Dystopian and Utopian Childhoods Navigating the Lagos

162 The focus here shifts to that of the city. In Abani‟s Graceland, the city is a spatio- temporal terrain connecting diverse worlds. It is a place of dialogue and conflict, a city of attractions (Highmore, 2005:45-69) and distractions, dystopia and utopia. As an urban space, Abani‟s Lagos is seen through a rookery, a tenement city called Maroko and through the life story of presently sixteen-year-old protagonist Elvis Oke. There is a historical development that alternates between Lagos the city and Afikpo, Elvis‟s countryside home, which builds up to the present. The movement of time and space also plots the migration of memory between Afikpo and Lagos, while constructing the polarities of a simultaneously dystopian and utopian existence that eventually converges in the Lagos cityscape. The dystopian existence is portrayed in the representation of the scatological imagery of poverty, deprivation and filth which intermingles with utopian dreams, wishes, hopes as well as the imagination of worlds that are polemically apart. In spite of these conditions, a feverish imagination thrives, stirring and speeding up human activity. Maroko is driven by the hope of flight and by the power of imagination found informs of mass media. This text portrays Lagos through the practico-sensory experience and the imagination of Elvis‟s late childhood. Childhood is a fecund time for experimenting with time and space, portrayed in reality and imagination. Moreover, fantasy allows childhood to rupture boundaries of reality and create what Ashcroft (2001:204) calls a “horizonal" reality, which according to him is transformative in the postcolonial worlds attempt at rising above the physical and metaphysical boundaries inherited by the nation-state at the juncture of independence.
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The time of childhood is also particularly impressionable because of imagination, which is infromed by mobility. In Elvis‟s case we seethe narrative move back and forth, between countryside and city in a stylistic positioning of Elvis‟s trajectory of identity formation. Eventually, space and time converge on the city of Lagos and on Maroko. The city of Lagos serves as the background of the narrative, moving in time and space through the rookery of Maroko. Gerald Gaylard (2005:4) also underscores the centrality of imagination through the genre of the novel as diacritical to the “transhistorical and transnational ontology of postcolonialism which in this sense becomes not just a period, but an idea.

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Maroko is an actual informal settlement in Nigeria, the result of a gradual process of gentrification, as the aboriginal fishermen community of Lagos were edged out of Ikoyi – later to become one of the most expensive suburbs in Lagos – through increasing costs of housing (Olu, 1990:83). Elvis describes Maroko as a swamp city which is also suspended Its precariousness is symbolic of the fragile material, cultural and moral socioeconomic fibre of this society. The fragility underlies what Marcus and van
Kempen (2000:18-19) describe as the ghettos of exclusion where an endemic attitude of abandonment is rife they call this the abandoned city It is part of the city destined, as Highmore (2005:6-8) explains, to be illegible. An overwhelming atmosphere of abandonment is made manifest by the unsightly sludge, dirt, mud puddles and mangrove swamps and the people of Maroko, in the wake of this abandonment have to literally, as Elvis does every morning, slog their way through While he waited, Elvis stared into the muddy puddles, imagining what life if any, was trying to crawl its way out. His face reflected back at him, seemed to belong to a stranger, floating there like a ghostly head out of a comic book […] Ashe sloshed to the bus stop, one thought repeated in his mind What do I have to do with all this
(6) The foul material conditions of Maroko remind us of Fanon‟s (1961) idea of the wretched of the earth In postcolonial Nigeria, Maroko stands out as an internal colony signifying the continuities of the Manichean colonial world, through the dual economies that characterise most postcolonial urban landscapes. By representing
Maroko, Abani makes it become what Highmore (2005:1-6) defines as a metaphor city or an imaginary city (Prakash, 2008) from where cultural readings can be made of the material and symbolic Maroko, as part of Lagos can be related to the whole of Lagos, making it in this sense synecdochic to Lagos as metaphor and symbol of meanings that can be drawn from cultural readings. Graceland becomes part of what Chris Dunton

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(2008) refers to as the Lagos Novel following the popular work of Cyprian Ekwensi in the late sands as examined by Emenyomu (1974).
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Maroko is located at economic and sociopolitical margins within the architecture of Lagos. Materially, it is a place of despondence and abandonment, fuelled by informal economies. Culturally, it is a cornucopia of positive energy (Dunton 2008)
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, creativity, imagination and utopia. Elvis, the protagonist, thrives in this diversity of cultural existence. His hobby, turned economic activity of impersonating Elvis Presley allows him to draw on the creative energy that comes out of these impoverished material conditions. The activity of impersonation, borne out of his early childhood maternal influences is ontological of the state of childhood as it thrives through imagination in

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