Little Rot

“This city. You think you’ll never be a part of things you hate; you think you’re protected somehow, like the rot won’t ever get to you. Then you wake up one day and you’re chest deep in it, watching some perverted gays at a random party in the highland.”

When Kalu goes to Ahmed’s sex party, he meets a woman who warns him against a sense of complacency toward the darkness and corruption in New Lagos. Throughout the novel, “rot” becomes a metaphor for the city’s corruption and its tendency to ensnare even innocent bystanders. The woman warns Kalu that the “rot” spreads so slowly he won’t see it coming.

“Ahmed stepped forward and his eyes glittered. ‘You’re a client just like those men—you come under my roof, fuck my women, and then think you can lecture me because you walked in on her? She’s lucky, Kalu. She works for me. What about the other ones, the ones you don’t see because your windows are tinted when your car drives past them? They get ripped apart and beaten into a bloody pulp, but what the fuck do you care? You don’t see it, so it doesn’t happen? Don’t fucking come at me. I’m a businessman. I hire whores who are old enough to fuck and I take fucking good care of them!’”

In this passage, Ahmed exposes Kalu’s hypocrisy after he walks in on Machi. Like all the other characters in the novel, Kalu compartmentalizes his experience as part of The Fight to Maintain Moral Integrity—ignoring the sexual violence all around him. It is only when he encounters a situation that it is impossible to look away from that he is moved to act. This passage underscores the convoluted sense of morality that runs through the novel. Ahmed suggests he is a good man because he treats the women he hires well, ignoring the fact that he is perpetuating sex work and human trafficking.

“He thought of Aima, of every time he’d touched a woman who was not her only to come home afterward and kiss her cheek, dropping a lie on the bone behind her ear. Is this not Nigeria and was he not a man just like those men in the locked room?”

Coming home from Ahmed’s party, Kalu worries that he might not be different from the abusive and violent men who populate his world. He has been unfaithful and lied to Aima many times since moving back to New Lagos from Houston, Texas. This behavior is tolerated and even expected of men in New Lagos, and the shift in Kalu’s behavior is evidence of The Influence of Circumstances on Individual Morality.

“Every time, every party, this centered him. Distill people down to their basic needs and desires, and it would smell like this—salty and ripe. Most of the time, in other spaces, Ahmed could feel how false they were, with all their layers, masks, pretenses. But not at his parties. Here, he never had to wonder if the world he was seeing was real. It was always true; it was the one truth he could be sure of.”

Little Rot repeatedly illustrates that no one is above the corruption that permeates New Lagos. In this passage, Ahmed surveys his party, thinking that his parties allow everyone to tune into their true physical self and needs. They are able to let go of all false pretenses that society demands of them.

“Kalu exhaled and tried to decide what to do next, if he should call back, why the thought of his friend with another—with a man—was making him sicker to the stomach than the vodka had.”

In this passage, Kalu hangs up the phone after hearing another man’s voice when he tries to call Ahmed. Thinking of Ahmed with another man makes him feel sick, which in turn surprises him, illustrating the depth of his feelings for Ahmed and the extent to which he has hidden them from himself.

“Even if the pastor didn’t turn his vengeance in Ahmed’s direction, it wouldn’t matter. He would be cut down all the same, because Kalu was—Kalu was supposed to be under his protection more than any guest, any client. Ahmed refused to allow himself to think of anything else Kalu could have been to him, ghosts of a teenage night that had drifted away with the years.”

Here, Ahmed thinks about the threat that Okinosho poses to Kalu’s life. He feels an intense obligation to protect Kalu, but he avoids thinking about where these feelings come from. Nevertheless, the implication that Kalu’s death would also be Ahmed’s indicates the depth and complexity of his feelings.

“It was like expecting a rotten tree to bear edible fruit. It was never going to give you that. It could give you other things, though, if you knew how to work the rot, if you weren’t afraid to touch it or use it. The rot could give you power.”

While the “rot” of New Lagos destroys some characters, others learn to use it to their advantage. Here, Ola describes how she has used the violence, corruption, and immorality of society to make herself powerful. She takes advantage of wealthy, corrupt men and uses their weaknesses to build herself a safe and comfortable life.

“‘But would you have killed him if he’d done it to someone else? Some girl off the street?’ She watched Ahmed closely as the question sank into his skin, and she saw the shame rise up in response. ‘Of course you wouldn’t, Ahmed. Men like that are your clients. It happens all the time.’”

