CANR

• Pharmakon - 2024 Mack, London, England
• Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time (Berlin Family Lectures) - 2021 University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL
• Golden Apple of the Sun - 2021 Mack, London, England
• Human Archipelago (Fazal Sheikh (Photographer), Teju Cole (Introduction)) - 2019 Steidl , Göttingen, Germany

• Teju Cole website - https://www.tejucole.com/

  TEJU COLE is a novelist, essayist, and photographer. He was the photography critic of the New York Times Magazine from 2015 until 2019. He is currently the Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard and a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine.

  His novella, Every Day is for the Thief, was named a book of the year by the New York Times, the Globe and Mail, NPR, and the Telegraph, and shortlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award. His novel, Open City, also featured on numerous book of the year lists, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the New York City Book Award for Fiction, the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Internationaler Literaturpreis, and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, and the Ondaatje Prize of the Royal Society of Literature.

  His essay collection, Known and Strange Things, was shortlisted for both the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay and the inaugural PEN/Jean Stein Award for “a book that has broken new ground by reshaping the boundaries of its form and signaling strong potential for lasting influence.” Known and Strange Things was named a book of the year by the Guardian, the Financial Times, Time Magazine, and many others.

  Blind Spot (June 2017), a genre-crossing work of photography and texts, was shortlisted for the Aperture/Paris Photo Photobook Award and named one of the best books of the year by Time Magazine. He was commissioned by the 2017 Performa Biennial to present a multimedia solo performance piece, Black Paper, which the New York Times acclaimed as “quietly grave” and “thoroughly devastating.” Human Archipelago, a collaboration with the photographer Fazal Sheikh was published in (2019), and Fernweh, a book of photographs in (2020). He published two books in 2021, the photobook Golden Apple of the Sun, selected as a book of the year in LitHub, and the essay collection Black Paper, longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, and named a book of the year by the Paris Review and Artnet, among others.

  His most recent book is the novel Tremor (2023), named a book of the year by Time, the Washington Post, New York Magazine, the Times (UK), and the Financial Times, among others. It was shortlisted for the National Critics Circle Book Award, and was awarded the 2024 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction.

  Teju Cole has contributed to the New York Times, the New Yorker, Granta, Brick, and many other magazines. His photography column at the New York Times Magazine, “On Photography,” was a finalist for a 2016 National Magazine Award.

  There have been solo exhibitions of his photography in Italy, Iceland, India, Italy, Germany, Switzerland and the US. He gave the 2014 Kenan Distinguished Lecture in Ethics at Duke University, the 2015 Susan D. Gubar Lecture at Indiana University, and the 2016 Spui25 Lecture at the University of Amsterdam. He was awarded the 2015 Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction, a 2015 US Artists award, and a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship. He was a Poynter Journalism Fellow at Yale University in 2018. He serves as a board member for several periodicals and arts organizations, and has participated in many literary and photography juries, including the 2021 Images Vevey Grand Prix, of which he was jury president.

  He delivered the Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Family Lectures at the University of Chicago in April 2019, gave the Class Day speech at the Commencement Ceremony of the Harvard Graduate School of Design in May 2019, and curated an exhibition titled Go Down Moses at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in July–September 2019. In 2021, he served as a guest curator at the Orchestra of St Luke’s, with a text and music program called Radia; and he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He will deliver the Clarendon Lectures at the University of Oxford in 2024.

  Teju Cole was born in the US in 1975 to Nigerian parents and was raised in Lagos. He currently lives in Cambridge, MA.

  [Author photos for media use can be downloaded here (credit Martin Lengemann), here and here (credits: Teju Cole)]

• Fantastic Fiction -

  Teju Cole
  USA flag (b.1975)

  TEJU COLE is a writer, art historian, and photographer. He is the Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.

  Born in the US (1975) to Nigerian parents, and raised in Nigeria, he currently lives in Brooklyn. He is the author of two books, a novella, Every Day is for the Thief, and a novel, Open City, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the New York City Book Award for Fiction, the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Internationaler Literaturpreis, and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, and the Ondaatje Prize of the Royal Society of Literature.

  Teju Cole is a contributor to the New York Times, the New Yorker, Qarrtsiluni, the Atlantic, Granta, Aperture, Transition, A Public Space, and several other magazines. He is a contributing editor at the New Inquiry, and is currently at work on a book-length non-fiction narrative of Lagos. His photography has been exhibited in India and the US, and has been published in a number of journals.

  Awards: PEN (2012) see all

  Genres: Literary Fiction

  Novels
  Open City (2011)
  Every Day Is for the Thief (2014)
  Tremor (2023)
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  Collections
  Pharmakon (2024)
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  Non fiction hide
  Known and Strange Things (2016)
  Blind Spot (2017)
  Golden Apple of the Sun (2021)
  Human Archipelago (2021) (with Sheikh Fazal)
  Black Paper (2021)

• Open Country - https://opencountrymag.com/cover-story-the-worldly-ways-of-teju-cole/

  TEJU COLE. PHOTOGRAPH BY MARTIN LENGEMANN.
  Books
  Cover Story
  The Worldly Ways of Teju Cole
  The great writer, street photographer, and art historian’s enquiries lured him onto a solo path in contemporary literature—a completely new terrain for an African writer. Ten years after his debut novel, Open City, he still seeks artistic freedom.
  Otosirieze
  July 4, 2021
  TEJU COLE. PHOTOGRAPH BY MARTIN LENGEMANN.

  Home
  Books
  The Worldly Ways of Teju Cole
  Lower Manhattan, on some nights, was a spread of book parties, gatherings of writers and editors, publishers and publicists, and booksellers and photographers from the rest of New York City and America. In these exclusive readings spiced with heady wine and set in affluent backyards of patrons of the arts, paths crossed and careers were set.

  And so here, eleven years ago, came a bespectacled 34-year-old man. In literary America then, he was an unknown. Not least at a party that had in attendance Salman Rushdie, Francine Prose, and Jay McInerney: properly famed figures. He was a private person, private and intense. He had artistic ambitions but they were on the page, and they weren’t do-or-die. Above all, he had a roving curiosity, a need to know. He was not afraid of deploying it in dialogue, and he was a natural communicator.

  He moved from one small cluster to the next, listening for chats of his interests, until, under a magnolia hung with tiny bulbs, he met Jennifer B. McDonald. She told him she had just resumed as assigning editor at The New York Times Book Review and he told her he was a street photographer and doctoral student of art history, studying 16th century Dutch paintings at Columbia. They slipped into a conversation about music and agreed to, someday soon, attend a performance together in Brooklyn.

  Surrounded by chatter and cheese, in the midst of people they’d only met through books and news, writers living other writers’ dreams, they stood looking around, a binary of the estranged, uneasy and starstruck. Teju Cole leaned on the tree and sipped his wine. He turned to her. “I feel like a nobody,” he said.

  Teju Cole Is on the July 2021 Cover of Open Country Mag. Reissued Cover.
  Teju Cole Is on the July 2021 Cover of Open Country Mag. Reissued Cover.
  Three years before, in his home country, Nigeria, he’d published a novella, Every Day Is for the Thief, an episodic book whose dimming of the line between fiction and nonfiction, pairing beautifully hewn prose with unassuming photographs of Lagos, quietly opened a new path for the African novel. Then the summer before the party, he completed another fiction manuscript, set right there in New York City, five years after 9/11. It was a novel that braided local and global histories, a book of psychogeography. Its narrator walks around absorbing nature and the stories of strangers, commenting on culture and critical theory, and in his digressions of philosophical reverie the past becomes present. He is watching birds, deciphering classical symphonies on radio, taking in the sounds of the Hudson River. The details accrue beautifully.

  Its title, “Open City,” came from the wartime convention of letting an invading army into a city in order to prevent it being bombed or destroyed, to preserve its structure and heritage. It came, too, from his suggestion of an openheartedness to culture, his belief in the idea of literature, of art, as uncontainable.

  In Julius, Teju had created a truly kinetic mind, a character intellectually similar to but personally different from himself. A Columbia psychiatry fellow, with a Nigerian father and a German mother, Julius casts a claiming gaze on the world. He fit into the new class of Africans born or resident abroad and wearing their cosmopolitanism: Afropolitans. He is that class’ first major fictional character. In manner, Julius embodies an audacious Americanness that Teju himself, despite being born in the country and having lived eighteen years in it at the time, did not feel he belonged to just yet; a confidence personified, Teju felt, by the then president, Barack Obama, and the Dominican American writer Junot Diaz.

  The narrative wasn’t conventional fiction, had no plot, no humour. It was driven by curiosity and connectivity and not conflict. It was obsessed with place and the abstract and not human drama, and so it lay outside ideas of a set Anglophone African literary realist tradition, tied to the fiction philosophy made famous by Chinua Achebe. Although a few African writers had nudged the tradition on varying levels of concept and form—Ghana’s Ayi Kwei Armah, Zimbabwe’s Dambudzo Marechera, the Republic of Congo’s Alain Mabanckou, in translation from the French—Teju knew that most of his Nigerian contemporaries—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Helon Habila, Chris Abani, Sefi Atta, Uzodinma Iweala—were producing important novels in it.

