A place called home

Sefi Atta’s superb new novel tells the story of a Lagos-born, UK-educated woman who is tired of London but wary of a return to a radically changed Nigeria, Lucy Scholes writes

The 39-year-old protagonist in A Bit of Difference is from Lagos, Nigeria, and has lived in the United Kingdom since she was a student at an English boarding school, but does not consider herself BritShow more

The idea that literature should have some educational or moral function has fallen out of fashion. Sure, readers want a believable reflection of reality in the fiction they read, but more often than not, the mirror contemporary authors hold up to nature has been fitted with an Instagram-esque filter – the colours are brighter, the outlines clearer, the contrast deeper, resulting in a portrait of uncanny (un)familiarity.

It's rare to come across a novel so devoid of artifice and literary pyrotechnics as Nigerian-born, American-dwelling Sefi Atta's A Bit of Difference; rarer to find so stripped down a work as compelling as this one; and rarer still, perhaps, to find an "African novel" that one can't praise for its larger-than-life exoticism and bold, colourful, rhythmic writing.

As the central protagonist of Atta's novel, 39-year-old Deola Bello – born and raised in Lagos, educated at a boarding school in England, then the London School of Economics – succinctly puts it, African novels are "too exotic" for her; they're "meant for western readers who are more likely to be impressed". Atta certainly doesn't seem out to impress with A Bit of Difference. Her protagonist is tired and troubled, and the tone of the novel is, although not angry exactly – it's too measured for that – it's definitely prickly.

Deola works for a London-based international charity foundation. She audits the various “well-deserving causes” vying for the foundation’s money so as to ensure it’s in safe hands. She’s concerned that fellow Nigerians see her as working for an industry “that thrives on an Africa that panders to the West” – she knows she’s in the odd position of a European-based African whose job it is to judge other Africans on their worthiness for western aid.

Underneath her suit, however, she’s not confused about her own identity; despite more than 20 years in the country and the cultivation of a pitch-perfect English accent – “speaking phonetics, as Nigerians call it – so that people might not assume she lacks intelligence” – she “definitely does not see herself as British”. She might well know London better than Lagos, “but she still thinks of herself as a Lagosian, not a Londoner”.

She doesn’t feel part of the “huge and fractured” Nigerian community in London, but we catch glimpses of its different facets in the form of her friends. Subu, a born-again Christian who sees Nigeria as “a place to escape from”, but who won’t “alter the pace of her voice or her accent for anyone, not even at work, which is commendable”; and Bandele, an old Harrovian whose “ridicule” of his countrymen and women appears to stem from “the sort of self-loathing that only an English public school can impart on a young, impressionable foreign mind”.

Like her friends, Deola hails from a wealthy, privileged background, but this doesn’t stop the slow steady trickle of discrimination – a colleague in her London office, for example, who won’t attempt to pronounce a Nigerian name, even though he will “struggle over a Russian name, though, and might even bite off his tongue to get a French name right”. As her brother Lanre sums it up, in England she can supposedly have it all – money, health, security – but all the while “it’s as if someone is chipping away at your backbone every day with that racialism rubbish”.

Besieged by a feeling of “boredom and a sense of unbelonging”, Deola returns to Nigeria for a business trip that coincides with her father’s five-year memorial service so is catapulted back into the bosom of her family and friends. However, worries about her unsatisfying career, stalled love life and cultural dislocation are suddenly thrown into sharp relief after a random encounter with a stranger goes wrong. A decision made in the heat of the moment has far-reaching ramifications and Deola is forced to make some important decisions about her life.

It should come as no surprise that Atta’s also a playwright, because much of the novel is conversation between characters and she demonstrates a skilful control of the narrative, managing the pace and delivery perfectly. Everything about this novel is real and tangible; it’s a truthful and deeply thoughtful portrait of the contemporary African diaspora – corruption, crime, bigotry, Aids and malaria versus cultural disassociation and ingrained, but ignored, racism.