In this passage, Ahmed and Souraya remember when Ahmed rescued her from the hotel room of a violent client. Ahmed insists what the man did was wrong. In The Fight to Maintain Moral Integrity, he views his actions here as evidence of his decency. Souraya reminds him that men in close proximity to Ahmed commit acts of violence toward women and sex workers all the time, and he does nothing. She points out the hypocrisy of his claim to have helped her out of a sense of moral duty and reminds him that he did it simply because of his feelings for her.

“Some of it was directed at himself. It had been so many years of ignoring those wants, of diverting them into other places—a roughness with women, for example, but only those who liked it. Sometimes he’d imagined that these women were someone else, that the cheek under his palm was textured with stubble, that he could reach around their hip and wrap his hand around a penis like he had that night when Kalu had panted next to him with such inviting desperation. How foolish was it, to have a desire from so long ago follow you in a haunting?”

Here, Ahmed again thinks about his repressed desire for men and specifically for Kalu. In trying to maintain a certain image of himself, Ahmed has denied and hidden his true desires. Ironically, this secrecy leads to a far greater threat to Ahmed’s self-image: When Seun threatens to expose Ahmed’s queer sexuality, Ahmed kills him, thus destroying his image of himself as a good person.

“Did she actually feel guilty or was she performing it because that was the only world she knew, where these things weren’t allowed, where pleasure in those forms wasn’t allowed? She blinked with wet eyelashes and frowned, confused and suddenly reluctant to keep praying.”

In this passage, Aima processes the consequences of her night with Ijendu. Initially, she feels intensely guilty, but upon closer inspection, she begins to wonder why. Stepping out of her own world for the first time has shown Aima that other realities exist, and this leads her to question the validity of her own.

“He wasn’t sure if he was lying or not, but she was giving him an option he seized with both hands. A terrible accident. Manslaughter instead of murder. He’d paid to have this done so many times before, but he’d never done it himself, ended a life with his own hands. He’d been such a coward, a fraud.”

When Ijendu and Aima find Ahmed with Seun’s dead body, Ijendu assures Ahmed that what happened was an accident. He jumps at this opportunity to preserve his last shred of moral integrity. However, he recognizes that his desperation to avoid the label of murder reveals his cowardice in avoiding the ugly realities of his work.

“Why had Ijendu brought them here? What could a man of God like Okinosho possibly do to help Ahmed? Sure, there were rumors of him being a womanizer, but no one was perfect and this was Nigeria and he had too much power to fall to temptation now and again—but disposing of a dead body?”

In this passage, Aima thinks about the shock of Ijendu bringing them to the pastor Okinosho’s house to dispose of Seun’s body. Her musing suggests The Ubiquity of Male Sexual Violence in New Lagos; transgressions like infidelity are expected, even from “a man of God.” However, there is a clear line in Alma’s mind, and helping to dispose of a body crosses it.

“Ever since she and Kalu had moved back, there had been moments when she felt like Ijendu and Ahmed saw them as naïve, as if there was a secret in New Lagos that those two knew but that Aima and Kalu were excluded from.”

Kalu and Aima are the two most innocent characters, softened perhaps by their time in the United States and unaware of the extent of the corruption in New Lagos. Friends like Ahmed and Ijendu keep them sheltered by hiding the true darkness of the underworld they are a part of.

“Their sinful night seemed irrelevant now, after the horror of Seun, after Aima had made her peace with God. This was what salvation could look like, she thought, being reminded that she didn’t really know the woman whose hand was in hers, that secrets were filling up the back seat of the car they sat in. Sometimes God showed you which paths to turn away from no matter how much love was there, showed you how a little darkness could lead to being swallowed by a devouring night. Aima knew with every fiber of her being that she didn’t want this—bodies and death, lies and men terrible enough to make or hide corpses.”

Aima muses that the day’s horrible events have provided her with a kind of “salvation.” Trying to dispose of Seun’s body has given her a glimpse of just how deep New Lagos’s darkness goes and helped her understand how to avoid it.

“They had followed each other into unspeakable darkness; they had spilled blood and done cruel, inhumane things for and with each other, and they would do those things again and again if it was necessary.”

This passage describes Thursday, Ahmed’s second. Because the two can match each other’s “darkness,” they have a deep bond, with no secrets between them. The novel is often concerned with what it means to truly “see” someone without masks or pretensions, having the courage to not look away from the parts that individuals try to hide. Through their shared darkness, Ahmed and Thursday see and accept one another completely.

