Teju Cole's Every Day Is For The Thief

No city is without ideology. Like any other human construction, the metropolis is imbued with a certain ideology that underlies the mere corporeal aspects of its buildings or streets, and the modern metropolis is no exception. The current conception of what a metropolis is, is largely defined by Western ideas of logic and rationality, and the city has become synonymous with this idea of progress. However, this notion of progress becomes complicated within a postcolonial setting, where rationality and logic have little place in the inhabitants’ lives. Teju Cole, in Every Day Is for the Thief, captures this image of the Nigerian metropolis as a city of “borrowed progress,” in which the rational organization of the physical landscape is disconnected from the irrational logic of violence that governs people’s daily lives. He also attempts to resolve this conflict in his novel, through acknowledging this irrationality and trying to recreate the experience of Nigerian cities by recovering personal histories.
The contemporary image of the metropolis is often defined by physical elements of progress, and Cole’s depiction of Nigerian cities captures how this physical progress is taking place in Nigeria. In Every …show more content…
At the same time, the novel itself is an attempt to reconcile the disconnected physical landscape of the metropolis with its inhabitant’s individual experiences. Though this novel does not provide an absolute solution to the inherent hierarchy of cities, and the problems of corruption and violence that characterize the postcolonial experience of the metropolitan, it offers a refreshing deconstruction of our previous assumptions of the metropolis. Maybe there is no city without ideology, but there is also no city without personal