Of Translational Spaces and Multilingual Cities: Reading the Sounds of Lagos in Sefi Atta’s Swallow and Everything Good Will Come

Abstract

Over the last few years, there has been an increasing number of Nigerian au-thors who in their writing have centered on portraying the different sounds and accents of one of Nigeria’s most diverse and vibrant cities, Lagos. This article aims to analyze the way in which Sefi Atta, a leading voice in what has come to be known as “the third generation of Nigerian writers,” describes in her novels Swallow (2005) and Everything Good Will Come(2010) the manner in which some of Nigeria’s vernacular languages, such as Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba, as well as Nigerian English and Nigerian Pidgin, permeate this incredibly plu-ral and multilingual city where varying ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups have been made to live together in the same translational space as a result of the colonial era.As Achille Mbembe (2010) has underlined, one of the main bequests of colonialism has been the unequal development of the different countries and regions of Africa. This situa-tion has led to an uneven distribution of people within multiple spaces. In this way, cities such as Lagos, Dakar, Accra, or Abidjan have actually become major metropolitan centers where interaction and negotiations among diverse peoples are commonplace and transcul-tural forms of different elements such as modes of dress, music, or language are constantly emerging. Without a doubt, translation is a main feature of coexistence in Lagos given its multilingual environment and the way in which various ethnic and linguistic communities share everyday life.* This article is part of the research project entitled “Violencia simbólica y traducción: retos en la representación de identidades fragmentadas en la sociedad global” [Symbolic Violence and Translation: Challenges in the Representation of Fragmented Identities within the Global Soci-ety] (FFI2015-66516-P; MINECO/FEDER, UE), financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness.