential project that can be critiqued as thoroughly as it ties the conclusions it has reached.

The study concludes that Lagos is too big to be overlooked by writers, and particularly by the featured novelists whose national and international impacts make them important to African literary and fictional criticism. Unlike the novel’s Academy’s protestations, which overlook the compassion with which the society finds depicted, the study has argued that the others’ attempts to put Lagos in its place are as valid when set within the critical tradition of a narrative history of the city, its fictional representations and its critical reception as those of the apologists who feature within an ideological tradition. In contributing to a literary-critical recognition of survivors’ acknowledgment of the city as Lagoscentric, as well as of the various ways in which a hybridizing postcolonial city becomes legible to itself, this study alights upon an issue which the sociohistorical dimension of African literature in general, and the missing Lagos story in particular, continue to render undertheorized in critical discussion of the literary and meta-literary histories of postcolonial Africa.