Literary tourism: "Miracle in Lagos Traffic" by Chika Unigwe (O. Henry Anthology 2025)

I joked a couple of posts ago about how doing a compare and contrast was a lazy way to make it seem like I was really engaging with a story while not actually working all that hard. It's partly true and partly just a self-effacing joke. There is still some thought involved, but the built-in structure of comparing two stories does tend to make it easier to decide what you're going to write about. There's nothing really wrong about comparing one short story to another as a way of teasing out what's interesting about the one you're looking at. But darned if I'm not here two stories later in the 2025 O.Henry Anthology and the first thought that comes to me after reading "Miracle in Lagos Traffic" by Chika Unigwe is that I should compare it to "Sickled" by Jane Kalu, which appeared earlier in this same anthology.

They're both set in Nigeria, and both have teenage girls with serious illnesses. Both sick girls even have the same name--Ije. One family is a middle-class Igbo family with two daughters living in Lagos. The other is an Igbo family with two daughters that has recently fallen out of middle class status. In "Sickled," the older sister of the sick girl is the first-person narrator, while in "Miracle," the mother is the first-person narrator. 

One thing I like about the O.Henry Anthology, a.k.a. "The Best Short Stories," compared to Best American Short Stories, the other main literary fiction best-of short story anthology to come out every year, is that the editors are willing to pick stories that play off of one another like this. BASS is more likely to pick one Nigerian story and, having checked a box off of its list in order to achieve a goal of a diverse menu of stories, move on to some other part of the world. O.Henry is willing to put stories in an anthology that invite comparisons, that take on more meaning when juxtaposed with the other story. 

Until this year, this thematic gathering was sometimes a lot easier to see, because O.Henry didn't follow BASS in ordering its stories in alphabetical order of the author's surname. From what I can tell, that's new to O.Henry this year. Instead, O.Henry would group stories based on their interplay with one another. In 2019, they put five coming-of-age stories back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back. I wish they had done that here with these two stories, which I'm pretty sure were both picked partly because of how well they complement one another. 

A different direction

In spite of how neatly they'd provide a compare-and-contrast project for me, one that would allow me to wrap up the anthology and move on to whatever comes next, I'm not going to do that. Instead, I'm going to use this story as cause to muse for a moment on the act of reading a short story set in a place like Nigeria as a Western reader with no deep knowledge of the country.

Unigwe was born and raised in Nigeria but lives in the United States. While Nigeria is full of English speakers, typically, when we read a story by a Nigerian set in Nigeria, that writer often has had a chance to leave Nigeria for a significant part of their formative years. For example:

• Chinua Achebe: born in Nigeria, traveled for work to London occasionally before making it big with Things Fall Apart. Lived most of the last twenty-three years of his life in the United States.

• Wole Soyinka: Educated in both Nigeria and England.

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Moved to the U.S. at nineteen to study.

• Ben Okri: Spent early childhood in London

• Teju Cole: Born in the U.S., raised in Lagos, moved back to U.S. at seventeen for college. 

That means the experience someone like me is getting is mediated by someone with significant Western understanding. Of course that's a good thing. Great writers like these, with a foot in both worlds, are able to translate their understanding of one world into the other in such a way that someone like me can more easily digest the information. But that ease of digestion comes with a cost. It's like eating at a Nigerian restaurant in the U.S. that alters favorites for American diners. It's close, but not quite the real thing. Maybe I wouldn't like the real thing, and if I'm being honest, yeah, I'd probably prefer a meal I will like if I'm only going to eat once or a few times. But if it were really going to matter that I understood Nigeria on a deeper level, then I really need to go eat the real thing. Even if I hate it. Even if it gives me terrible diarrhea. 

American military forces have been in South Korea since the end of the Korean War. There's an enormous apparatus there for Americans stationed in the country, one that allows them to live in Korea without feeling too lost most of the time. You can go have Korean "experiences," but they're curated by locals who know how to make the experience enjoyable and safe. Some Americans go away from their time in Korea thinking they really understand something about Korea, but they don't. They can't speak a lick of Korean. They've never eaten anything but bulgogi and kalbi. 

I don't know Korea like a Korean would, but because I speak passable Korean, I had a different experience when I've been there from what most Americans would. I at least have been in conversations with locals in their own language, seen bad, good, and indifferent behavior from people who didn't care that I was watching. I've eaten food that made me sick and food that isn't in any restaurant in the States. I've karaoked 70s Korean tunes and followed Korean news for domestic, rather than foreign, consumption. 

None of this makes me a Korea scholar, but it does mean I understand what farcical bullshit the "Korean experience" experience is. It's the same thing for people who think they're becoming cosmopolitan by checking off countries on a travel list, thinking that because they've been to the twelve places it's safe for tourists to go, they're worldly now. They're actually worse than people who've never traveled, because now they'll substitute their bullshit experience for just being humble enough to admit they don't know anything. The two-star general with a Korean driver who interprets for him and takes him everywhere is quite likely more mistaken in his understanding of Korea than the dude from his hometown who can't locate Korea on a map. 