  But he had no qualms being different. His influences were multifarious, substantially non-African and non-Black. He loved Michael Ondaatje, J.M. Coetzee, James Salter, and Michael Tournier as much as he did Wole Soyinka. He appreciated Shakespeare as much as he did Yoruba mythology, James Joyce’s Dubliners as much as he did Kofi Awoonor’s Ewe-sharpened poetry. He thought Penelope Fitzgerald was the perfect novelist. He was fascinated by Joan Didion, John Berger, and V.S. Naipaul, and just after he finished Every Day Is for the Thief, a friend introduced him to W.G. Sebald, whose Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz, in their blurring of the real and the imagined, became a major influence in the early chapters of Open City.

  Ultimately, he felt that the traditions of European art, film, music, and philosophy belonged to him as much as they did the next French singer or Swedish actor or Polish painter, and he found as much meaning in them as he did in the sound of Sunny Ade or the paintings of Wangechi Mutu or the bronze sculptures of 14th century Ife. He had also entered photography at the same time he did literature, and he wanted everything he was made of to show in anything he created.

  He had written only a third of the manuscript before his then agent, Scott Moyers at the Wylie Agency, sent it off to publishers. It was 2008. At Random House, the editor-at-large and bestselling novelist David Ebershoff fell in love with its “original mind,” its prose moving like a river, and acquired it. He had edited the English translation of Austerlitz and understood what Teju wanted to achieve. Teju’s then publicist Jynne Martin also knew how unique a writer he is, but presenting an unknown, composite African—who’d dared to start his career with exactly the book he wanted to write—was tough. They shifted the release date from spring 2010 to winter 2011.

  They marketed the book to “readers of Joseph O’Neill and Zadie Smith,” two dissimilar writers whose conjoining, they hoped, might begin to capture the novel’s breadth. And yet beyond broad thematic strokes—O’Neill’s post-9/11 New York novel Netherland, Smith’s stories of multiracial London—Teju wasn’t like them. He wasn’t like anyone. His expectation was that this second book, like his first, was also not going to have a wide appeal.

  But later that year, an excerpt appeared in Tin House and won early readers. Ebershoff asked Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, as the most established contemporary African writer in America, to co-host a luncheon with Random House, to introduce Teju to journalists. She did and it was a success. Teju would hold his own launch night at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn, and, hours later, a party at a Nigerian restaurant called Buka, both attended by over a hundred people.

  In February of 2011, when Open City arrived, it received high praise from critics, who lauded him as an interpreter of cosmopolitanism, a leading bicultural voice. A long review in The New Yorker, in which James Wood called it “a beautiful, subtle, and finally, original novel,” set the tone. The Nigerian social critic Ikhide Ikheloa noted it as “a refreshing and eclectic departure” from the suffered tone of the typical immigrant story.

  The novel would be shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and win the Internationaler Literaturpreis, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the New York City Book Award for Fiction, and the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy of Arts. Although it never became a national bestseller, it would be translated into 15 languages, become the subject of extensive academic discourse, and instantly lift its author into the upper reaches of his generation’s originals. It would inspire a collaboration with the jazz pianist and composer Vijay Iyer and parts of his 2015 album Break Stuff. It would have its own fanbase, complete with a literary tour map of its narrator’s walks. Flavorwire would rank him 40th on its list of “New York’s 100 Most Important Living Writers,” and later he would win the Windham Campbell Prize.

  “The hardest part of publishing Open City was also the easiest,” Ebershoff, now Vice President and Executive Editor at Hogarth Books and Penguin Random House, told me in early May. “It is not an easy book to pitch. Any attempt to summarize it becomes dissatisfyingly reductive. The language and metaphor are as important as plot and story. Subtext and tone reveal as much as dialogue and action. It wasn’t an easy book to talk about conventionally. On the other hand, once people opened it and began reading, it was easy to convince them of its greatness. So I went around asking people to read the first chapter. I said, ‘Do that and you’ll know.’ Enough people did. After that, it wasn’t particularly hard to publish.”

  Ebershoff said that the main reason he wasn’t worried about the novel’s prospects was simply because he loved it so much. “It was precisely because of Teju’s unique perspective. Born in America, raised in Nigeria, steeped in European art, philosophy, and literature, he sees the world, and interprets it, unlike anyone else. I knew many people would feel this way about him and Open City.”

  Teju Cole - Open City
  Teju Cole’s difference is a major subplot in a distinctive career. The reporter Matthew Kassel contrasted him with contemporary immigrant writers, like the Indian American Jhumpa Lahiri and the Russian American Gary Shteyngart, who “put questions of identity front and center.” Teju, Kassel notes, “is harder to pin down; he revels in ambiguity.” Former Paris Review editor Philip Gourevitch summed him up: “It’s not like he’s placeless, but he’s creating a new space for himself, a space that isn’t already inhabited by a lot of other writers—other voices.”

  It is a meticulously crafted space that now includes Known and Strange Things, a mellifluous cruise through literature, film, music, photography, travel, history, and politics. It is the book that cemented his reputation as a major essayist, for whom, writes The Boston Globe, “there’s almost no subject [he] can’t come at from a startling angle.” Since the three books of prose, Teju has recalibrated his space, with three more books that meld text and images: 2017’s Blind Spot; 2019’s Human Archipelago, a collaboration with the photographer Fazal Sheikh; and, last year, Fernweh.

  His books are voyages of curiosity rendered unconstrained. They are versatile lunges of enquiry, Method in manner and seamless in reach. His prime power as a fiction writer is his unity of ideas and character, and his appeal as an essayist is in his marriage of sophistication and accessibility; all blend in his painterly prose. It is an oeuvre in constant reinvention, releasing him, like a canary determined to flex its voice, to bask beyond the boxes that non-white writers are placed in.

  Yinka Elujoba, an art critic for The New York Times, discovered Teju’s essays as an undergraduate in Nigeria. “This is really the manner of Cole’s contribution: most of my friends believe that they began to think of the possibilities of literature for us—as Africans—differently after reading him,” Elujoba told me. “The voice, the cadence, the intelligent prose, the concerns, the insight, the allowances he gave himself, everything pointed us towards a new light. Perhaps it was because he straddled two worlds—art and literature—something uncommon for most African writers. Yet he brought the same intense seriousness to both practices.”

  In the middle of March, when Teju gets on a Zoom call with me, he looks as he always does, bald and bearded, collected and reflective, professorial, like he might for his classes at Harvard, where he is the Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing. He speaks with contemplated warmth, hands moving, and you hear all his cultures, the Nigerianisms, the Americanisms, the gentle meshes in syllables and slang.

  On the page and in the world, this is an elusive man; for all his essayistic expressiveness, he shields his history and solitude. “As any migratory bird,” he smiles, “I’m not keen on being captured. One has to protect the space from which the work itself is emerging.”

  He takes on the question of literary tradition. “If you talk about Achebe and Things Fall Apart—fair enough, it is set in late 19th century Igboland—what tradition of Igbo novel-writing was he relating to when he wrote it? Because clearly what he’s doing is that he’s reading English novels and he’s making his own thing out of it. He’s figuring out from English novels how to write a novel in English. I’m sure people like D.O. Fagunwa and Duro Ladipo are significant to the work of Wole Soyinka, but the fact of the matter is, what he’s really studying closely is Sophocles, Shakespeare, Shaun O’Casey, W.B. Yeats. Does that make him any less Soyinka? Because you have to express what you are based on what you have learned, the environment that has shaped you.”

  “I have never had anxiety about influence,” he contemplates. “I speak Yoruba fluently, I know the music, I know the mythology, I know how I was formed. Some of it is explicit in the work, some of it is implicit.”

  The academic Akin Adesokan saw Teju’s approach—“writing about Africa within the context of worldly travels”—in the vein of the pre-slave trade traditions that established Ibn Khaldun, Ibn Battuta, and Leo Africanus as global thinkers. “He wants to do this not on the terms of contemporary understandings of race and culture but on the terms of writing as the mode of fashioning individual sensibilities,” Adesokan wrote in 2013. “This option is not to be construed as avoiding politics, but as conceiving of the political on terms that put the individual first.”

  What bothers Teju is the possibility of constriction. “I think I would have been happy with a smaller career as long as I could write my work with the kind of freedom that I’m doing my work,” he says. “What I would not have been happy with is if somebody had said, ‘Ah, the way you make it is to write certain things in certain ways because that’s what we expect of an African Writer.’ But, you know, nobody ever said that to me.”

  His parents met in the U.S., in the 1970s, in Kalamazoo, Michigan. His mother worked as a French-language teacher while his father studied for an M.B.A. at Western Michigan University. Teju was born in June, 1975. When he was five months old, his mother took him to Nigeria for the first time. When he turned two, she fully returned to Lagos. Later, his father joined them, working as an export manager for cocoa companies.

  For a time, they lived in G.R.A., Ikeja, in a white house cluttered by trees. It was a middleclass family steeped in Yoruba intellectual culture, and he grew up with interest in books.

  At six, he began to paint, setting up objects in the bedroom with his younger brother and drawing them. At 10, he began to scribble in notebooks, having read Things Fall Apart, Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, and an abridged edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. By 11, his eyes became weak and the family doctor recommended that he wear glasses. His family was not surprised: his grandfather, his mother, and his younger brothers had myopia, too.

