Leaving Lagos: Diasporic and Cosmopolitan Migrations in Chris Abani’s GraceLand

Chris Abani’s 2004 novel GraceLand tells the story of a young man named Elvis who migrates from a rural Igbo area of Nigeria to the United States by way of the sprawling city of Lagos, where he spends over two years in a slum. While in Lagos, Elvis struggles to find a way to attach himself to his new home and ultimately fails to do so. From a diasporic perspective, which tends to essentialize places of origin, Elvis’s story represents a tragic series of estrangements from his native Igbo culture. From a cosmopolitan perspective, which seeks to overcome attachments to place, Elvis’s development is slightly more positive. His time in Lagos equips him to move to a diverse community of immigrants in the United States where he will have more access to the international cultural influences that he seeks. By considering and then rejecting the diasporic interpretation of Elvis’s experience of migration, Abani has written a cosmopolitan narrative that documents his protagonist’s integration into a globalized community that is skeptical of a diasporic insistence on origins.