Welcome to Lagos by Chibundu Onuzo
My first great literary love of 2024 is a book I’ve had on my shelf for almost four years. In March of 2020, I attended AWP in San Antonio and returned home, with a stack of books I couldn’t wait to read. Of them all, I finished Louise Erdrich’s The Watchmen quickly, but then lockdown hit, and I didn’t touch the rest of my AWP haul.
The titles I bought in San Antonio didn’t become less compelling to me, but I saw them on my own shelves as if behind locked glass cabinets: artifacts of a time Before. To read them—to even pluck them off the shelves and touch the pages—felt like a reminder that I had once traveled, eaten, and laughed in the same physical space as other people who were not my husband and child.
I still feel like I’m only just emerging from the pandemic on most days, but this month, I finally felt ready to take a peek at Before and see what it had to teach me. In Welcome to Lagos by Chibundu Onuzo (Catapult 2018, Faber & Faber UK 2017) I found a revelatory reading experience, perfect for the moment we are in: a book about individuals with their separate hopes and fears, brought together by a need for home, hope, and the safety and support of a collective.
Chike and Yemi desert their military posts on moral grounds and decide to escape to Lagos. On the way, they find Isoken, a brilliant teenager orphaned by a militia; Fineboy, a militia member who would rather be a radio DJ; and Oma, a warm and beautiful woman fleeing her abusive husband. In Lagos, the group find chaos, precarity, beauty, joy, and a corrupt government minister fleeing his own personal and professional demons. That these individuals—and other characters they meet along the way—are able to ultimately work toward a singular goal, in spite of real danger to their lives, feels like exactly the story I and much of the world could use right now in 2024. The novel is hopeful without being saccharine, beautiful without dismissing the ugly hardness of life.
And the writing is fantastic. Onuzo delivers a riveting plot with richly drawn characters and finely crafted sentences. Reading Welcome to Lagos felt like a gift both from the writer and from my former self: a reminder that the life rich with literature and community I wanted before, I can strive even harder for now.