DIS LAGOS LIFE

“There is something about this city with its vivaciousness, and clutter, and hardcore exterior that begs to be stripped bare. To be captured. To be remembered. With its yellow buses, and bridges, and waterscapes, and open markets, the city is alive. A constant buzz that conceals itself within the menacing grin of hustlers and the glumness of commuters too long in the heat and unending traffic, Lagos is pulsating with hope. This is why we stay here. It is why we return. This madness belongs to us all.”

 

Kovie Parker

Writer, Curator

Dis Lagos Life
Brimming with dreams cradled in our mothers’ prayers
in faraway land
Fast and faster, the hustle and bustle
To check the clock, is to lose time
Of the tenacious and the bold, who lose their foothold
Mining the wealth this land has promised

Dis Lagos Life
Where blaring horns pierces through morning reverie
And each dawn, fraught with relentless hope than it
can hold
Hope so brittle to be shattered in a blink,
And mountain peaks flattened in a twinkle

Dis Lagos Life
Where crazy is the norm
Because sanity comes at a cost too high
A life where feet race beside wheels,
for pennies that will vacate pockets just as fast
But Dis Lagos Life,
We die here.

Roli O’tsemaye
Writer

“For some reason (actually known to me), Quora has been sending me emails about narcissism. I mean, I’ve been called one and I’ve known many. Since this email infestation, I’ve learned that there are all sorts of terms that describe the operating system of a narcissist: ‘The Love Bombing’, ‘The Sudden Tantrums’, ‘The Discard’, ‘The Hoover Stage’ (when they don’t want you, but also don’t want anyone to have you), and the retaliating ‘Absolutely No Contact’ declaration from the victim. Scrolling through the pool of testimonies one day, I remembered walking through New York with my friend who had just separated from her mother- I described what I was going through with Lagos, and she said “You know cultures can be narcissistic too right?”

Sheila Chukwulozie
Performance artist, Writer

“Lagos is a city often spoken of in terms of ‘urban sprawl,’ a term at risk of flattening out and simplifying the variety and complexity of its urban expansion over the last fiftynine years. If Nigeria’s independence brought a wave of twentieth-century (indigenous) modernist architecture to separate the city from its colonial past, and birth a new indigenous identity to match the city’s industrialization, the 2000’s brought a need to separate old from new, dystopia from utopia with new gated functional areas of the city and economic zones pitched against the ruins of an old Lagos no one seems (as of yet) to know how to sustain or transform. The city’s shoreline, then becomes a site for future projection and potential that has not been without contestation. From the ongoing realization of Eko Atlantic, to displacement of water-side communities forcibly to grab land, Lagos has long been a city segregating its populations based on class, and future projections seem even more inclined to sustain the rich. Let’s hope the tide turns and Lagos becomes more inclusive for all.”

Jareh Das
Researcher, Curator, Writer

“I think of Lagos in fragments. Fragments of transitional spaces between one fleeting movement and the next. There is a certain reluctance on the part of the city to present itself in its entirety, rather choosing to present as an amalgam of visual and auditory experiences. A series of images and sounds, revealing parts and holding back others. I think of Lagos in moments, the city that gives as it takes. nothing is ever lost, nothing is never needed. It is easy to describe Lagos as noisy, chaotic, violent and ultimately tragic. It is true to define it as such, but Lagos is also calm on a Sunday evening watching cigarette smoke drift through a window that looks out to nothing, a potluck on a Saturday afternoon, heated yet tender arguments into the early mornings. Lagos is pain and solace. A contradiction of being. Lagos is home, till it is not.”

adeoluwa oluwajoba
Artist, Writer