  He was a regular kid living a nerdy life. His father hoped for him to one day go to Silicon Valley or N.A.S.A., but studying for chemistry exams in secondary school, he would often have an art book on his lap. It was the ‘80s, and at school he argued with classmates about politics, the Cold War, always siding with America, rooting for them at the Olympics because Nigeria, as he would later write, was “unlikely to win anything anyway.”

  The country was in a slow but sure fall—corruption, decayed structures and education, crime, despair—and the family had a plan: if anything happened, like the war then consuming Liberia, they would drop him off at the American Embassy. He was American and Americans would airlift him out.

  When Teju turned 16, his parents pooled their savings so he could study further in the U.S. He was accepted by both W.M.U., his father’s alma mater, and Kalamazoo College, and in the fall of 1992, he went to the former.

  “There was no expectation that I will be coming back,” Teju tells me. “As it was back then and as it continues to be now, maybe not as grievously, if you went overseas to study, just because of costs and distance of communication, you were gone for a while.”

  America was not Lagos, he found quickly. On his first evening on campus, walking in the cold, it struck him that all the people he loved were 6,000 miles away, and he panicked. For two weeks, he struggled both to understand the accelerated English and to make himself understood. He got student loans and worked at McDonalds. Watching The Phil Donahue Show left him surprised by the American lack of reserve.

  He spent one year at W.M.U. before transferring to Kalamazoo College on scholarship, and graduating in 1996 with a B.A. in art history and a minor in pre-med. In the midst of his studies, in 1995, he briefly visited Nigeria. His parents, encouraging of his art dream, were nevertheless puzzled. Art would be just for undergrad, he assured them, and then he would do the befitting thing: study Medicine.

  It was at Kalamazoo College, on that small, quiet campus, that Teju’s rabid curiosity grew wings. One session, he returned from a study in Aberdeen, Scotland, and entered the office of one of his art professors, Billie Fischer, and began to ask her about the Dutch baroque painter Johannes Vermeer.

  “I remember thinking, ‘Who is this kid from Africa who wants to talk about Vermeer?’” Fischer recounted years later. They became friends and she began inviting him to her house, and they would sit together and watch movies. She had a stack of magazines, copies of The New Yorker arriving weekly, which he spied enviously.

  “That was a revelation to me that people lived that way and made the arts the center of their lives,” Teju recalled in a 2011 interview. “Without people like that, my imagination might have remained more parochial.” Later, he said of her: “She was one of these people who gave me the sense that the world did not have to be narrow.”

  Teju spent most of his time at the library, reading books unconnected to his courses, and in its basement watching European films. His grades weren’t exceptional but his sense of the world was expanding. It was at this time that he discovered Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Red, a film whose quiet vigour stayed with him, into his writing.

  In his apartment, he listened to music. He was getting into jazz and classical music, and on the wall of his dorm room was John Coltrane. Although there was a lot of his parents’ ‘70s soul and late ‘80s-early ‘90s R&B in his childhood, music, until Kalamazoo, had been on the fringe of his life. Now he was listening to Mahler, to Beethoven; to the Malians Ali Farka Touré and Oumou Sangaré; to highlife: Dr. Victor Olaiya. Now he was telling people, “Listen to this, listen to this,” a habit he has retained.

  For his senior individualized project, a cell biology research, he went to Harvard Medical School. It was there, in Boston, that he began taking walks, began his habit of wandering and observing, listening to Lauryn Hill, and Mos Def and Talib Kweli’s Black Star. After two years, realizing that medicine was not for him, he finally, fully, turned to the humanities, leaving for the University of London to study African art history at the School of Oriental and African Studies.

  In the 13 years that Teju was away from Nigeria, through different jobs as a dishwasher, gardener, cartoonist, haematology researcher, and lecturer, his mind roved the world. He’d become a born-again Christian at 13, but, by 28, he swerved to atheism, a step, he said, that altered his “relationship to the world and ethics.” He would shift once more at 33, outside religion entirely, to an “even keel” relationship to spirituality that allowed him to fully own his “sense of how to move forward in my life.” He defined himself by the interior happenings, and the central moments of his life, he would later say, “have had to do with my relationship to my own being in the world.” In all those years, he was slowly unfurling in self-discovery, and by 2004, a year after moving beyond atheism, while in London, his mind began to settle, on writing and on photography.

  When it came to words on the page, he was drawn as much to style as to substance. He hoped to one day write a “free book” like Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. He looked to writers who, he told Guernica, “don’t take language as a boring, settled thing” and “deliver it with corresponding freshness on the page.”

  Although he didn’t write serious poetry, his deepest happiness came reading verses. He liked poetry’s tightness, its “intensely localized effect.” His touchstones: Tomas Tranströmer, Wisława Szymborska, George Seferis, Anne Carson, Charles Simic, Sharon Olds, and generally, he told BOMB, “anyone who has found a way to sidestep conventional syntax,” whose prose “contains the elusive and far-fetched.”

  In honing his style, his training in art came in handy, the necessitation of contemplation, of unrushed uncovering. He was still learning to shoot with a film camera, and that visual quality seeped in. He thought that if he were a movie director, he’d use slow-motion too much.

  He used that slow, steady hand to build the fabric of his writing: mood. He was heeding the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt: “It is enough if one note is played beautifully.” All he needed was to create a mood, sustain a space in which, as he told Guernica, “other things might happen to the reader.”

  He was not hung up trying to read most of the 19th and 20th century classics. So fixated was he on the inner workings of literature that he didn’t send out many submissions as his writer friends were doing. It was only when he felt he’d arrived at a way of making sentences that was true to him—it was only then that he sought a subject.

  Teju Cole - Every Day Is for the Thief
  When Teju Cole returned to Lagos in late 2005, Nigeria was six years into civilian rule and relative open expression, and the national metamorphosis was intriguing for someone who had been away for a decade. “There was something about that trip that struck me very, very differently,” he tells me. “I felt that I had arrived not in a different Nigeria but in a Nigeria that I understood differently. I had sort of come of age in a certain way that now I was looking at it not just as ‘Oh, I’m going back home,’ but ‘I’m going to a place that calls for annotation but also for interpretation.’”

  Culture was returning in style: homes were filled with Nollywood CDs, shops and vehicles spilled Afropop hits, and in museums, curators were again treating history and art with seriousness. Lagos, Africa’s biggest and most populous metropolitan area, was flourishing.

  To describe what he saw, Teju took to a rising medium: blogging. From January 2006, he blogged about where he went: parks, galleries, agency offices; the people he met: artists, hustlers, passengers; how they behaved: hopefully, cynically, street smartly; what he thought; what it might all mean. Blogging eight hours a day, producing a chapter per day, the project took him a month to finish.

  His inclusion of black-and-white images came naturally, from his interest in photography and his training as an art historian. He’d also read Ondaatje’s fiction debut, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, and two nonfiction books, Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City and Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, which all embedded images in text.

  He did not necessarily set out to capture Lagos, its visceral, intense, incessant multivocality, in a way that no one else had; he already believed that “the best novel of Lagos” was the discography of Fela Kuti, who, he wrote, “earthed the lightning of our contemporary life,” weaving micro struggles in a way that is “very hard to do in literature.” He thought Fela to be Nigeria’s greatest genius. The incandescent anger, the savage humour of Beasts of No Nation/ODOO (Overtake Don Overtake Overtake), the pain of the title song—it had, he felt, a blazing beauty, like “a house on fire.” He preferred nuance but also knew when the artistic response needed to be raw, so he did not flinch from showing a lynching of a thief. The title, “Every Day Is for the Thief,” came from a Yoruba proverb: Every day is for the thief, but one day is for the owner.

  A few hundred people read it. Weeks on, he deleted it. Months on, he received an enquiry from a new publishing press, Cassava Republic. They edited it, replacing Teju the original narrator with a persona of equal eloquence who’d been away for 15 years, and, with that longer absence, now simmered with disillusioned love for a country that should be doing better. In 2007, Every Day Is for the Thief was published as a 130-page novella.

  It was in writing the book that Teju decided, like Berger, to straddle fiction and nonfiction, for his fiction to read realistically and his nonfiction to read novelistically. “I think that what we care about, finally, is whether an author can create a world—a sensitively and convincingly evoked world—that we want to inhabit,” he later told Tin House. For some of the earliest novelists—Miguel de Cervantes, François Rabelais, Robert Burton, Daniel Defoe—the demarcation, he saw, wasn’t a rule.

  Teju tells me that he categorized Every Day as fiction because it would give him “a clearer shape.” “I think any work of writing, particularly a work of fiction, is coherent based on certain simplifications that you make,” he says. “My own feelings were sort of all over the place, it’s positive, it’s negative. By making it fictional, I was able to focus the emotional temperature of the work.”

  He was also particular in its intended effect. “If I was just gonna write a pure memoir of my experience of that time, maybe there would be less fury, maybe I could talk more about family. There were good times, there were people I hung out with, I also had fun. But I wanted to register that shock of a place that seemed mired in circumstances it could not quite escape. And write about what that feels like from the perspective of someone who knows it very well but has not seen it in a while. The ability to look at the familiar with new eyes.”

