“I am what you all call an ambassador, the first to come and communicate with you people. “You people call me an alien because I am from space, your outer heaven, beyond,” Ayodele tells them. The aliens have given the sea creatures whatever it was they have asked for, leaving the lagoon now full of massive spiked octopi, monstrous swordfish and sweet, sweet water that now heals “the worst human illnesses and cause a hundred more illnesses not yet known to mankind.” But they do not want to “rule, colonise, conquer or take.” According to their first ambassador Ayodele, they “just want a home.” Ayodele is the first shape-shifting alien to take human form and talk to the three people on the beach - Adaora, Agu and Anthony. The strange alien life form falls from the stars and into the sea around Nigeria, cleansing it and giving it new life. Instead they find themselves alive and unhurt back on the beach after a strange encounter with extraterrestrials, an encounter that changes each of them unequivocally, and sets them on a path to save the city of Lagos, in Nnedi Okorafor’s novel Lagoon. “Fast and quiet as a whisper,” a huge wave drags them into the water, as if “the ocean had opened its great maw and swallowed” them. Each is there searching for solace, each with her or his distinct, complicated life. A scientist with a tumultuous marriage, a rap star trying to find quiet and a military man desperate to contact his family. Three strangers on a beach in Lagos, Nigeria. Previously Published in Dawn Books & Authors.
Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor Posted on: June 15, 2014
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