I read AbdouMaliq Simone's Improvised Lives with much interest and focus. I did so for two reasons: first, the author packages the words chosen to carry his story and ideas in a way that obscures the deep meaning of the book when read quickly; and second, there is much being said within a short space, about many people across many cities. It is an important book but not an easy read. Simone uses the concept of harmolodics – the ability to deliver the same melody in different ways – to devise a portrait of urban life that together forms an ensemble. Melody is a metaphor for an ensemble of lives lived in different ways by different people brought together by the intricacies of urbanity. These different ways are expressed by Simone when looking at change in the seemingly stable and unchanging life situations and rhythms of the city. He terms it ‘the simultaneous presence of many temporalities’ (p. 65). Urban life is both static and dynamic.
Simone invites the reader to rethink their view of urban life, challenging notions of urban life as marked by struggle or by similar types of people, or as representing continuous living. The majority of city inhabitants are low-income earners involved in the heavy lifting work of the service industry, manufacturing, and other areas common to the life of fast-growing urban centres. The same population lives in or close to the city, interacting with the space both socially and professionally. Such living cannot be planned or designed. Instead, Improvised Lives emphasizes heterogeneity and a sense of looseness, of being tentative and unpredictable.
Simone's writing style stood out for me. He places the reader at the centre of a narrative about a character in Chicago and switches to a new character in Naples or Freetown. Yet the thread keeps connecting the stories being told of urban bodies in flow and flux, trying to make sense of their inhabited and negotiated spaces. Each of the five chapters of the book stands as an independent yet interconnected story. He is able to do this by using key terms that capture elements of the story, such as ‘districting’:
a process of creating a platform for operating in the world using a repertoire of available classifications and administrative categories … [that] enable residents to spiral in and out, propel themselves into the larger urban surrounds and then bear back down again into the familiar places now rendered unfamiliar. (p. 5)
This is an adventurous style of writing that left me feeling intrigued and frustrated at the same time. Simone twists and turns the same words and concepts in a way that leaves one wondering how many points he is making in the same breath.
Urban dwellers have learned to make the city work for them. In Nairobi, this ‘bringing down the city’ (p. 17) is expressed through what is locally termed the Kadogo economy. Kadogo is a Swahili word meaning ‘small’ and thus denotes a small-item economy in which expensive goods are bought in bulk and sold in smaller quantities to residents in informal settlements. As Simone says, these activities produce a special kind of economy, one that ‘depends upon reciprocity, collaboration, dissimulation, manipulation, trust, and extortion in varying degrees and formats’ (p. 82). While we may laud these strategies used by residents, they highlight the need for improved infrastructure and access to resources, which is the duty of governments.
Simone describes one urban space thus: ‘This is a neighborhood that is party to stitched together deals of all kinds, a place where strangers are put in touch with other strangers’ (p. 36). In urban areas people thrive on an ethic of not knowing each other. Survival and belonging are mostly predicated on legitimization acquired through having a skill or goods to offer, as exemplified in Jakarta and Hyderabad. Urban life for the marginalized is about peripheries of choice (people imagining and expecting to move on and make it) and of force (people being evicted or transplanted from or to different spaces).
Simone creates a collage or series of sketches of short, sometimes unfinished stories, lives, maps and spaces. His uncanny ability to move from one city to another on different continents may be welcome for anyone seeking vignettes of urban life, but it does not build any single portrait or story fully. He does the same with the rendition of his own life, where the reader is introduced to his short stint in Freetown before being transported quickly to Chicago, then introduced to his parents and grandparents but never given an opportunity to get a good sense of people and places. It is almost as though Simone hardly built any real connection to the places he writes about. While this could be seen as a heuristic tool to describe the transient state of urban life, it can also turn out to be a weakness as the reader gets only a glimpse of many groups and places. It also suggests that the work is thin on commitment to the actual inhabitants of the spaces. What are the ethical implications of these brief encounters Simone has with his interlocutors? And how do they also affect the integrity of the methods selected?