  It was also a reconciliation of his childhood and teenage years with the world-weary thinker he had become. “As a child you don’t really know where you live, you just live it. As an adult, you begin to interpret the structures, you begin to write down what you see, you begin to interpret the meaning of what you’re looking at.”

  The arrangement of Every Day gave him deep personal satisfaction. But there was more he wanted to do, and he needed a larger canvas to figure it out.

  New York City—its energy, its crossing of cultures, their variegated histories, the discoveries they afforded—gripped Teju Cole on his first coming, back in 2000, when he was transitioning from medicine to art, to enroll at Columbia. The city fascinated him. Vaguely, he began to think about making something, but didn’t know where to begin, didn’t know how.

  On September 11, 2001, the Twin Towers fell, and the city and America were plunged into anguish. The force of the terrorist attacks broke open a portal for him, and he began talking to people, in cafes, at concerts, on planes, and he was surprised that they were opening up, sharing what to them were small, insignificant details of their lives, but in which he could see something clear: a failure of mourning. That, he decided, was what he could show, something he hadn’t seen much of in the reportage and fiction on the tragedy.

  He believed that the best way to write about catastrophe was to write allusively, about other things, to let the trauma show in shades. The writing must intimate distance and he preferred to fill that vagueness with music, with art. He saw truth in Leo Tolstoy’s warning that events shouldn’t be written about until ten years later, and yet he did just that.

  Earlier in London, at the S.O.A.S., he’d written down the first words, five pages of Mad Libs. But in New York City now, he had a title, clear sentences, cumulative observations, relying on clarity to convey the narrative’s energy. He agreed with Didion saying she wouldn’t know what to think until she wrote it down. So he did not tell himself that he was writing a “novel.” It wasn’t his intention, and if it were, he would have over-obsessed, over-sketched, and over-determined its structure to the point of frustration. Instead, he took it patiently, random thought after random thought, seeking flow.

  It was another year later, in late 2006, on the day of the New York Marathon, a day he didn’t take a walk, that he really began to write: and on that day, in the beginning of the book, Julius takes a walk, setting out from Morningside Heights, where Teju lived, overlooking the streets full of runners and watchers.

  The first character he created was not Julius but Julianne, his German mother, whom those Mad Libs were about, who is estranged from both her own mother and her son. Teju named her after his grandmother and made up a biography for her, most of which he didn’t use in the book. Then came Julius, and a conversation he has with an older man, who became Professor Saito, his Japanese mentor-figure. Once he had the two men, the story began to open up, one sentence asking for another; he was feeling an internal pressure and the prose flowed; it was, he would later say, “like a fever dream.”

  Although the writing of the two books overlapped—he began Every Day in January 2006 and, as a way to procrastinate edits for it, Open City in November of that year—his ideas for the latter were a significant leap. In its final stages, he looked to maximize the possibilities of the novel, aware that there are internal conditions that only the form could achieve. He wanted to explore stream-of-consciousness without falling into tedium and tedium itself without becoming tedious. He thought of Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, both written in a strong first-person voice, thriving in gaps between reportage, essay, and innovation.

  He also expanded the external, presenting intellectual life as he did in Every Day, with characters going to bookshops, museums, having cultural experiences with no plot conflict. In threading Julius’ thoughts, he avoided heavy research so the book wouldn’t read like Wikipedia. He wanted it to read naturally, without quotation marks, a stream of musings.

  He meant for some of the scenes to read the way art is meant to be seen: yielding more on rereading. The intent was aesthetic and psychologic. He was thinking of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and his Renaissance landscapes. Like the Old Master European paintings, he wanted Julius’ human encounters to reveal more afterwards.

  His devotion grew at the expense of his studies, and his wife, Karen, became concerned again—given how he’d eloped with Every Day. She would return from work and he would tell her, “I did a lot of work today,” and she would ask, “On your dissertation?” It became a running joke among his friends.

  He missed his submission deadline from Random House. In the summer of 2009, in his new apartment in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, he wrote the last chapters, 21, 19, and 20, in that order. The day he finished, he went out to a Mexican neighbourhood, into a restaurant he’d never been to, and ordered enough food for four people. He ate, smiling at strangers. And then he went home and took a shower.

  Fifty pages of Open City are set in Brussels, the Belgian capital. Teju planned this detour to extend an irony: here is a psychiatrist who talks about everything but nothing about what happened with his mother, who travels to another continent to locate his grandmother but doesn’t make a concentrated effort to find her. The arc also best exemplifies how the novel functions on doubles. For New York City, there is Brussels: a city that, during World War II, was actually an “open city,” surrendered to Nazi German forces in 1940. And in Brussels, for Julius, there is the young Moroccan man Farouq: as liberal, as sensitive to history, but possessing greater rigor, more militant in his diagnoses, more idealist.

  In Open City, there is an abundance of the unstated, the observed but uncommented upon, and it builds Julius’ complications. He may engage robust logic on global systems of oppression, but he wrings away from racial attachment, from almost every encounter with a fellow Black or African, all “people who tried to lay claims on me.” His need to be differentiated feels cryptic and colonialist: he would take the heritage but not the baggage—a posture that invites fresh problematization in the age of Black Lives Matter. (The novel is set during the Bush Years but Teju, writing most of it later, has called it an “Obama Book.”)

  But there is also the author’s own contrarianism. This, after all, is a book about the old bleeding back into the new, a book, he has said, about “a new kind of American reality, one that takes diversity for granted,” that “doesn’t celebrate diversity, actually, it just says: this is how we live now.” To take diversity for granted, to honestly presume the naturalness of difference, is to dare give full life to a Julius, a character fleeing racial attachment, against convention.

  But nowhere is the unstated, the uncommented upon, more obvious, and troubling, than in Julius’ attitudes to gender. Near the book’s end, an acquaintance, Moji, accuses him of raping her when they were teenagers.

  “I don’t think you’ve changed at all, Julius,” Moji says. “Things don’t go away because you choose to forget them.”

  She tries to hold him accountable: “But will you say something now? Will you say something?”

  Julius says nothing, he simply shifts attention to the beauty of morning light on the Hudson, and a story Albert Camus told about Friedrich Nie­tzsche.

  In the cerebral shimmer of the narration, the scene is a chilling irruption. It proved divisive with critics and readers, most of whom thought it was striking, the rest of whom felt it was unsatisfyingly unresolved, or ill-tailored into the story’s vast scope, or just wouldn’t want their attachment to a fine intellectual mind to be so troubled.

  “What’s interesting to me is we all know, unfortunately, very many women who have been assaulted, but we rarely know men who have committed assault,” Teju says. “We either don’t know or we don’t wanna know. We don’t want to acknowledge the extent to which we know. And that is why I put that incident so late in the book, because I wanted to ‘normalize’ Julius as intelligent, intellectual, curious, likeable/not likeable. Life is not like, ‘Oh, he’s this wonderful character and then there’s this shock.’ It’s more like, ‘He’s this person who really does feel like a person.’ If he doesn’t come across as a real person, then the events of Chapter 20 don’t have the force that I intend them to have. Without that ending, it would have been a nice intellectual tour, but then came the knife.”

  He wrote Moji’s voice to supplant Julius’ in that moment, so that even though he is the narrator, she surges past him in spite of his hesitation and editing. It reads as if, for the first time, another voice takes over the narration—which is significant considering that Julius has encountered people as forceful as Farouq.

  “Ten years on I feel great about what I went for in that book,” Teju says with relief. “I did what I wanted to do. And I would humbly submit that it holds up.” (I do not point out that his writing year, 2006, would go down as the start of the Me Too Movement.)

  More women in Julius’ life face his hesitation to search himself. His girlfriend, Nadege, sometimes registers as secondary in his thoughts; for a lover he never passes through a lens of desire, he is particular in portraying her “uneven walk. . . the way she moved her body in compensation for a malformation.” The sex he has with a Czech woman, for all the words spent on it, feels plastic, lacking in soul. The only women he seems to really see—Dr. Annette Mailotte, his grandmother (whom, he surmises, might have been raped or sexually assaulted by the invading Russians in 1945)—are women on the same footing, intellectual or familial, with him. It is, Teju agrees, “a very wounded relationality to women.”

  It contrasts with what feels like a mental gravitation towards men. Julius describes men, noting their nuances, like he does Farouq, and like he does Professor Saito, the person he is fondest of, who happens to be gay. When I first read Open City six years ago, I received Julius’ attitudes to gender, with his aversion to looking inward, as perhaps hiding a queer history.

  “I would say that Julius is queer-friendly, it doesn’t strike me that he is queer, you know,” Teju replies. “I don’t think it’s illegitimate as a view, but we see him, he has a girlfriend, there’s a woman he assaults, I think there’s definitely a kind of heterosexual toxic masculinity going on there.”

  He admits, “The writer can be very intentional but there might be more interpretative possibilities than intended. I read a paper where someone made an elaborate case that Julius, through his mother, is actually Jewish. This scholar proves the case with clues throughout the book. I’m like, that’s interesting, really interesting, also not impossible, but I did not sit down to write Julius as secretly Jewish, as secretly queer.”

