Every Day Is for the Thief

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2007

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-6

Chapters 7-12

Chapters 13-17

Chapters 18-21

Chapters 22-27

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

The Search for Culture in a Developing Nation

The narrator returns to Lagos with a strong desire to find the places where a national artistic or literary culture has taken root. He sees Nigeria as a vibrant space that has much more life than the suburbs of America or his new home, and his expectation is that with that vibrancy will come artists who make important, nation-defining statements that transcend Nigeria and allow it to have a place in the global consciousness. While Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, one of the first African novels to find a place in the global literary canon, doesn’t evoke him explicitly, it does bring up fellow writers like Michael Ondaatje, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Tomas Tranströmer, and Vikram Seth, all authors who found global recognition through writing that felt specific to their own cultural experience. The narrator has a vested in this because he sees himself as someone who may step into this tradition—but to do so, he feels that he must connect to his homeland.

What he finds is almost always tempered by the frustrations he has with Nigerian culture and modern life in Lagos. With one exception, the shops he visits are somehow adulterated experiences—the first jazz shop he finds is engaged in piracy, undercutting the ability for musicians to make a living, and the bookstores he wanders into are more interested in religious books and the requisite pop fiction. The little culture he finds for sale isn’t Nigerian. His visit to the National Museum is even more disconcerting, as he sees that Nigerian history was written by victors unwilling to brook criticism, who downplay Nigeria’s long history of slavery to the point of farce. Even the MUSON Centre, which he regards as a hopeful sign, is inaccessible to most Nigerians and treats Nigerian teachers as second-rate. All of this combined creates a portrait of a nation with a key moral failing: They import their culture rather than making their own, and they ignore the difficult parts of their national identity to focus on the prosperous present (which itself is in many ways a facade).

This quest is personal for the narrator, but it grows into a larger indictment of Nigeria as a nation: it hasn’t made space for its own people to thrive as individuals or experience the enlightening parts of life. He finally finds a place that fosters Nigerian artists, musicians, and writers, the Jazzhole, a store that has a literary press and a record label, but it’s a small bulwark against the larger lack in the nation. The narrator wants to have hope for his country, particularly because he has young relatives to hope for, but he feels as though cultural artistry has too little space to thrive and become a meaningful national identity.

Modern Corruption as an Outgrowth of Colonialism and Slavery

Throughout the novel, the narrator identifies the many ways that the government of Nigeria is corrupt. In addition, he demonstrates many instances in which an expectation of victimization runs throughout the society: having to bribe local figures, pay “fines” to police officers, or be mugged or forced to pay a ransom by area boys ready to do violence. In the novel’s modern reality of Nigeria, people live under constant threat, exacerbated by an economic stagnation for all but a few certain industries connected to global capitalism.

He traces this to Nigeria’s history of slavery, with particular emphasis on the way it has been ignored or downplayed by society. Lagos was a key hub for the slave trade, which was driven by tribal warfare as prisoners were sold to slavers, but when the narrator visits the National Museum, it’s called “an obnoxious practice” (78), an insulting dismissal of centuries of pain and trauma. When slavery ended, Nigeria existed under colonial rule for decades, exporting all its best resources and leaving a legacy of exploitation and internal competition. Exacerbating that legacy were the leaders in the postcolonial era who replicated the power structures that had come before, lining their own pockets and burnishing their own legacies over trying to build up a nation struggling to enter the global stage.

This legacy runs throughout Lagosian society. The “yahoo yahoo” use the romanticism of the noble savage (itself an outgrowth of slavery) to scam Westerners, diminishing Nigeria and humiliating themselves in the process. The mutual victimization of slavery lives on in the area boys who threaten their compatriots and live under their own threat of cold-blooded murder by the police. Leaders recreate the dependent status of Nigeria by plundering their own museums for personal gain and neglecting to build up the economy or local infrastructure in favor of imported goods. Western religion is clearly a tool that the wealthy use to create a sense of complacency in the people.

The narrator’s attitude toward all this is one of outrage and shame, but he’s careful to acknowledge that these problems are systemic and long-standing. In the individual, he tries to see the dignity of struggle (though he still has little patience for the factotums and thieves he encounters), as when he focuses on the child who was burned to death in an act of brazen mob justice. He clearly sees that for the dignity and identity of Nigeria to mature, it must face its history rather than overwriting it, yet he sees little willingness for that in individual Nigerians or in the culture.

Immigrants’ Relationship to Their Homeland

The novel’s narrator is a close analogue to Cole: Both are Nigerian-American immigrants, and Cole dropped out of medical school, as reflected in the narrator’s apparent crisis over whether he’ll continue his study of psychiatry. Throughout the novel, Cole features his own photography, further tying the narrator’s story to his own, but clear differences between narrator and author set this apart as a work of autofiction structured as a travel diary rather than a memoir. By using this narrative structure and basing his character loosely on his own experience as an author trying to define his own career in the context of his national identity, Cole establishes a central theme of grappling with one’s national and family legacy.

The narrator’s decade and a half away from home has made him a stranger in Lagos: He’s unused to the casual thievery and grift that goes on, and he has lost his ability to blend in at the market and in other public spaces, where he’s frequently mistaken for a Westerner. In addition, he has become a fierce critic of the culture in the interim, an instinct honed by his experience in the US, where opportunities are more readily available and the dangers, while still present, are less of an everyday occurrence. Not only is he no longer accustomed to the everyday culture, but he also struggles to find a place in the city that shares his interests, proving again that he’s someone who has grown into an outsider. Throughout, however, he sees his inability to reintegrate into Lagosian life as the problems of the nation, not himself; where some might see a loss of one’s connection to home as something to reach back for, the narrator expects Lagos to either have or make space for him.

Interconnecting with his national identity is his identity in his family, and it’s telling that some things he criticizes Lagos for are present in his own attitudes toward his dead father and estranged mother. The grief he feels over his father’s death runs throughout the novel, but he rarely acknowledges it outright, choosing instead to refer to it obliquely. Only toward the end of the novel, after he has seen the danger of ignoring the past and grief, does he delve into his family history. His return trip to Lagos is thereby a way for him to find closure, honoring the past while realizing that he no longer belongs in it, which he sees as a primary cause for Nigeria’s lack of progress.