Power comes back at 4:00 A.M. or later. The fan resumes its spinning like a broken conversation continued in mid-sentence. Lightbulbs hiss back to brightness in the hallway and living room. The heat is difficult to deal with at night, and often I don’t get to sleep until the power is restored. Only then, as the fan cools the room down, do I finally fade out of consciousness. But within an hour or two the sun comes up, the muezzin and the cockerels begin their daily contest, and any further hope of sleep is futile. The hardest thing to deal with, after weeks of constant power cuts, is the noise of the generators. The house, which was quite large to begin with, has been carved up into three sizable apartments. Two have been rented out to other families, an arrangement that supplements my relatives’ income. One negative result of this arrangement is that there are now three loud diesel generators in the compound. When they all come on, as they do nightly, I can feel my mind fraying. I don’t experience the real privilege that it is for these three families to have the generators in a city where so many sit in darkness. The noise, the dark gray plumes of the diesel smoke are foremost in my mind: the moment there is a power cut, my evening is finished. The neighbors downstairs watch South African sitcoms at top volume. My bedroom, near the generator house, is filled with the din. It is impossible to hear myself think. I would prefer, on these evenings, to sit in silence with a candle, but that is not a decision I can make for the eighteen other individuals in the compound.
This is but one issue out of many. Combined with traffic congestion, which is a serious problem in Lagos, and considering the thousand natural shocks to which the average Nigerian is subject — the police, the armed robbers, the public officials, the government, the total absence of social services, the poor distribution of amenities — the environment is anything but tranquil. I have newfound respect for anyone who accomplishes any kind of creative work in the country. Like the Nigerian photographers I met at an event at the Goethe-Institut: people who, against all odds, keep an artistic struggle alive. I admire them anew.
There is a disconnect between the wealth of stories available here and the rarity of creative refuge. There is no computer at the house, but I had hoped at least to sit quietly in the bedroom in the evenings and do some writing. It proves difficult to do so. Not in daylight, with all the running around to do and people to see, and not at night, with the smell of diesel lacing the air, and the wail of a trio of power-generating engines mixing with the loud singing from the churches in the middle distance. Writing is difficult, reading impossible. People are so exhausted after all the hassle of a normal Lagos day that, for the vast majority, mindless entertainment is preferable to any other kind. This is the secret price paid for all those cumulative stresses of Lagos life: the ten-minute journeys that take forty-five minutes, the rarity of places of refuge, the constant confrontation with needs more abject than your own. By day’s end, the mind is worn, the body ragged. The best I can manage is to take a few photographs. For the rest of the month, I neither read nor write.
And yet, and yet. The place exerts an elemental pull on me. There is no end of fascinations. People talk all the time, calling on a sense of reality that is not identical to mine. They have wonderful solutions to some nasty problems; in this I see a nobility of spirit that is rare in the world. But also, there is much sorrow, not only of the dramatic kind but also in the way that difficult economic circumstances wear people down, eroding them, preying on their weaknesses, until they do things that they themselves find hateful, until they are shadows of their best selves. The problem used to only be the leadership. But now, when you step out into the city, your oppressor is likely to be your fellow citizen, his ethics eroded by years of suffering and life at the cusp of desperation. There is venality in abundance here, and the general air of surrender, of helplessness, is the most heartbreaking thing about it. I decide that I love my own tranquillity too much to muck about in other people’s troubles. I am not going to move back to Lagos. No way. I don’t care if there are a million untold stories, I don’t care if that, too, is a contribution to the atmosphere of surrender.
I am going to move back to Lagos. I must. I lie in bed, on my back, wearing only boxer shorts, enduring the late afternoon’s damp heat. I have headphones on, and I am listening to “Giant Steps,” that twisting, modal argument of saxophone, drums, bass, and piano that is like a repeated unmaking and remaking of the audible world. It is at high volume, but the generators say, No, you will not enjoy this. I have no right to Coltrane here, not with everything else going on. This is Lagos. I disagree, turn the volume up, listen to both the music and the noise. Neither gives way. No sense emerges of the combat between art and messy reality.
FOURTEEN
The National Museum is in Onikan in the heart of old Lagos. This part of the city has much in common with other faded colonial centers. The legacy of foreign rule is visible in the churches, the Brazilian-style buildings, the porticoed and decrepit institutions that lace the tiny, winding streets. Alongside these are the gleaming modern buildings that announce Lagos Island as the national center of commerce. It is the same thing one might observe in Bombay around Victoria Terminus, a combination of the borrowed old and the uncertain new. The museum sits in a less choked section of Onikan, in the shadow of the Tafawa Balewa Square stadium, across the street from the vibrant headquarters of the Musical Society of Nigeria, next to the brand-new Doric-porticoed City Mall.
The museum has no share in the glamour of these buildings. It consists of three or four low buildings set at the end of a drive fringed with manicured lawns. On the morning of my visit, the grounds are quiet. A sweeper is at his calm work. Behind the blue ironwork grille at the entrance is a pair of giant pots. The reception window, which opens into the vestibule, has a sign announcing an entry fee of fifty naira. The listless woman at the reception sends me to the ticket office, which is five yards away from where she sits. I buy a ticket from another woman and, as neither the receptionist nor the ticket agent looks keen to answer questions, walk into the first of the galleries. There are no brochures available about the collection. There are no books or prints for sale. There is no gift shop.