Yekini is in big wahala.
As a junior analyst working in the Pinnacle, Yekini arrives late to work and finds to her dismay that she has been assigned a depressing task: to go down to the Lowers and investigate a possible breach.
And hereʼs the rub—the Pinnacle is the tallest building of the skyscraping Five Fingers, a partly submerged structure inhabited by a people who survived The Deluge, a flooding of biblical proportions which overwhelmed the coastlines of Old Lagos.
While the elite and ultra-wealthy (the Uppers) live at the rarefied top of the Pinnacle, the Midders beneath them work and live with little access to sunlight, and the worst of the lot (the Lowers) are quite literally submerged below sea-level with no access to sunlight, poor infrastructure and scarce resources. Only the engineering of strong walls and compressed air locks prevent the Lowers from being flooded, and protects them from a darker, otherworldly threat.
If Yekini is apprehensive about going down to the Lowers, Ngozi—an egotistical high-level bureaucrat, is positively appalled at being ordered to accompany her. Yoked together, they meet Tuoyo, an undersea foreman who leads them to ascertain the cause of a disturbance. However, what should have been a simple maintenance check quickly morphs into a dangerous mission charged with fear and adrenaline. The oceanic vastness surrounding the Fingers is home to many creatures of the deep, none more terrifying than the “Children of Yemoja.” The possibility that such a creature, referred to as a Child, could have breached the security of the Pinnacle becomes an all-too terrifying reality, and with that, we are thrust head-on into a frenzy of action, conspiracies and page-turning thrills.
Suyi Davies Okungbowaʼs Lost Ark Dreaming unfurls a futuristic vision of Lagos which has been compared to the hit TV series, Snowpiercer. Just like the latter, Lost Ark Dreaming brings us into a dystopian near future that still operates a system of sharp class divisions.
The story which holds this post-climatic disaster novella together is a character-driven one, told from the shifting perspectives of Yekini, Ngozi and Tuoyo. This is a clever decision that enables Okungbowa to dissect and subtly indict the injustice of a class-based hierarchy which leaves too much power with the “ogas at the top”, and little for the common folk far beneath them. If this state of affairs sounds much like the society of the real Eko, the actual Lagos, it is actually meant to be so. Okungbowaʼs distorted vision of Lagos echoes the present-day one with satirical accuracy.
Lost Ark Dreaming calls the inequality of this faulty order into question, allowing undercurrents of rebellion and resistance to infiltrate the plot. By alluding to the biblical epic of Noahʼs Ark, it demystifies it further by asking, “What happens to the people who could not make it into the Ark?” The answer to this question is a revelation that cannot be given away here without spoiling the entirety of the story but suffice to say that readers will be floored by how it charges the plot towards a dizzying end.
Okungbowa intersperses the narrative with archival reports that provide a historical background to the world therein, and beautiful poetry infused with the evocative spirituality of African oral traditions. All of these functions to highlight the thematic heft of the story, which flits between climate change & environmental degradation, corporate greed and brutal capitalism, systemic oppression, class struggles and resistance.
Resistance, as Okungbowa portrays it, is a refusal to accept and live by propaganda. To erase a people is to deny their history, to make it seem like they never existed at all.
After the Queen Conch, a mystical repository of knowledge, reveals all truths to Yekini, she is able to convince the others to not only challenge the status quo, but work with an unlikely ally in order to enlighten everyone else. As such, Okungbowa reaffirms the notion that one cannot confront the present and prepare for the future, without first of all knowing the past.
More than just a brilliant work of sci-fi, the novel is an unsubtle warning, a layered prophecy of the dangers of climate change, inequality, bad governance and unbridled capitalism. For a work set in the future, it offers a disquieting mirror to the realities of Lagos and its troubled history. And more than anything else, it shows us that the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we believe to be true, ultimately define us as a people.
