‘Graceland’ is a study in Nigeria’s many contrasts

“Graceland” opens in 1983, in the teeming city of Lagos, Nigeria, where 16-year-old Elvis Oke, who hopes to become a dancer, is trying to earn money performing in the street, doing impersonations of the more famous American Elvis. As evoked in this novel by Nigerian writer and poet Chris Abani, Lagos is a city of startling contrasts:

“Elvis had read a newspaper editorial that stated, rather proudly, that Nigeria had a higher percentage of millionaires ... than any other country in the world.... The editorial failed to mention that their wealth had been made over the years with the help of crooked politicians, criminal soldiers, bent contractors, and greedy oil company executives. Or that Nigeria also had a higher percentage of poor people than nearly any other country in the world.”

Sharing a flimsy shack with his father, stepmother and stepsiblings in Maroko, one of Lagos’ many squalid slums, Elvis is well-acquainted with this side of the city: “The road outside their tenement was waterlogged and the dirt had been whipped into a muddy brown froth that looked like chocolate frosting. Someone had laid out short planks to carve a path through the sludge.” Although the Okes were never among the wealthy elite, Elvis’ family has come down in the world.

Elvis remembers the life he led eight or nine years before in the rural village of Afikpo when his kind and gentle mother, Beatrice, was still alive, and his father, Sunday, had a job as a school inspector. Persuaded by some of his fellow citizens to run for a seat in the legislature, Sunday gave up his job, only to be defeated by a richer, more powerful opponent. The period of free elections was short-lived in any case, as a military coup replaced the civilian government.

Intolerant, harsh and selfish, a male chauvinist in a particularly African tribal mode, Sunday wasn’t exactly an Ozzie Nelson kind of dad even in the best of times.

Now, in the wake of his wife’s death and the loss of income that forced him to move to the city, he has deteriorated into alcoholic inertia.

Elvis looks elsewhere for direction and guidance. The world he inhabits is a maze of contradictions and incongruities. Elvis carries his copy of Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet” as a kind of talisman. He also cherishes the journal kept by his mother, although it seems to contain little more than recipes.

Yet much of what he -- and most of his contemporaries -- feel and think comes from American movies and pop culture. As his streetwise buddy, Redemption, remarks: “Television is the new oracle.” Redemption plans to go to America and become a movie star, but in the meantime he knows some quick ways to make money and he offers Elvis the chance to do the same. Elvis is uncomfortable at becoming involved, however tangentially, in drug trafficking, and the criminal world in which he and his friend get caught up is engaged in far more horrifying things.

Elvis finds another mentor in a man who seems to manage without much money: the King of the Beggars, as he’s called. This fascinating character is more than a beggar: He’s the head of a traveling theatrical group of singers, dancers, musicians and actors who perform in remote villages. He’s also a political activist and opponent of the military regime. The King denounces the evils of American-style capitalism and calls for a return to the traditional communal values of the indigenous culture.

But, although Elvis admires the King, he doesn’t think this is the answer. For one thing, “It was essentialist, maybe even prejudiced, because the culture he spoke of was Igbo, only one of nearly three hundred indigenous people in this populous country.” Most of all, Elvis feels the King’s theories fail to take account of the inherent complications in either culture, Nigerian or American.

In a military dictatorship, however, as Elvis discovers, politics is not merely a subject for theoretical speculation. One moment, you can be a teenager dressing up as Elvis Presley; the next, you can find yourself in a cell being tortured. Nor is the evil confined to a corrupt and brutal regime. Elvis sees signs of it everywhere: in a crowd stoning a suspected thief and burning him to death and even in his own extended family. As one soapbox orator admonishes his audience, “[a] country often becomes what its inhabitants dream for it.... Every time we complain that we don’t want to be ruled by military dictatorship; but every time there is a coup, we come out in the streets to sing and dance and celebrate the replacement of one despot with another one. How long can we continue to pretend we are not responsible for this?”

Abani is not the first Nigerian writer to paint a vivid and disturbing picture of post-colonial life in that country. Indeed, Nigeria has produced more than its share of notable writers, from Nobel Prize-winning poet, playwright and prisoner of conscience Wole Soyinka and the eminent novelist and critic Chinua Achebe to such younger writers as Ben Okri, feminist Buchi Emecheta and the late Ken Saro-Wiwa. “Graceland” amply demonstrates that Abani has the energy, ambition and compassion to create a novel that delineates and illuminates a complicated, dynamic, deeply frac- tured society.