  The way that Teju wrote Julius, sketching so close to his own life, coloured how some readers perceived him the author. He received letters presuming he was Julius, which did not offend him. “I think it’s an interesting tension,” he said in 2015. “[It] says something about the expectations we have about what a book is supposed to do. Maybe to a certain extent, this particular book is stymieing those expectations a little bit.”

  “One big difference between my characters and I,” he has said, “is that I usually have a pretty dark and ironic sense of humor.”

  It was after Open City that Teju’s gusts of experimental energy spilled beyond formal writing, and with it that sense of humour withheld in his fiction. The recreational context of Twitter made it possible. His “Small Fates,” a series of over a thousand micro stories culled from Nigerian news, was an influential step into social media intellectualism. It was based on the fait divers, a centuries-old practice in French journalism.

  “Even if one does not believe in ghosts, 2,700 of them continue to draw salaries from the Imo State payroll,” reads one. Another: “Knowledge is power. He graduated in business administration in Calabar, and Charles Okon has since administered sixteen armed robberies.” “Small Fates” helped inspire the Twitter Fiction Festival.

  Another series, “Seven Short Stories About Drones,” from 2013, imagined lives for victims of American drone strikes, each tweet starting like a classic novel. “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Pity. A signature strike leveled the florist’s.” “Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His torso was found, not his head.” By tying famous books to everyday stories of faceless people, he was reframing distanced tragedies, bridging art and app, the classic and the contemporary, canonical cruxes and disownable deaths, and universalizing the planned happenstance of militarist violence.

  The Indian writer Amitava Kumar once called him “one of the great tweeters of our time,” hailing his “exercise [of] poetic instincts.” His social media use made headlines. Twitter, he has said, is “the real stream of consciousness.” He told The New Inquiry that he used it to “bring the literature to [people] right where they are.” He compared the app to an “African city” and rejected the idea that his work on social media was less important than his books; our rewarding of literary production, he believes, will eventually exceed just “books” as we know them.

  His Twitter experimentation peaked with his release of a micro story on the app. He retweeted lines sent to friends and a 33-tweet story unfolded on his timeline, titled “Hafiz.” It was a new level in Twitter Literature, harnessing the app’s responsive nature.

  Later that year, he would give a lecture at Twitter’s Headquarters, and then he would leave the app, stunning his over 250,000 followers.

  He never understood Snapchat, couldn’t connect with Vine, and finally settled on Instagram, hoping to find a new mode of pictorial criticism, of image sequences as essays. On Facebook, he remains expressive, regularly sharing Spotify playlists, 104 of them.

  “If somebody tells you that a five thousand-word essay in the New York Review of Books is the only way of being serious, they’re lying to you,” he once said. The irony must have eluded him: Who but Teju Cole, whose tribute to the photographer Marie Cosnidas became the longest sentence published in The New York Times, better represents the perception of Long/Important essays in highbrow publications as a way of seriousness?

  Teju Cole - Known and Strange Things
  There is a very public attraction to Teju Cole’s worldly reasoning, so that some of his essays appeared as intellectual events, dissected on social media and blogs. “The White Savior Industrial Complex,” a viral one, grew from his tweets criticizing the viral KONY 2012 video, the “banal sentimentality” of Western humanitarianism in Third World countries. “Black Body,” his rereading of Baldwin’s 1953 essay “A Stranger in the Village,” and claiming as his “heritage” European artistic traditions, spawned multiple analyses.

  One of his most important is “A Reader’s War,” his criticism of Obama’s drone strikes in the Middle East, which set up his political commitments on a tense slope, far away from the distanced bubble of his narrators. It put him in a line of fire in mainstream liberal American circles, and, as a new writer, he hedged.

  Three years later, though, there was no hedging when PEN America announced that it was awarding the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, which has a history of hitting political and religious leaders, with its PEN/Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award, following the Al-Qaeda terrorist attack that killed 12 and injured 11 of its staff. Two days after the massacre, Teju had responded with an essay, “Unmournable Bodies,” which received some pushback.

  He led a dissent of six writers—Ondaatje, Francine Prose, Peter Carey, Rachel Kushner, and Taiye Selasi, all scheduled to be table hosts at the PEN event. They dissociated themselves from the awarding on grounds that “PEN is not simply conveying support for freedom of expression, but also valorizing selectively offensive material . . . that intensifies the anti-Islamic, anti-Maghreb, anti-Arab sentiments already prevalent in the Western world.”

  Alliances broke. Salman Rushdie, 30 years after his fatwa, tweeted: “The award will be given. PEN is holding firm. Just 6 pussies. Six Authors in Search of a bit of Character.” He later called them “fellow travelers” of “fanatical Islam.” But more PEN members were already distancing themselves and the number of signatories to the letter grew to 242. The event went ahead. (Last year, on the eve of the trial of the terrorists, Charlie Hebdo reprinted the cartoons.)

  But where Teju’s disbelief in American exceptionalism prompts his activist tendencies, his attitude to Nigerian dysfunction is conventional: he puts the criticism in his books, speaks on panels and, almost as if it were futile, avoids table-shaking essays.

  A few Nigerian critics, riled by his depiction of Lagos in Every Day Is for the Thief, accused him of Afro-pessimism. He dismissed the suggestion as “just a little bit empty, sometimes”; if people are really suffering, why paint a rosy picture? His home country, he told BOMB, “haunts me in terms of being a space of unfinished histories.” I ask him if these histories of “squander,” as he put it, are why he doesn’t publicly comment on Nigerian issues.

  “Nigeria is in a tough place right now,” Teju says, his tone resigned. “There are too many forces arrayed against us: violence, mismanagement. We used to be able to simplify them into, ‘Oh, it’s just corruption,’ or ‘Oh, it’s just the military.’ But now it really feels like—this Boko Haram thing, hugely intractable, but then the Herdsmen thing is a huge one as well, and then the separatist movements that are coming to the fore every day, and then on top of that we have incommunicativeness. It’s a powder keg. More enlightened leadership would help, and a real commitment to reducing inequality. It’s one thing to be a poor country, it’s another thing to be a poor country that has so many rich people, and yet it’s another thing to be a poor country that has so many rich people intent on demonstrating their wealth. I wouldn’t say we need better political education, but we need for the people who have the political education to have more of a platform so that their voices are heard.”

  The class inequality disturbs him the most. “Boys can go out for a drink, and by the time they’ve ordered one round, that already pays the monthly salary of the guy who’s opening the door for them. That’s normal in Nigeria, but that kind of normalcy—that’s what revolutions come out of.”

  He understands the pressure building up inside the system. “There was almost like a valve release for that during End SARS. It’s part of a larger pattern of being disregarded. People are not stupid, you know. The people protesting know that they are just as smart and as hardworking as the people living large. It is possible to envision a kind of future that isn’t dependent on having a permanent underclass. I don’t know how we are going to get there. We need a vision that can speak to Sabo, Áseése, Makoko, to every neighbourhood in every city in this country that has the wealthy cheek by jaw with the impoverished. When I got to V.I., right next to the hotel, there were people sleeping under aluminum sheets. We need a vision of a society that can somehow include the least among us. We are all in this together.”

  Teju moves as if to lean close to the camera. What he sees is a foreclosure of the horizon of imagination, how news of Nigerian international firsts are an optical illusion. “It’s like a version of Black People Magic,” he says. “That’s not gonna save us. I don’t give a damn what Nigerian becomes a billionaire, but we are under-educating other people’s children. There’s a naivety among smart young Nigerians who think the private accumulation of wealth is the only horizon of possibility. Smart young Nigerians seem to think that neoliberalism is our way forward. It’s not. Our salvation does not lie with the global neoliberal network, it does not lie with Goldman Sachs, it does not lie with hedge funds, it does not lie with Silicon Valley. If you have a buildup of wealth that goes to a tiny percentage of a country—history never fails as far as this goes: that system will collapse and it will be very messy.”

  Teju Cole - Golden Apple of the Sun
  Last year, in his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Teju was in deep thought. The coronavirus was decimating the world. George Floyd was dead and Black Lives Matter protests had swept the country. In faraway Nigeria, the End SARS protests had begun, thousands of young people demanding answers on the streets and on social media. It was a charged, changed world, and he might have pondered if our regular ways of seeing and feeling were still enough.

  One sunlit evening in October, weeks before Donald Trump was voted out as U.S. president, he carried his camera into his kitchen and began to photograph the counter. A glass of ice. A red knife. A bottle of gold wine. Bowls of blue. Slices of yellow lemon. The dark table providing a balance of hues. Every day, for five weeks, he did this, borrowing from the still life tradition of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Paul Cézanne, Laura Letinsky, and Jan Groover. But unlike them, he left the placing of the objects to chance. It might have been his way of reassembling the staled energies of the lockdown.

  A friend once told him: “In almost every single one of your photos, there is something wrong.” And he, who has spent more time in the last 10 years taking pictures than writing, took it as a compliment, a target, for his work to “be made of hopefully poignant fragments that I then seek to reunite with each other.”

