Matthew Omelsky lingers on the spatial afterlives of Walter Benjamin and Samuel Beckett as traced by Ato Quayson in his lecture on Accra's Oxford Street.
18
December 1926. Walter Benjamin writes in his Moscow Diary on the circuitous routes of pedestrian life in the
Russian capital:
“It
has been observed that pedestrians here walk in ‘zigzags.’ This is simply on
account of the overcrowding of the narrow sidewalks…. They give Moscow a
provincial air, or rather the character of an improvised metropolis that has
fallen into place overnight.”
Today,
in his lecture “Spatial Practices and Performative Streetscapes: Oxford St.,
Accra,” Ato Quayson drew from this brief moment in Benjamin’s Diary. Transposing and reconfiguring the
zigzagging figure to the streets of Accra, Quayson spoke of the meandering pedestrian
on the sidewalks of the bustling Oxford street, in the Osu neighborhood of
Accra. But where the narrowness of Benjamin’s Moscow sidewalks necessitated
zigzag movement, the sheer density of hawkers and merchandise covering the
sidewalk necessitates labyrinthine movement in Quayson’s Accra. For Quayson, improvisatory
walking is part of the performative streetscape of contemporary Accra. Figurations
of global capital – from cell phone top-up cards, to handbags, to wheel barrows
full of coconuts – saturate the walkways, creating obstacles for the Oxford
pedestrian to bound around and over.
 |
| Oxford Street, Accra. Source: panoramio photos |
Later
in his talk, Quayson moved to another 20th century European figure,
this time situating Samuel Beckett in contemporary Lagos. He likened the
“burden of free time” on the streets of Lagos to that of Didi and Gogo in
Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. But
where Beckett’s absurdist protagonists speak to one another to while away time
as they wait for the much-anticipated Godot, contemporary Lagosians pass time
by remaking themselves and the objects around them. Didi and Gogo recycle
language in their free time, Lagosians recycle space, Quayson says. Attempting
to access labor and evade the paralysis of free time, the Lagosian moves
through a cycle of ad hoc occupations, from shyster to pastor to water vendor.
Objects, lives, and occupations are reworked in the Lagosian informal economy.
Improvisation becomes a way of sustaining life in one’s perpetual search for
work.
Quayson
revealed how global capital has shaped the performative and improvisatory
landscape of Oxford Street. He showed how we might begin to work through the
spatial logics of West Africa via Beckett and Benjamin, but importantly, how
West Africa and the work of these European vanguardists are often utterly
incommensurable. Reaching outside of West Africa to work through the modern
African city demands a contortion of these outside spatial logics, a mutation
of thought from other geographies and epochs.
Matthew Omelsky is a PhD student in the Department of English, Duke University.
Melanie Eva Boehi is a PhD student from the University of Basel, Switzerland. Her PhD dissertation is concerned with the
South African botanical complex in the 20th and 21st century. The dissertation examines how social life in cities is negotiated by defining relationships between
people and plants, how floral spaces can be approached as archives and flowers
as carriers of historical narratives.
