Every Day Is for the Thief: Fiction by Teju Cole Read Free Book Online

question of money, the question of my professional development and my other work. Serious questions for which there are answers. But there is also the question of my tolerance for the environment. Am I ready for all the rage Nigeria can bring out of me? The various run-ins a “humanist” might have in such a place as this? My first few nights in Lagos, I actually enjoy the power cuts. Muyiwa and I take bets about whether electricity will see us past 10:00 P.M. on a given night. It rarely does. The television flickers into nothingness, the room is instantly swallowed up by shadow, and the ceiling fans whir to a stop. Depending on how late it is, we might switch on the generator or we might leave it off. Rarely do we have the generator going right through the night.
    Power comes back at 4:00 A.M. or later. The fan resumes its spinning like a broken conversation continued in mid-sentence. Lightbulbs hiss back to brightness in the hallway and living room. The heat is difficult to deal with at night, and often I don’t get to sleep until the power is restored. Only then, as the fan cools the room down, do I finally fade out of consciousness. But within an hour or two the suncomes up, the muezzin and the cockerels begin their daily contest, and any further hope of sleep is futile. The hardest thing to deal with, after weeks of constant power cuts, is the noise of the generators. The house, which was quite large to begin with, has been carved up into three sizable apartments. Two have been rented out to other families, an arrangement that supplements my relatives’ income. One negative result of this arrangement is that there are now three loud diesel generators in the compound. When they all come on, as they do nightly, I can feel my mind fraying. I don’t experience the real privilege that it is for these three families to have the generators in a city where so many sit in darkness. The noise, the dark gray plumes of the diesel smoke are foremost in my mind: the moment there is a power cut, my evening is finished. The neighbors downstairs watch South African sitcoms at top volume. My bedroom, near the generator house, is filled with the din. It is impossible to hear myself think. I would prefer, on these evenings, to sit in silence with a candle, but that is not a decision I can make for the eighteen other individuals in the compound.
    This is but one issue out of many. Combined with traffic congestion, which is a serious problem in Lagos, and considering the thousand natural shocks to which the average Nigerian is subject—the police, the armed robbers, the public officials, the government, the total absence of social services, the poor distribution of amenities—the environment is anything but tranquil. I have newfound respect foranyone who accomplishes any kind of creative work in the country. Like the Nigerian photographers I met at an event at the Goethe-Institut: people who, against all odds, keep an artistic struggle alive. I admire them anew.
    There is a disconnect between the wealth of stories available here and the rarity of creative refuge. There is no computer at the house, but I had hoped at least to sit quietly in the bedroom in the evenings and do some writing. It proves difficult to do so. Not in daylight, with all the running around to do and people to see, and not at night, with the smell of diesel lacing the air, and the wail of a trio of power-generating engines mixing with the loud singing from the churches in the middle distance. Writing is difficult, reading impossible. People are so exhausted after all the hassle of a normal Lagos day that, for the vast majority, mindless entertainment is preferable to any other kind. This is the secret price paid for all those cumulative stresses of Lagos life: the ten-minute journeys that take forty-five minutes, the rarity of places of refuge, the constant confrontation with needs more abject than your own. By day’s end, the mind is worn, the body ragged. The