  This month, the sequence of 60 kitchen photos will appear in his fourth photo book, Golden Apple of the Sun, accompanied by a 15,000-word text on hunger, fasting, poetry, and the history of photography, both interspersed with a handwritten cookbook from 18th-century Cambridge. In a blurb, the photographer Stephen Shore writes: “Many artists have felt the lure of juxtaposing photographs and text, but few have succeeded as well as Teju Cole.”

  (Sharpness did not come to his eyes with the willful work that it did his prose. Just after Open City came out, he suffered a Big Blind Spot syndrome. The book has a scene on the mechanics of blindness; it was ironical, his life imitating his art. As he struggled down the street that afternoon, the sun felt like a hallucination. With surgery, he recovered his sight, but also acquired a new appreciation of light, a fresher way of seeing in which the ordinary looked glorious. It was a turning point in his photography, lending it mystery and meditation.)

  Teju Cole and Fazal Sheikh - Human Archipelago
  Teju once said that the “authentic truth” of photography is “available only in language, as practiced in narration.” While his writing has been influenced by images—like the Black Lives Matter protesters’ “visual language of the comic-book superhero”—he understood that the logic of writing differs from that of imaging. The annotations to his photos are often not about the images—he prefers his images to hold their own, to be more than illustration for the text.

  When he began working with Fazal Sheikh on Human Archipelago, poring through Sheikh’s images of landscapes and people forced out of their homes and lands by political and environmental crises, he considered the global rise of xenophobia, and cooled his words through ideals of compassion and courage. Aside Human Archipelago, all photos in his books are taken by him.

  But it was in the process of composing Fernweh, his most recent book—a convergence of the histories of photography, tourism, and the fragility of landscapes, with images taken across six years of visiting Switzerland—that he finally felt that his photography and his writing were coming from the same place, that still but searching tenor. Part of it came from writing his Times monthly column, “On Photography” (a finalist for the National Magazine Award in 2016).

  “Fernweh” is a German word for the opposite of homesickness; it translates to “farsickness,” a desire to stay away, which took on significance as the book came out in a world of COVID-19 restrictions. He chose Switzerland for its clean beauty, but also because he did not, like many young American photographers, want to make a generic photobook about Brazil or Mexico or India. He believed in ethical travelling, in imagining what real life is like for people living anywhere he went. So he, an African born in America, went to Europe, to its buttered centre of white privilege, with a camera and an intent to discover, an eagerness to exercise expertise, like Europeans once did in Africa and America.

  Teju Cole - Fernweh
  He was taking in Joachim Brohm’s patterns of composition at the time, and he had begun to prefer images with what he calls “a very slow surface,” the kind that elicited a “Hmmm” rather than a “Wow,” the kind that fills his Instagram, the kind he knows is often categorized as “boring.” He sequenced Fernweh with the influence of Dayanita Singh’s Museum of Chance and Rinko Kawauchi’s Illuminance, books that, he felt, lured stories out of fragments.

  But this new one, Golden Apple of the Sun, builds on the texture of his first photo book, Blind Spot, in which his travels for literary events—to Zurich, Tripoli, Lagos, Beirut, Seoul, São Paulo, Berlin, Ubud—are captured in 150 “tourist’s pictures,” each annotated by brief luminous prose. It is the book he considers his most original work. (“A real contribution. There is, like, literally no other text that is like that.”)

  He called it “Blind Spot” because it is about all the things we miss as we go through life. But he wanted to end the book with a double vision, so the last photo in it, taken in Brazzaville, is accompanied by a short text that begins: Darkness is not empty. It is information at rest. It was him, a writer whose books always begin in the middle, seeking a generative ending.

  “It’s different from Blind Spot but it has as much text as Blind Spot,” he says of Golden Apple, and for the first time I see how it looks for Teju Cole to be stirred, a quiet charge in his spectacled eyes, on his face, his gesticulating hands. “I’m very excited about that. Nobody else needs to be excited. I think it’s one of the most exciting, most interesting, and original things I’d ever done. And for me, there’s no other work by anybody else I can compare it to. It’s something that my experience has brought me to as a form, to say, ‘Look at this, look.’”

  Teju Cole - Blind Spot
  For years, critics have hinted that he is on a search. Reviewing Open City, Miguel Syjuco wrote: “Cole suggests that we re-examine, as perhaps limited and parochial, the idea of the Great Fill-in-the-Nation Novel. Instead, we can look again at the notion of what Goethe called Weltliteratur. This book may not be the Great World Novel, but it points to such a work’s possibility and importance. Judging from his performance here, Cole may eventually be the one to write it.”

  I ask Teju about his deliberate movement from novella to novel to essay to photobook, all drawing from poetry, if this cross-pollination is him testing forms to know their capabilities, if he is feeling towards an ultimate, composite work that transcends genre and delineates the world uniquely, with the sensorily sharp temperament he has used to create fiction that feels nonfictional and photobooks that are novelistic: not a Great World Novel now but a Great World Book. I ask him if he had this is in mind when he said that “The central thing motivating my photography and by extension my writing is the idea that there was a mythical pre-history of humanity when everything was intact.” Is this the goal then, realizing that pre-history in a modulated form, as a kind of super-history?

  Teju is quiet, looking at the corner of the screen. “I have been very gratified by the work I’ve done, because I think freedom is important, but I think the work I’d done since then indicate my relationship with this particular ambition of writing ‘the great novel’—”

  “Book,” I say. “The Great Book.”

  “The Great Book,” he repeats, an unasked question. “Great, by what measure? It seems to suggest something that has to do with scale, size, as a deposit of intent. You know, I think it’s possible that that’s also participating in a kind of masculinist view of what literature can be or what it can do, that real power comes from size.”

  I clarify that I mean a scale of quality, not size. He nods. “The thing is, when you’re approaching form, there are certain things you need to say, and the process of saying what you have to say will let you know what the ideal form is. I’m not in a hurry.” He stresses hurry, a slight drag, and he breathes. “What interests me is to do the work and to do it well. If I was listening to that, people wanting me to write another novel, I would never have made Blind Spot.”

  Teju Cole, Black Paper, 2017. Photo Credit, Paula Court. Courtesy of Performa.
  Part of Teju Cole’s Performa Biennial 2017 presentation, Black Paper. Photograph by Paula Court. Source: Art and Africa Magazine. Courtesy of Performa Biennial. Image has been cropped.
  The year Blind Spot came out, 2017, he presented a solo performance piece at the Performa Biennial, an audiovisual response to the Trump Age titled Black Paper. This October, his second essay collection comes out with the same name, subtitled Writing in a Dark Time (reviewed here by us). The photos in Black Paper first appeared in a 2016 solo exhibition in Milan titled Punto d’ombra. In 2019, he held his first major curatorial show at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; the project, about freedom and chaos in contemporary America, took its name from the African American freedom song “Go Down Moses.” For years, he was developing a nonfiction narrative about Lagos, titled Radio Lagos. It was research for it that led to “Small Fates” on Twitter.

  Now that he is working on that second novel, he prizes freedom and treasures brevity. “Rather than thinking of myself as making this big, powerful, influential book—no, maybe what I would do from now on is just chapbooks. Maybe I’ll just make 12-page books. The point is to be grateful for the freedom of doing work, and to follow the voice and make the work. As the artist you’re thinking of the container and what you’re putting into the container, but sometimes you’re also creating that container. It’s a journey, you don’t know where this is gonna take you. Only in retrospect does it seem like, ‘Ah, that’s obvious,’ because now it exists in the world.”

  His body of work is, he says, “a vision of the world, a vision of a certain kind of experience that involves being raised in Africa’s biggest city, being raised in a Yoruba family, coming into the U.S. and studying here, the opportunity to have visited 45 different countries, to have a certain literary sensibility, to have certain interests in music and in art, to have certain political commitments that have to do with equality of persons, and then just to have a certain personality that is my personality because each person has their own. I am committed to a kind of artistic freedom that has led to this body of work.”

  He is a disciple of artistic stubbornness. “We need to also have a relationship with a body of established work,” he says. “Excessive originality means you’re kind of, like, a quack, right? And yet having understood the body of work that is out there in the world, the forebears, the masters—at the end of the day when you’ve read your Toni Morrison, or whomever you’re reading, then you have to decide your part in this. And Toni Morrison got where she got by reading Richard Wright, William Faulkner, but at some point, you say, ‘Okay, what does Toni Morrison sound like?’ and she had to be stubborn about it.”

  When his agent sent out the unfinished draft of Open City and editors began to indicate interest, Teju feared the book would be deformed, would defer to someone else’s idea. David Ebershoff wanted him to think about plot, but not at the expense of his authorial vision. Editing Every Day Is for the Thief, Ebershoff saw him as reaching for a similar thing as Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. (When Every Day came out in the U.S. and the U.K. in 2014, seven years after it did in Nigeria, Western critics received it as “an epilogue” to Open City, not as a standalone precedent but as a confirmation of reputation, another offering after tragedy, dealing with post-military rule Nigeria as Open City does with 9/11.)

  Ten years on, Ebershoff, who also edited Known and Strange Things, looks back with fulfilment. “His journey doesn’t surprise me,” he told me. “I love how he doesn’t let any one genre define or limit him. Whatever he’s working on, it’s always unmistakably Teju.”

