The very moment they stumble, quite literally, into each other is perfectly timed with the occurrence of a deafening blast, huge tidal waves, and the appearance of a “naked dark-skinned African woman with long black braids.” Adaora is the one who names the woman Ayodele. There is Adaora who is a marine biologist. The main story line of Lagoon hangs upon two encounters - the seemingly unlikely meeting of three strangers in Bar Beach, on the one hand, and their encounter with a mysterious woman. But in Lagoon, Lagos stands up tall as iconic enough to be an irresistible lure to aliens. Even when aliens landed in Johannesburg, Neil Blomkamp made this famously cosmopolitan city devoid of Africans from any other nation, except for Nigerians, who were portrayed as gun-totting, superstitious cannibals. Not a grimy, over-populated third-world megalopolis in a continent thought of as stranded in the “waiting room” of modernity. After all, if the science fiction cannon is anything to go by, aliens, it would seem, prefer fancy cities in America and Japan. There are some who might think that the very premise of Nnedi Okorafor’s novel Lagoon -aliens landing in Lagos - is a bit far reaching.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |