Every Day Is for the Thief

The narrator considers how Lagos is full of stories, and he thinks of himself in comparison to Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Vikram Seth: a writer in the romantic city. He walks around the city observing incidents. He witnesses a street fight over a car accident and realizes that “[l]ife hangs out here” (65).

He begins to think he should move home to pursue his literary ambitions but worries about the rage that Nigeria would bring out in him. As an example, he details the frequent power outages and the need to rely on loud generators for electricity, which irritates him. He experiences many other stressors, and he realizes that the many stories going on around him are tempered by the lack of security and peace that the writer needs. What used to be a corrupt leadership has become a corrupt society in which the stressors of everyday life have turned people against each other. Still, the narrator feels the urge to return home and create the literature of his homeland. He turns up the jazz music he’s listening to, but it doesn’t drown out the sound of the generators: “[N]o sense emerges of the combat between art and messy reality” (69).