  Literary Tour Map of Open City by Lavelle Porter
  A literary tour map of Julius’ walks in Open City, created by Lavelle Porter and published by The Revelator.
  Ebershoff sees writers working in the wake of Open City. “Ben Lerner and Rachel Cusk, both of whom are superb, are two examples. I’m now editing the debut novel of New Yorker writer Vinson Cunningham, which is called Consider the Years. He and I have talked about Open City and its powers.” Cunningham’s novel was pitched to him as “a meditative book in the tradition of Teju Cole.”

  Over the years, Teju’s work has gone further, garnering as ardent readers the very writers he looked up to—Jan Morris, Derek Walcott, Soyinka, Claudia Rankine, people he sees as “mountains in my literary imagination”—some of whose artistic processes he traces with fidelity in Known and Strange Things. (Like the rest of his books, the collection takes its name from a pre-existing idea: Seamus Heaney’s poem “Postscript”: “A hurry through which known and strange things pass.”) He receives this with gratitude and faint alarm.

  He’d met Philip Roth, and when the man died, he was invited to his funeral. As he stood by the graveside, watching the coffin going under earth, an old lady approached him. “I’m so glad you came,” she told him. “Just before Philip died, the last time I saw him, he wanted to discuss your essay about James Baldwin.”

  As she spoke, he listened. The service was over, people had moved to the reception, and they were at the graveside, alone, and he was thinking of his life, the work he put in to get there.

  Teju moves in his seat now, as if in anticipation. “Listen,” he says to me, “what I tell students: you can have the talent, you can have the desire, but if you don’t have the fire in the belly to make the vision come through, to bring it forth, you’re not gonna last in that game. There has to be a deep, inside stubbornness. I know you know what I mean.”

  Teju Cole - Black Paper, 2017. Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery.
  Sections of Teju Cole’s Performa Biennial 2017 presentation, Black Paper. Source: Wide Walls. Courtesy: Steven Kasher Gallery.
  Teju Cole is staring upwards again. Our interview, scheduled for 45 minutes, has passed the hour and 15-minute mark, and he begins to respond to a question I didn’t ask, a question he has been asked all through his career: the question of audience. “It’s not an unimportant one, but it’s not as simple as people make it out to be,” he says. “I think people who are not deeply invested in literature or who have not thought carefully about it can sometimes function in a very cliched way of ‘Are you writing for white people?’”

  He believes that we write for our best readers. “Like me, you went to school in Nigeria: Aba, secondary school; Nsukka, university. And when you read Open City it made sense to you. You are the target audience. It’s because you felt the work was respecting your intelligence, to put it very simply. And that has nothing to do with white or black, with European influence or whatever. When people read my work, no matter where they may be, if it’s for them, it’s really for them. And I would say the absolutely crucial part of the population I’m writing for is young Nigerians. There’s nothing I’ve written that I’ve not had a young Nigerian say to me, ‘Ah, that one really entered, it was like you entered my head and helped me understand something.’”

  His tone falls, tired. “But that’s not the presumption that is made, because we’ve been encouraged to sort of caricature ourselves into ‘If it’s not set in a Yoruba village, is it still authentically African?’ Really, are we still discussing this? In the 1920s, our forebears were publishing newspapers, practicing law, arguing against the colonialists, they were studying classics, they had a big sense of the world—more than a 100 years ago and there was a large population of them. They were reading poetries of all kinds, there were jazz orchestras in Lagos. And a 100 years later, we are supposed to pretend as if we are sealed off like some holy kingdom of uninfluenceablity?”

  His work represents “a kind of intellectual internationalism that young Africans take for granted in their lives and that they often don’t see reflected,” he notes. “White people always think the world belongs to them, they can be interested in anything, they can read anything and bring it all in, and I don’t think young Africans see that model for them often enough, by the writers that are ahead of them.”

  Fourteen years ago, in 2007, when the novelist and art critic Emmanuel Iduma first found Every Day Is for the Thief on a bookshop shelf, he was still 18, an undergraduate at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife. It was his first time seeing fiction by a Nigerian that incorporated photographs, and the writing itself, he felt, was “nonpareil.” Five years on, when he began studying for an MFA in art criticism and writing, he looked to Teju Cole.

  “His example made me feel that my own work was possible,” Iduma told me. “His ideas are never just the sum of their parts, but each part a world entire.” In his debut novel Farad, the influence is obvious. For his second book, a travelogue, A Stranger’s Pose, Teju wrote the foreword.

  The novelist Ayobami Adebayo also discovered Teju’s work at the same time as Iduma. “What continues to mean the most to me is how his work yields more insights upon re-engagement,” she told me. “Returning to Everyday Is for the Thief recently, I was transfixed by how riveting its characters are even when observed in passing. Especially Lagos, evoked with such poignant vignettes that it comes into sharp focus, vivid and textured, as though painted.”

  Their acquaintance, Iduma said, “highlighted for me his kindness, and how, even if I thought of him as peerless, he considered my thinking deserving of consideration alongside his. Though assured of his path in the world, he continues to make way for all who aspire to creative freedom of every kind.”

  That generosity comes through in a fictional letter that Teju published online in 2010, “Eight Letters to a Young Writer,” in which he emerges as a mentor. “Read slowly,” he writes in one of the letters, “like someone studying the network of tunnels underneath a bank vault in preparation for a heist.”

  A photograph by Teju Cole, taken at a night club in Germany.
  A photograph by Teju Cole, taken at a night club in Germany.
  Two years ago, Adebayo and Iduma joined Teju to teach a week-long workshop in Lagos. When he walked into the room, vibrant, one of the participants, the poet and editor Ebenezer Agu, pulled out his phone to find a quote from “Age, Actually,” an essay in Known and Strange Things that looks at Michael Haneke’s film Amour. “I was comparing the voice in the essay with the figure in the room, still trying to step up to the fact that I’d come face to face with the source of the very wisdom I’d looked up to for years,” Agu told me.

  Like Agu, who’d come from Nsukka, some other attendees had traveled in from outside Lagos. “If you have any other plans, postpone it,” Teju announced. “We have intense work to do.” He told them what he always told young writers: that the only part of the literary process that was in their control was the sentences in the pages.

  Yinka Elujoba also attended the workshop. “He seemed to be measuring every word with his tongue,” Elujoba said. “The way each sentence landed was important to him.”

  “For the five days he taught us, I learned more than I’d known about the art and craft of writing,” Agu said. He would have been drawn to Teju’s work because he himself, a poet and prose writer trained in literary criticism, was seeking the intangible, and he knew no one else in the African literary canon he’d been raised on who was reaching for the same.

  “I also learnt anew of the man,” Agu said. “He was meticulous, noticed the minute flaws in our writing and most times knew how to correct them. He was emotionally sensitive, too. I learned that it was fine to know and not be modest about it. He is able to reflect upon uncommon modes of expression. The sum of this peculiar model is what I keep sight of in my own practice as a writer.”

  Tolu Daniel, another writer and editor who attended the workshop, first met Teju in 2013, at a literary festival in Nigeria, and was surprised that he remembered his name on their second meeting three years later. He, too, began reading Teju from Every Day.

  “I definitely agree that his writing has opened up a new tradition in the African literary canon,” Daniel said. “It’s evident in the writing of Emmanuel Iduma, Yinka Elujoba, and a few others.”

  One evening, a class ended, and Daniel joined Teju and another participant for a walk. Someone said something about Alice Munro’s short story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” which they read in class. Teju thought of one of the characters. One night out in Germany, during the making of Black Paper, a man overdosed and people were trying to revive him. In the phone light shone by someone from above, the scene looked not like a matter of life and death but like theatre, and he brought out his camera and quietly captured it. He thought about that moment of ignition as he walked with the two now. They were in the evening light and ahead of them were faint shadows. Vehicles glided by. It was Ikoyi and the streets looked mundane, blunted of edges. He began to tell them how what is mundane might become charged in the right eyes, with the right vision. “I am always looking for the spark of life,” he said. ♦

• British Journal of Photography - https://www.1854.photography/2022/03/teju-cole-golden-apple-of-the-sun/

  4 March 2022
  Teju Cole collates musings on the everyday and an exploration of image context and space in his new book
  by Alice Zoo

  View Gallery
  9 Photos
  1
  This article is printed in the latest issue of British Journal of Photography magazine, themed Home, delivered direct to you with an 1854 Subscription, or available to purchase on the BJP shop.

  In the tense weeks leading up to the 2020 US presidential election, Cole photographed his kitchen while reflecting the construct of image-making and sharing today
  In September 2020, Teju Cole was making pictures of his kitchen counter in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The US presidential election was six weeks away and he needed something to occupy himself, something to help him endure the anxiety of the interim. “I want a record of this apparently impossible and impassable distance,” he writes in the essay that forms part of the work. These pictures are that record; time happened to him, to all of us; the impassable distance was passed. At 4.02pm on 03 November 2020 – the afternoon of the election – a sliced persimmon glows gold on the chopping board, and after that the pictures stop.

