The Book of Lagos
The autobiography of a city.
Everything I make is one book. A story of characters and gods, of saints and sinners, of witches and paintings and sculptures. Each chapter is a world of its own, and they are siblings rather than a sequence. The book is the frame. The city is the binding.
- Children of the SunA cosmic mythos. Sol and Luna at the centre, twenty-five children named for stars by proximity to the Sun. Twenty-seven portraits in total, the archive that lives in the sky.
- The DeathlessSeven figures named for the seven colours, and the long dusk that takes them. The Red Man, the Orange Father, the Yellow Queen, the Jade Woman, the Blue Boy, the Indigo Man, the Violet Daughter.
- The BrothersThree sons of Odùduwà. Aláàrá, Àjẹ́rọ̀, Ọ̀ràngún. Three brothers walked out from Ilé-Ifẹ̀ and each became a king of his own land. Three crowns from one root.
- The WeddingAn exercise in togetherness. A temporary community formed around a single vow. Bride, Groom, families, staff, wildcards. Twenty faces in the same frame. The archive that lives on the ground.
- Lagos Man!One man and the city that made him. The worst version and the strongest, held in the same glass.
- A chapter not yet announcedNot yet announced.
- Witches of AuchiWhat the archive refused to hold, kept in the interior.
- The AuntysThe sisters, and the room they hold. In bronze and in marble.
Eight chapters standing at one radius around ámá, the word for a town, a city, a nation. Nothing joins them, because nothing should. The order is not numeric: the city remembers out of time.