Reading stories like this is the literary equivalent of a three-day trip somewhere

Look, I'm not in any way ripping on "Miracle" here. It's a fine story. It leaves the reader in the same place of moral ambiguity as the readers of the real-life news event that inspired the story. Yeah, you know that paying an unfortunate person for the kidney is immoral, but also, it's kind of understandable, and when the person doesn't end up fulfilling their end of the bargain, maybe you even feel like they've committed about one-eighth of a sin. It would be good grist for "Literary Court," if I didn't think I'd played that out already. 

There's nothing wrong with the story. In fact, it's the story's total okayness that makes it a good candidate to be the one where I finally stop and more fully consider the notion of including stories like this in an anthology meant for Western readers. (Also, it's the last story in the anthology, and now this post can serve as a wrap-up, because I was thinking to talk about the same thing in a wrap-up anyway.) 

I can guarantee that some of those Western readers of this book know even less about Nigeria than I do, and they're going to use the occasional story that a Western anthology uses to "round out" its collection to fake knowledge, either to others or to themselves. They'll feel like they've done something to become citizens of the world, the same way some travelers congratulate themselves on making themselves better people for having gone to Budapest. It doesn't. Without serious work to understand other parts of the world, traveling just upgrades you from ignorant to ignorant and privileged enough to travel. 

Let's say you are a securities trader. You try to fulfill your democratic duty by following the news, going deeper now and again by reading a longer story on the weekends. You've traveled a bit for work, say to Dubai and London. Most of your time and cognitive energy is spent on your job, but you do the best you can outside of that to improve your mind. You only can read one work of fiction a year, and since this is a highly regarded anthology, you make that your choice. Now these two stories are most of what you know about Nigeria. That, and a few stories you've heard from a woman at work who's from there. How does any of this affect you when you hear the White House, say, threatening military action against Nigeria for persecuting Christians?  

I'm not sure. I like to think that maybe it at least makes you think that Nigeria is a complicated place, and a simple take like "Nigeria persecutes Christians" is probably not quite getting to the heart of it. After all, aren't the parents in "Sickled" super, over-the-top Christians? And is anyone persecuting them? Aren't they doing a good job of ruining their own lives? That's possible, but maybe the well-meaning-but-busy futures trader takes away from it that Nigeria is a dangerous place, full of violence, because that's certainly a take one could have from "Miracle in Lagos Traffic." An alien reading this story might draw that conclusion. Mightn't a reader like this have an intuition where it seems plausible that Nigeria is persecuting Christians, or at least that it is inept enough to allow large-scale persecution. The government in "Miracle" doesn't exactly seem active in preventing crime. And the government in "Sickled" is a military dictatorship, although it's from decades ago. Come to think of it, our reader wonders, maybe those Christians in the story from decades ago are facing hardship now? He'll never know, because now he has to get back to work.

Not sure what the conclusion is

So what would I recommend, not putting stories like these in an anthology? Probably not. I mean, it's still a good story, and it shouldn't get ruled out because it might make someone smug and dumb instead of just dumb. But I do think part of the goal of making these anthologies "well-rounded"--one of the most unfortunate clichés in English, but okay, let's use it--is to give people at least some kind of cursory look into the minds of people from very different backgrounds. Maybe it's not so much to "teach a little about Nigeria" as it is to just experience Nigeria as a setting in a story in which the main point is to live through the psyche of a character in that setting. But some learning about Nigeria does happen. I Googled what a harmattan was while reading the story. I'll never remember that in a month, but maybe it gave me one trillionth of the feeling of living in Lagos for a second. It made me look up the news article about the senator who tried to buy a kidney for his daughter. A window into a few tableaux isn't deep knowledge, but it is knowledge of a sort. I'm not sure I can answer the question of whether something is better than nothing or whether a little learning is a dangerous thing.  

Reading stories like these, unless you happen to have done pretty thorough research or have a lot of experience with the culture coming into it, requires discipline. It also requires humility to prevent your self from making wide generalizations based on a narrow window into a fictional-but-based-on-at-least-some-truth world. Most humans aren't that disciplines, though. They take one fact they know and extrapolate wildly from it. They say Emily Dickinson's poems aren't worth reading because they heard somewhere she lived alone and was weird. They write off North Korea as a credible threat because Kim Jong Un has a funny haircut. So there's a bit of a risk to stories like these, curated by writers who know us so well, they don't let us get lost and terrified in a foreign land. 

O.Henry does something else that BASS doesn't ordinarily do: it included a few stories in translation. If I had to use some kind of fictional narrative to introduce someone to South Korea, I think I'd be more likely to use a novel in translation or even a soap opera with subtitles rather than a story written originally in English by a Korean-American. There is something quite different that happens when you experience art in which a culture is representing itself to itself than with art where a skillful guide represents a culture, knowing it's intended mainly for someone outside that culture. 

Ideally, we'd all have time for both kinds of stories, both those from inside the culture and those created specifically for export. I don't want to rule out the exports. I've certainly written more than my share of those stories myself, based on the hope that I had done enough work to present at least some truth from a different culture back to my own native one. My only point is that it seems to me that most Western readers get more of the literature meant for export, and that when you're consuming this, you have to have an extra level of vigilance to prevent thinking it gives you more knowledge than it does.