It’s the catchiest hook in recent memory: mysteriously, a city’s pregnant women are killing themselves by drowning; at the same time, a young girl has just arrived in the city, soon-to-be pregnant, working for a strange architectural firm that has just reclaimed city-large expanses of land from the ocean. That the book is 220 pages long, the prose lithe with imagistic beauty, the city Lagos – West Africa’s famed, dazzling, and filthy cultural epicentre – all but guarantees its appeal. Why then does One Leg on Earth feel like a chore?
‘Pemi Aguda’s previous and first offering, Ghostroots, a collection of 12 stories set in Lagos, largely concerned itself with the same themes: mother-daughter relationships, the plight of women in society, inherited violence, loneliness, death, transcendence. In ‘The Hollow’, a young architect, Arit, is contracted to fix a house that devours generations of erring men. In ‘24 Alhaji Williams Street’, the youngest sons on a street begin to die off one after the other. In ‘Birdwoman’, a severely unhappy woman gains wings at the marketplace, gets murdered by a mob, and then flies off with her soul’s eternal wings. In ‘The Wonders of the World’, a teenager slips into a stream on a school excursion, and upon being rescued, thinks: “she had not wanted to be lifted up. She had been weightless… [she] wanted to be water too, to be light, to flow despite gravity.”
The wonder in that story, the life source the geography teacher is in raptures about – the distinctly cold and warm single stream of Ikogosi – mutates stunningly by its end from the force of Abisola’s loneliness. This inverting loneliness is the propelling force of the characters in the collection, intensifying the further you read. They are estranged from social life and from their inner desires; they suffer and hurt others; they devise strange companionships. Yosoye, the protagonist of One Leg on Earth, is similarly plagued by loneliness, and has come to Lagos for its “unpredictable turns to a day so that what was up was suddenly sideways, and that 8 p.m. would bring adventure that 6 a.m. never dared to anticipate, and enough courage to stop her from curling back into herself, retreating into the loneliness she was used to, the comfort of its grasping arms.”
Unfortunately for Yosoye, who views everything with a romantic filter, Lagos is a beast. In an attempt at bravery, she pretends to be more worldly than she is and hooks up with a stranger from the bar. The man rapes her in an act of stealthing, and puts an end to all her desire for adventure. He also gets her pregnant, and once this brings us to the premise of the novel, Yosoye descends from character into plot point, vacated of interiority, becoming the site of philosophical contemplations happening outside of her. This is not unusual in Aguda’s work. ‘Manifest’, Ghostroots’ spectacularly chilling opening story, takes it up as its core concern: told in the distancing second person, its main character commits cruel acts that suggest she is being possessed by her grandmother’s ghost. Sections in ‘The Hollow’ are interspersed with questions on the ontology of houses. ‘Contributions’, told in a deft first person collective voice, has no interiority. The social breadth of Aguda’s situations has always been too capacious for the nitty-gritty of individual consciousness. In One Leg on Earth, however, there is no real social thinking happening here, beyond the trigger of pregnant women dying, and Yosoye is too inconsistent to be the one thinking the surface thoughts.
There appears to be a rampant dilemma for the contemporary Nigerian writer: how do you think with the tools of elite university education, and write characters trapped in the morass of daily Nigerian life? The consensus has been to make intellectually unsteady beings, at best, and Frankensteins at worst. This shows up most egregiously in dialogue, which One Leg on Earth mostly avoids, though no character, however uneducated, seems capable of speaking multiple consecutive sentences in pidgin. It’s surprising to see the other faults here because Ghostroots had effortlessly solved the problem by having its characters own up to their intellectual or economic powers. From the moment we meet Yosoye, surveying her new apartment, her gaze is relentlessly architectural. Her language aims ruthlessly for precision and is steeped in cultural registers. But in her life, there is no clear source for these powers. If she has a professional ambition coming into Lagos, we don’t know it. Her classmates are shocked by how adeptly she wields the written word, and shocking them is the summit of her satisfaction. Compare this with Arit from ‘The Hollow’, whose eyes are also architectural, and who is an architect, who took informal lessons with her uncle from a young age and has abiding formal obsessions of her own.
Same thing with class. Ghostroots’ characters are nearly all middle or upper middle class. Money oils their frolicking around Lagos. Its poorer characters are engrossed in a world so fantastic that the language of money need not apply. The extent of Ghostroots’ weird class signifying, more or less, can be seen in Pauly, the charismatic star of its final story, ‘Masquerade Season’. He is so poor that he and his single mum can’t afford to eat at Sweet Sensation, but he has LEGOs. In One Leg on Earth, however, the novel’s liminality extends to Yosoye’s class. Her living situation is “sad, poor, and dangerous”. She thinks of herself as a “bush girl”. She responds to Lagos with an awe that makes you question whether Ibadan is only two hours away. And yet her mother is a civil servant and tailor, with the power to alter NYSC postings. Her fit at the architectural company and pretentious art spaces on the Island is troubled with anxiety but not characterised by her class. Naivete comes and goes at will; analysis is independent of emotion.
