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

Chapters 18-21Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 18 Summary

The narrator waits for a shipping container full of supplies and a car at a schoolyard outside of his family’s neighborhood. He’s there with his aunt and uncle, the owner of the school (Mr. Wuraola), and some workers. The goods are destined for a school that Aunty Folake started in the 1980s, and they’re being unpacked here and loaded into buses to avoid the attention of thieves. Getting the goods into the country was already an ordeal, involving bribes, conflicts with customs officers, and more delays.

The container arrives, and they begin unloading. Midway through the job, three men accost them. The men have opened the gate and are demanding payment. The narrator says that they’re area boys, local gangs that are out of control (except when they’re periodically murdered by the police). Wuraola’s men give them a bribe, but it’s not enough. The men threaten them further, saying that if they’d met them on the road they would’ve killed them for their goods.

The men continue to demand a large sum while the group deliberates and tries to ignore them. The narrator feels ready to do violence to these men, but they leave without further incident. The group finishes unloading and caravans back to town in the buses with the goods, and the narrator feels sad about how close his family lives to everyday violence.

Chapter 19 Summary

The narrator recalls a passage of Tomas Tranströmer about repressed violence, and he imagines it was written about Nigeria. Wandering around Lagos after a sudden rain reminds him of New Orleans, which he sees as a sister city, the other end of the journey of the slave trade. He delves into the history of Lagos as a slave port, fueled by tribal wars. Since the slaves were kept on ships until they were ready to sail, little evidence of the slave trade exists now: “no monument to the great wound” (114). He sees the police bribery and the area boys as a continuation of that erased history of exploitation.

He goes to a bookstore he loved as a child. The religious section dwarfs the fiction available, which is meager and not very literary. He doesn’t find any Nigerian-born writers of fiction either and wonders where he might find a sense of culture in the city.

Chapter 20 Summary

The narrator originally left Lagos without telling most of his family, and his father’s death led to his estrangement from his mother due to her grief. He told her he was leaving only after he arrived in New York, leading to a confused letter from her that he never answered. He knew he needed a complete break from his old life, and he largely stuck to that. His Uncle Tunde informed him of when his mother moved to the Western US; however, he doesn’t intend to see her. Back in Lagos for the first time since he left, the narrator doesn’t see any memory of his mother here, and he can’t bring himself to go to his father’s grave.

He walks through the rain-soaked streets to visit an old friend, Amina, who was the narrator’s first love. On the way, he’s stopped by a police officer, who uses a concealed one-way sign to exact a bribe.

Amina is married now and has a daughter, and the family welcomes the narrator into their home. Her husband, Henry, is a banker, so they live well. The conversation is polite but stilted, which the narrator suspects is because the husband is there to prevent them reminiscing about their intimate time together. He wonders why he came.

Amina lost her hand in a tragic accident, and the narrator thinks the change he sees in her might be related to that. Henry asks the narrator if he intends to move back to Lagos, and he demurs. He considers all that Amina had to relearn after her injury.

Chapter 21 Summary

While walking through the city, the narrator comes across a jazz shop. He’s impressed by the selection, but he quickly learns that the music isn’t for sale except at exorbitant prices. Instead, the employees tell him that they’ll make him a copy far more cheaply. The narrator wonders if they understand why this piracy is a problem.

Later, he finds a shop that sells jazz and literature legitimately, and he finally feels he has found a place he can enjoy. The store has started a record label and a press as well, creating a space for Nigerian artists to make their work public. The narrator compares the two stores and is reassured that Nigerian creatives are emerging despite the hurdles they face.

Chapters 18-21 Analysis

The narrator’s encounter with thieves is deeply troubling for him. He sees the work his family has put into bringing the goods into the country, and they’re bound for a school, which makes the thieves’ demands and threats even more galling. Area boys are common in many parts of Lagos, and though the narrator is sympathetic toward them in theory—noting that they’re callously murdered by the police with regularity and seeing them as victims of the same system that causes them to victimize others—his close encounter with them reveals that those beliefs are no help and that he’d abandon them under threat. This, more than the violence itself, is what troubles him so much: he doesn’t want to be the kind of person who’s ready to hurt others, regardless of the reason, and Lagos demands it of him.

He connects the violence of Lagos to the largely erased history of slavery that thrived under the region’s tribalism and colonial rule. Little physical evidence of slavery in Lagos remains because most of the industry took place in the shipyards and on the ships themselves, and few acknowledge it at all, officially or unofficially. For the narrator, this is a moral failing of the nation, one that leads to perpetuation of the trauma. The Faulkner quote he cites (“The past is never dead. It’s not even past”) is about the American South and its erasure of the trauma of slavery, but the same is true in Lagos (114).

A wrinkle in the narrator’s condemnation of the nation’s erasures is his own history: He paints his leaving Lagos the first time as a kind of running away, and he’s estranged from his mother and won’t go see his father’s grave. By leaving the way he did, he erased his own connection to Lagos, and on his return trip, he finds it easier to address his homeland’s failings than confront his own.

Meanwhile, he continues to look for a sense of belonging. His visit with Amina doesn’t provide it, as he calls it an attempt to “recover the impossible” (126). He sees the loss of her hand and learning to write with the other as a significant symbol, both of her ability to adapt and thrive and of how utterly different she is now: The hand that she wrote to him with is gone. The first jazz shop he finds is another disappointment, as the piracy it engages in means that it isn’t fostering the culture it claims to love.

Only in the second shop he visits, the Jazzhole, does he finally find the “moving spot of sun” (130) about which Tranströmer wrote. It’s a place that focuses on building artistic community and supporting local artists, which to the narrator makes all the difference. Everywhere he has been, he has seen culture as either an import from the wider world, a commodity for the powerful to exploit, or totally devalued. In this shop, he sees hope for the future of Nigerian culture, one that has community and depth. It’s the most hopeful moment of his trip.