Reading in Waithood: Silence and Hope in Self-Published Narratives About Lagos Hustling

Abstract This article reads two narratives that were self-published on the now defunct Nigerian free-to-use reading and publishing platform Okadabooks as addressing the theme of waithood. The narratives center on young adults in Lagos, who struggle to get out of a life of precarity. They are read as interpellating a reader who like their protagonists is stuck in waithood. Waithood has been defined by Alcinda Honwana as a prolonged period in someone’s life in which they wait for opportunities to secure a job, to start a family and to take on the responsibilities associated with adulthood. Because of this contextual frame, the texts are caught in a bind: they tacitly promise the reader the arrival of a brighter future for the narrative’s main character, but ultimately do not represent this moment of arrival since the texts themselves are written from within waithood, a point from which the mechanics of upward social mobility are difficult to imagine. This means that there is a silence at the centre of the narrative, a crisis of representation. This article argues that this silence should not be understood as “lack” or the absence of a missing component, but read as an affordance that structures a specific mode of reading. As with reading practices shaped by Pentecostal traditions and motivational rhetoric, both widespread in Nigeria, this mode of reading centres on what is unknown and unsaid, which is understood as a threshold to hidden meaning and to hope, rather than as an absence of meaning.