All sociality is strange here: there are no social repercussions for Yosoye, a 22-year-old unmarried woman, turning up with a pregnancy. A corporation rich enough to fill up oceans, headed by a foreign-trained visionary referred mythically to as The Architect, does not have a copywriter to write its ads until a corper happens to come along. The ads this corporation puts out, to a misogynistic culture, targeting male investors, are somehow female-oriented. Most crucially, we get nothing of the country’s temperature regarding the pregnant women until a third of the way through, via a series of comments on a blog post, and then we move away.
Yosoye shape-shifts to become whatever yields novelistic contemplation on Lagos and its aspects, and the world itself bends to whatever can further narrative aims, so that one doesn’t quite care what happens because one doesn’t quite know what matters. Yosoye can’t descend into madness because she’s there from the onset. She can’t lose anything because she has nothing to lose.
Calling this a novel about the displacement of communities in Lagos is a reach: count the number of scenes dedicated to the matter. The figurehead for this displacement is a mute, eerily masked gate man whose family is killed in a government effort, who demands a job with Yosoye’s architectural firm and is given one out of… guilt? Reparations? We get his neatly summarised painful backstory from a bike man Yosoye meets by chance; the end. His presence is not so much a haunting as an irritation, if even that. What promised to be a societal novel becomes about outlines of individuals, which would not be a problem if the individual was interested in, or attuned to, the society. But the gate man and Yosoye are too particularly antisocial to be this, which begs the question: why is she the major mouthpiece? Why not Miriam Aiki, who opens it, and who at least is enmeshed in a patriarchal family? If it’s because Yosoye works for the firm involved in taking land from the dispossessed, her role in the workplace is too minimal, her complicity too flippant, her final judgment too superficial, for this to matter.
You could read One Leg on Earth less literally, as a book interested in the imaginary or mythological status of Lagos over its reality, an ambition whose most recent sibling is in the work of Eloghosa Osunde. In this realm, anything is possible, anything is defensible – the world offers itself for our reformulation. But where Osunde grounds readers and our social realities in polyphony – offering the friction of multiple contrasting realities – One Leg on Earth imbues all of its stakes in Yosoye, crucifying itself. There are moving passages, such as this childhood memory: “Watching her classmates giggle and roughhouse, nudging, tickling, hugging, exchanging long-winded stories while she watched from that distance, feeling nothing, thinking: What is wrong with me?” But these are few and far between. Because Yosoye is slipping into delirium, the bulk of her emotional processes feel delirious and unconvincing. A lot of excitement rests on The Architect having a menacing hand in things, but that’s only a red herring. There’s a small romantic sub-plot involving a brilliant painter, Beloved, but this ends when Yosoye realizes Beloved courted her to make art – an ending only meaningful if the social terror of the dying women had been ambient (unless Beloved was making the art for rapacious international eyes, the way Yosoye looks at her neighbours like “a slow-motion scene from a contemporary Nigerian film that might be praised internationally: a montage of real people living real lives.”).
In the end, one could read the babies as the catalysts for it all, desiring not to be born into this wicked world, taking their mothers back with them. It’s a reading strengthened by the phenomenon of rich women not committing suicide like their poor counterparts. But whether it’s an accurate reading doesn’t matter; the novel squashes all readings. As a sort of epilogue:
“In Lagos, women continue to jump. One day, this exodus will end and people will say the suicides came and went, like a plague of locusts covering the skies, casting shadow over everything… then one day, clear sky. Others will say it was a classic case of mass hysteria.”
One protests immediately: what are the material conditions that lead to this end? Why are the feelings of the people coming now? Why only Lagos? What does it all mean? Somewhat responsively, the novel offers:
“Many young men form a watch group, taking turns to troll the bridges and beaches, and when they see a pregnant woman, they pounce, and before dragging her back to her family, they look her in the eyes and ask, ‘Why are you doing this?’ And if the woman asks, ‘Why should I stay?’ well, they have to think about it, think about the world they’re convincing her to stay in, they have to think about what they have to offer her and her child.”
I don’t know what Lagos would exhibit this contemplation in its men. Certainly not the Lagos its women are fleeing so desperately they’d rather die.