Corruption and Crime in “Portrait with Keys” and “Every Day Is For the Thief”

 

  Portrait with Keys presents the daily struggles of urban life that captures individuals into its complex grip. The industrialized and urbanized city allows its infrastructure to accommodate a variety of people from different backgrounds. While this is an indication of advancement and convenience, it grants individuals a clearer glimpse at each other and decreases the distance between classes depicting a clear picture of a metropolitan city. Ivan’s neutral and unfiltered narrative sheds light on the daily occurrences of such a city In “Every day Is For The Thief”, the anonymous narrative centralizes the modernized and urbanized Nigerian city. Both literary works display the inequality among people and high crime rates drawing the readers' attention to the corruption woven into the core of the city. In this essay, I shall analyze how crime is presented in both literary works and I shall argue that while Portrait with Keys dwells on the crime’s impact on the individual on the society’s structure “Every day Is For The Thief”, approaches crime from a determinist standpoint and shows the causality of crime is in a Nigerian city.

         In Portrait with Keys crime’s impact in the city is most visible in individuals’ attempt to overcome it. One of the evident offspring of modernity is individuality which in Portrait with Keys stems from the distrust people have for each other. The distrust among people in Johannesburg arises due to the high crime rate and racism lingering in the city. Ivan does not hold a biased perception towards criminals and he rather objectively narrates the scenes. Even though the novel does not explicitly explain the reason for Ivan’s undiscriminating approach against the criminals, the incidents reveal that the crime in the city stems from people’s desperate solutions for poverty suggesting that the inhabitants of the city are not inherently corrupt. People simply lose their trust in each other because of the poachers and other criminals which are the consequences of unequal wealth distribution and poverty. The narrative throughout the novel touches upon poachers and people stealing even manholes showing that some people are highly underprivileged. While this reinforces the idea that people are not inherently evil, and they are simply desperate the government’s attempt to solve the crime issue underlines the question of who is corrupt? “Elsewhere in the city, the council has begun to replace the stolen iron covers with blue plastic ones. These bits of plastic tell the scrap-metal thieves to go ahead and help themselves as the authorities have given up on protecting their resources” (104). Authorities according to the narrative “have given up” implying that there is a previous failed attempt which suggests that the government puts effort into maintaining the order of the city. People lose their trust as a reaction to the hazardous environment making everyone a stranger to each other. The government takes precautions as a reaction to the increasing crime rate and the crime rate increases due to poverty. This deterministic causality suggests that both parties (government and criminals) are not inherently evil, rather they are simply reacting to the changing environment.

        In “Every day Is For The Thief”, the narrative presents a similar type of causality where the crime rate stems from the unequal wealth distribution and hence poverty. However, in everyday thieves, people find bribery and fraud as primary instruments to deal with poverty. The narrative even implicitly suggests that the desire to fraud people has gradually become an instinct alluding that it has become uncontrollable and natural “The man knows the risks, but he carries on nonetheless, casting his net out into the unknown, prompted by urgings so frequently indulged that they have become instinctive” (25) Narrative’s word of choice carries utmost importance as it suggests that the scammers “Yahoo, yahoos” are not inherently evil they on other hand, develop an instinct to adapt to the environment implying that people’s tendency for criminal activity is a reaction caused by the city itself. The rules are not obeyed and on the surface, disorder prevails. However, the anonymous narrative unveils that there is never a disorder, people formulate a working system even in the most corrupt and distorted structure.

“Precisely because everyone takes a shortcut, nothing works and, for this reason, the only way to get anything done is to take another shortcut. The advantage in these situations goes to the highest bidders, those individuals most willing to pay money or to test the limits of the law” (20).

Here the narrative contemplates the system that people formulated themselves. The bribery, fraud, and criminal activity cause corruption in the core of the city’s system. To survive in such a corrupted city, understanding corruption and adapting yourself to it become mandatory. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator observes the nature of malpractice and bribery and concludes that there is nothing except for accepting it. A random stranger poses an important question to the narrative indicating the core reason for such corruption’s existence “why trouble yourself? They’ll take your money anyway, and they’ll punish you by delaying your passport. Is that what you want? Aren’t you more interested in getting your passport than in trying to prove a point?”(12). For the majority of people in the novel, it isn’t worthy to “prove a point” and hence they adapt to the corrupted environment resorting to criminal activities to acquire what they think they deserve. People ultimately, get accustomed to the anarchist looking city and find a place for themselves by abusing the rules or obeying those who abuse the rules.

       In conclusion, “Portrait with Keys” and “Every day Is For The Thief”, grant the reader the window to observe people’s reactions to crime. More importantly, in both literary works, the reader is given the ability to see the function of crime in a modern city. The crime mostly stems from poverty and the need to acquire what people think they deserve leading people to become rebellious to the government. In both works, we do not see a sort of rebellion but we see a resentment or indifference for the city’s welfare. In Portrait with Keys, poachers steal everything they can without thinking about the city. In the everyday of the thief, “Yahoo Yahoos” besmirch the good name of Nigeria. Both incidents suggest that the criminals do not put importance on their nation alluding to the concept of globalization.  Ultimately and most importantly, both literary works display the importance of crime in modern cities and how it changes the core structure of such cities. While “Every day Is For The Thief”, crime enforces the segregation of classes and hence prepare a base for an environment in which the fittest survives, Portrait with Keys shows the crime causes distrust among people and how it is not contrary to its image caused by inherently evil people nor government.

Vladislavić, I. (2009). Portrait with keys: The city of Johannesburg unlocked. New York: W. W. Norton.

Cole, T., n.d. Every Day Is For The Thief.