“She ignored his questions. ‘How did it feel?’ He was pushing her dress up past her hips, skimming past her sheathed blade like it was nothing, shoving her legs open with his knee. Something close to anger pulled at his face. Souraya kept pushing because it felt good. ‘You liked it, didn’t you, baby? It made you feel like a god? To hurt him like that?’”

Here, Souraya taunts Ahmed about murdering Seun while they are having sex. She feels empowered by making him angry and seeing him turn the same violence that he used on Seun on her. It makes her feel strong to know that Ahmed no longer feels the need to be careful with her.

“Souraya had no business flirting with this world, no business with a man as dangerous as Ahmed Soyoye, not if she wanted to keep the life she’d built for herself. But she’d already fucked him against the wall and said unthinkable things in his ear and none of it had felt unfamiliar. God help her, but maybe she was more of this city than she wanted to admit. She should run. She should get on a plane and get out while she still could, before this man wrapped more of his shadowed tendrils around her with such terrible tenderness.”

When Ahmed asks Souraya to go with him to find Kalu, she hesitates. She knows that Ahmed and the world he inhabits are dangerous, but after her boldness while they were having sex, she thinks for a moment that she is strong enough for the city and Ahmed’s darkness.

“You see, your friend thinks he is…superior. Better than the rest of us when, really, he is nothing; he is dust as we are all dust. He needs to be reminded that we are, in God’s eyes, all the same. Some of us might be anointed by the calling, but we will all return to dust. We are all flesh. Only God is God. Only God can judge.”

Here, Okinosho tells Ahmed why Kalu must be punished. He suggests that Kalu attacked him out of a sense of moral superiority. However, by making Kalu have sex with Machi, Okinosho intends to prove to him that he is no different from Okinosho or other men. In The Fight to Maintain Moral Integrity, this is Kalu’s final defeat.

“Ola laughed. ‘You’re the one who put her in a room full of old perverts like Okinosho. Don’t lecture me about who’s sick. You should be fucking thanking me. I didn’t need to do this, and I only did it for Souraya, who you exposed to all this rubbish.’ She eyed him up and down with contempt. ‘I should have let your friend die, you ungrateful piece of shit.’”

When Ahmed learns how Ola has arranged to “help” Kalu, he is furious, thinking what she has proposed is cruel and immoral. She reminds him that hiring Machi for his party is no less “sick.” This confrontation completes Ahmed’s character arc, revealing the degree to which he has failed in The Fight to Maintain Moral Integrity.

“Ahmed looked away, which Kalu found rich. After all those parties, all those things he’d justified, this was the one he couldn’t watch? What a fucking hypocrite. Ola was watching, though, her eyes unmoving except for an occasional blink. Like a vulture, Kalu thought, waiting for me to rot.”

When Kalu is forced to have sex with Machi, Ahmed turns away, perhaps because he cannot bear to see Kalu corrupted or perhaps because he doesn’t want to admit that his supposedly more innocent friend contains the same depth of darkness as himself. Ola, on the other hand, watches intently. The statement that she is “waiting for [him] to rot” reveals how the experience will ensure Kalu’s corruption.

“So, he thought, this was what damnation felt like—a corruption he would never recover from, a piece of his soul that would never come back to him, that would never be whole again. Machi didn’t look at him, didn’t move. Kalu began to push himself inside her.”

The moment that Kalu penetrates Machi is his moment of “damnation” in which he becomes the very thing he was trying to prevent. He is completely powerless against the corruptive rot, and his effort to preserve his moral integrity ironically proves to be the mechanism of his corruption.

“Ahmed hoped he’d been thinking of Aima while he did it. Souraya would have whispered something else, another possibility—what if Kalu had simply thought of the child beneath him and what if that had been enough?”

Driving Kalu home from Okinosho’s, Ahmed entertains the dark possibility that Kalu had liked having sex with Machi, that he hadn’t needed to think of anything or anyone else to complete his “penance.” This is one explanation for why Kalu is so destroyed by the experience; he realizes that in his most twisted secret fantasies, he is no better than men like Okinosho.

“Kalu curled back toward the window. ‘I feel like he reached inside me, Ahmed. The pastor. I feel like he took a handful of dead things and he pushed his hand into my chest and dumped them there and now I’m decaying, like him. I’m rotting; I’m dying.’ ‘He doesn’t get to do that, Kalu. He doesn’t get to change who you are.’ ‘He already has.’”

Kalu feels fundamentally changed by his experience with Machi. The image of the pastor placing “dead things” inside his chest serves as a metaphor for Kalu’s has been infection by New Lagos’s “rot.” The man he thought he was is dying, and he feels he will never be the same.