Popular Cultural Memory in Chris Abani’s Graceland

Abstract

This essay argues that Chris Abani’s Graceland uses popular culture as a project of narrative memory. This project of memory involves the performance of popular expressive cultures across a range of mediated texts — literary and musical — within the context of the everyday. The paper also argues that Abani’s recourse, particularly to Onitsha Market Literature, gives the text the dimension of a literary archive of urban cultural history, especially the history of literacy in Lagos. Abani re-animates Onitsha Market literary history as foundational of Lagosian cultural memory. The manner of its invocation allows Graceland to be a textual archive of the metropolis while creating sensorial cartographies of Lagos through the flaneur figure of its protagonist, Elvis Oke. Abani’s narrative project seems to not only be a performative site of a particular set of entangled memories, but also to work through memorial artefacts — texts, books and other cultural products. In effect, Graceland performs its own materiality within the narrative(s) of memory that enables its existence.