Over the past couple of weeks, there have been a number of posts looking at the vitality and entrepreneurialism of slums in different ways (here, here and here.) I came across another today in a discussion at Laphams about how the great nineteenth-century English Literature canon (Dickens, Hardy, Gissing, Dreiser etc) is more relevant today in the slums of Mumbai and Rio and Rangoon than it is to us in the west.
The concerns of that literature—the individual caught in an encompassing social web, the sensitive young mind trapped inside an indifferent world, the beguiling journey from countryside to metropolis, the dismal inventiveness with which people survive, the permanent gap between imagination and opportunity, the big families whose problems are lived out in the street, the tragic pregnancies, the ubiquity of corruption, the earnest efforts at self-education, the preciousness of books, the squalid factories and debtor’s prisons, the valuable garbage, the complex rules of patronage and extortion, the sudden turns of fortune, the sidewalk con men and legless beggars, the slum as theater of the grotesque: long after these things dropped out of Western literature, they became the stuff of ordinary life elsewhere, in places where modernity is arriving but hasn’t begun to solve the problems of people thrown together in the urban cauldron …
With Dickens, the sheer energy of invention (as well as the irresistible temptation of sentimentality) lightens up the darker implications of his vision. By contrast, a writer like Gissing, a late Victorian who was not blessed with Dickens’ dazzling imagination and bravura style but made up for it in hard-won sensitivity to the daily humiliations of London life, produced, in the course of a short life, novel after novel about men and women whose aspirations always end in suffering and sordid compromise. His eye for the petty details of thwarted lives was flawless …
[I]n a country like Burma, which has experienced neither modernity nor the welfare state, an intense young reader is better equipped to enter the world of Dickens than anyone in Los Angeles or New York, and knows it. Also for this reason, Dickens’ real heirs are less likely to have grown up in London than Bombay … In vast, impoverished cities like Bombay, Cairo, Jakarta, Rio, or Lagos, the plot lines of the nineteenth century proliferate. Not ignorant mass suffering, but the ordeal of sentient individuals who are daily exposed to a world of possibilities through a sheet of glass—satellite TV, the Internet—that keeps them out. The extreme conditions of megacity slums contain the extravagant material that animated Dickens. In the gap between what their inhabitants know and feel and what they can have lies all the poignancy of Hardy …
Lagos
[A] complex, informal, but quite rigid hierarchy controls life in Lagos, one that a reader of Oliver Twist would immediately recognize.In the relentless daily commercial hustle, everyone has an economic place in a system based on patronage: the person above you (your oga, or master) provides a subsistence living and protection of sorts, for which you owe him a pledge of loyalty and a cut of your earnings. For example, the boys who scavenge the gutters and streets for pieces of discarded plastic sell their haul to their oga, who in turn sells it to a plastics grinder. Lagos attracts the ambitious and desperate young from all over West Africa, 6,000 of them a day. They are drawn by stories of quick wealth, spread by immigrants who return home over the holidays flashing new clothes and gifts. When a newcomer arrives in the city, he’s initially dependent on an oga for a place to sleep and a meal or two. The charity lasts around twenty-four hours, then the new arrival is on his own and has to start paying back his oga for the kindness. Illusions quickly die, and he soon realizes what a young man who was cutting hardwood boards in a sawmill told me: “Nobody will care for you, and you have to struggle to survive.” But there is a great deal of latitude for entrepreneurship of a desperate kind (in a wholesale market, the poorest of the poor charge a few cents to wash the mud off the market women’s feet), which accounts for the spirit of striving that prevails in Lagos and molds people’s faces into a hard, weary, calculating expression.
These slums are not simple places, and their inhabitants are far from simple themselves. We need to understand how they live and work because, quite probably, the future belongs to them.
Posted by jakking 
