Paper short abstract:

This paper examines a young European's first encounter with the complexity of Lagos using spatial literary theory.

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers the spatial presentation of Lagos as a contradictory city with a precarious personality that can be fallen in love with in Maureen Hansen’s Letters from Lagos. In this memoir, Hansen shares her impressions of the city as a firsthand experience of a foreigner. In 1970, Maureen Hansen traveled to Lagos to join her husband, who was working as an expatriate with one of the multinational companies in Lagos. During the sixteen years she spent in Lagos, she constantly sent letters to her parents back home in London. Shortly before her mother died, her mother handed her all the letters that she (Hansen) wrote from Lagos during this time. Letters from Lagos is published for her grandchildren, with whom she would like to share her humble beginnings and travels in Nigeria. Although the memoir was published in the United Kingdom in 2016, its realities are of the early days of Nigerian independence shortly after the relative calm after the Nigerian civil war. This paper uses spatial literary theory to examine Hansen’s outsider’s presentations of the precarious nature of Lagos and how she simultaneously preserves the image of Lagos as a city one can love.