Entropy and Energy: Lagos as City of Words

In his 1971 study City of Words, Tony Tanner employs the term “entropy” to characterize the vision of the city offered by American novelists of the second half of the twentieth century. The term applies equally to the accounts of Lagos given by novelists such as Ekwensi and Okara in the 1950s and ’60s and, even more markedly, to the work of members of the “third generation” of Nigerian novelists writing in English. An examination of texts by Helon Habila, Akin Adesokan, and Maik Nwosu reveals, however, that Lagos is characterized by these—and other—novelists not only as a site of disorder and decay but as an environment in which creative energies are nurtured that are held to constitute a corrective and liberatory force.