VEJOH - VERITAS JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES

Lagos city, the first capital of Nigeria from the 1914 Amalgamation to 1991, has been a favourite setting for most Nigeria’s cultural productions, especially fiction, poetry and the movie. Although the “culture novel” model motivated by the publication of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in 1958 had depicted African fiction as predominantly set in the rural environment, Lagos city had had its early portraiture in Cyprian Ekwensi’s People of The City (1954) even before Achebe’s 1958’s debut. Since then most fictional stories set in Lagos have described a dynamic cosmopolitan environment marked with ever increasing modernity, over population, traffic congestion, rapid economic and infrastructural development as well as improved transportation by road, air and sea. Lagos is, therefore, viewed as quintessential object of social and cultural shift from the primordial through the modern to the postmodern. Thus, the consequential creative-destructive process inflicted on the city evokes images of an urban jungle brimming with life; a mass of humanity bereft of human compassion; en environment of pollution, dirt and crime provoking fun and resilience; the elites of power and wealth, eliciting the emergence of areaboyism; and the culture of oppressive patriarchy instigating assertive womanhood, and so on. This paper is an ecocritical examination of Sefi Attah’s Swallow to demonstrate how the cosmopolitan environment has gradually given Nigeria its postmodern twist in literature arising from earlier discourses of realism and modernism. But, above all, to prove that realism still remains the pivot for creative writing as there is no clear distinction between realism with either modernism or potmodernism.

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