  The idea for the project arrived fully formed. “One evening, I realised I wanted to do a work that interweaved photographs of the kitchen with a long essay on a list of interrelated subjects that had been gathering in my mind,” explains Cole. “I began the very next day.” My first encounter with the work that eventually became Golden Apple of the Sun, Cole’s new book with Mack, was on Instagram. Pages from a 1780 cookbook (discovered by Cole in Harvard’s Schlesinger Library during the early research stages for the project) appeared overlaid with inset images of Cole’s kitchen counter. Each image was captioned with a paragraph of text. These fragments were eventually amalgamated to form the essay now found at the end of the book.

  Cole, perhaps best known as a writer of novels and essays on photography, often shares his work-in-progress on social media. The process helps him see his output afresh – the knowledge of others’ eyes on it inevitably provides new information. “It was also helpful in the general sense of providing energy,” he says. “I was posting every day for about six weeks, and I was enthusiastic about putting this intense material out into the world, one fragment at a time. For those six weeks, that’s what I was living for. Which I suppose was the point of the project: to divert my attention away from the stupid news and towards something life-giving and lasting.”

  “The commitment I have made is that nothing is moved to make a photograph. Nothing will be arranged to create a better picture, though the temptation to arrange things is very strong. What will be of interest is the operation of chance in this small space.”

  Teju Cole. ‘OCT 11 12:30’ from Golden Apple of the Sun (MACK, 20201). Courtesy the artist and MACK.
  In the book, Cole’s photographs have been separated from the reproduced pages of a recipe book, and sit cleanly on white pages. A date stamp informs us when each image was taken. Without a knowledge of the context that surrounded them, the images feel calm, full of a commonplace domestic tenderness and consideration. Here is the cheesegrater awaiting its use, the curve of a bowl arcing away from that of a saucepan, and the blank space between them. Here is a sliced lime. “The commitment I have made is that nothing is moved to make a photograph,” Cole writes of his approach in the essay. “Nothing will be arranged to create a better picture, though the temptation to arrange things is very strong. What will be of interest is the operation of chance in this small space.”

  The photographs are quiet and still. Posted on Instagram, they make a particular demand on the viewer. At times, it seems as though Instagram is designed to make looking at images as easy and frictionless as possible; we are ‘users’, not ‘viewers’. Cole’s photographs push back against the platform’s algorithmically generated notions of visual appeal. On a later Instagram Story, he wrote: “If I’m choosing between two photographs, I pick the worse one. Intransigence is what interests me.” The still lifes of empty containers on his counter are formally adept. Many are beautiful, but they offer a subtle challenge. There are no eyes, no faces, no decisive moments. The containers pictured on the kitchen counter suggest cooking, but do not show it. These images require the viewer to work, just as reading does: we bring our imaginative effort to the experience, co-constructing the work with Cole as it proceeds.

  Teju Cole. ‘OCT 21 10:44’ from Golden Apple of the Sun (MACK, 20201). Courtesy the artist and MACK.

  Teju Cole. ‘OCT 10 16:39’ from Golden Apple of the Sun (MACK, 20201). Courtesy the artist and MACK.
  “‘Openness’ is closer to where I want to go. And that openness has, as part of it, a certain interest in de-skilling, in reducing the assertion of one’s skill. The photos in Golden Apple of the Sun are not the most beautiful or most impressive I have ever made – and that’s very much the point. I feel I had to give up some know-how in order to arrive at a greater openness.”
  Cole’s approach appears to be experimental with an intentional uncertainty about what the outcome of a project will be in its emotional content or form. “‘Openness’ is closer to where I want to go,” he says. “And that openness has, as part of it, a certain interest in de-skilling, in reducing the assertion of one’s skill. The photos in Golden Apple of the Sun are not the most beautiful or most impressive I have ever made – and that’s very much the point. I feel I had to give up some know-how in order to arrive at a greater openness.”

  Cole’s essay is condensed into a single potent paragraph. He writes, among many other things, about Dutch Golden Age still life paintings; about the violence of salt-harvesting in Bonaire; about Bobby Sands’ hunger strike. He writes about his own experiences of hunger, first at boarding school in Nigeria and then as a college graduate in Massachusetts. About Louise Glück, Jan Groover, Chris Killip; about Yoruba expressions of love. In the essay’s sprawl and density, the seams of its fragmentary construction are occasionally left exposed – the text counters the photographs with their tidy lines and negative space. Much of it is written in the second person, to a “you” whose identity shifts throughout. Cole appears to address his partner, the person with whom he is cooking these meals. Then, the memory of a friend who has died. The reader feels addressed too; inevitably the collective ‘you’ of the crowd of Instagram followers, the work’s first audience, is also invoked. In his acknowledgments he thanks “the many yous”.

  What appears while reading the essay and returning to the images is a profound sense of contingency. Objects are not neutral, and the truth of a thing or a person or a period of time is not straightforward. It is not fixed, but continuous. We relate and interrelate indefinitely; our choices rebound on one another. We address ourselves to “many yous”. The pandemic required us all to stay at home, to shop less, to cook our meals for ourselves – not just out of convenience, but to arrest the spread of a virus that might affect our neighbour as soon as ourselves. “I ate with care, care for myself which began to feel like care for the world,” Cole writes of that time.

  Teju Cole. ‘OCT 02 14:01’ from Golden Apple of the Sun (MACK, 20201). Courtesy the artist and MACK.

  Bookshelf
  ,

  Home
  Marie Tomanova comes full circle with her exploration of the home in a new photo book, It Was Once My Universe

  Agenda
  ,

  Home
  Julia Gat’s decade-long project invites us to reimagine what we define as learning

  Decade of Change
  ,

  Displacement & Migration
  ,

  Home
  Osceola Refetoff’s poignant survey of man’s presence in the deserts of the American West

  Home
  ,

  Identity Politics
  ,

  Ones To Watch
  Salih Basheer’s dreamlike images explore home, belonging and loss

  Home
  ,

  Ones To Watch
  ,

  Race & Representation
  Cedrine Scheidig explores notions of home, place, and the Afro-Caribbean diaspora
  Everything we encounter, including the sugar bowl on a kitchen counter or its image in a photobook, is complicated by outside contexts, this work suggests. An example: about halfway through the essay is a list of symptoms, followed by a pathology report. While making the work, Cole became ill, and records it here. It reminds us that these words and images come from a mind within a human body, one susceptible to the same illnesses and fears of illness as the person reading; that the essay and the photographs represent not an abstract instant, but an aliveness within a period of time.

  How often, when encountering a piece of work, are we put in contact with the physical reality of the person making it? What does it mean to the reader if I tell you that, almost a year to the day after Cole transcribed his symptoms, I am writing this from my sofa, convalescing after a minor surgery, stitches in my leg? Where do you read this essay from – what is the reality of your body now? And when are you reading it – what is the reality of the world today? How do our multiple contexts, personal and social, change our reading of the works we encounter, or indeed the kinds of work we make?

  © Teju Cole, courtesy of Mack Books.

  © Teju Cole, courtesy of Mack Books.
  “As I photograph, I’m looking for the moment when one kind of interest becomes something else, where the words I want are neither ‘interesting’ nor ‘boring’.”

  Teju Cole. ‘OCT 08 10:06’ from Golden Apple of the Sun (MACK, 20201). Courtesy the artist and MACK.
  During our conversation, Cole speaks about “the grand success of photography”. “There has probably never been a visual art practised by so many people,” he says. “Everyone has a camera, and there are billions of people showing their work on social media – even if they don’t think of it as ‘work’. Most of these are not skilled, but vast numbers of them are. And there are these various forms of ‘good’ photography, rampant and easily findable. I think this puts some new pressures on what we wish to do with the photographic image, and what we can do with it. I find myself more and more interested in the ways a photograph can generate friction. Where it’s not quite as clean or good as an advertising image, where it’s a bit too reticent, or weirdly composed, or lacking obvious content. Not difficulty for its own sake, but difficulty as a way of holding a space.”

  What happens to the photograph when it is freed from the imperative to be good, easy, shareable? And what happens to us as we encounter this new kind of image? What do photographs know, suggest and conceal? What do we require from them, and they from us? “As I photograph, I’m looking for the moment when one kind of interest becomes something else, where the words I want are neither ‘interesting’ nor ‘boring’,” Cole’s essay describes. A space is opened on the counter, and questions rush to fill it.

  tejucole.com

  Golden Apple of the Sun is published by Mack, priced £35, available now.

• Wikipedia -

  Teju Cole

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  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Teju Cole
  Cole in 2013
  Cole in 2013
  Born Obayemi Babajide Adetokunbo Onafuwa
  June 27, 1975 (age 49)
  Kalamazoo, Michigan, U.S.[1]
  Occupation Novelist, photographer
  Education
  Kalamazoo College (BA)
  SOAS, University of London (MA)
  Columbia University (M.Phil)
  Notable works Open City (2011)
  Website
  www.tejucole.com
  Teju Cole (born June 27, 1975) is a Nigerian-American writer, photographer, and art historian.[2] He is the author of a novella, Every Day Is for the Thief (2007),[3] a novel, Open City (2011), an essay collection, Known and Strange Things (2016),[4] a photobook Punto d'Ombra (2016; published in English in 2017 as Blind Spot),[5] and a second novel, Tremor (2023).[6] Critics have praised his work as having "opened a new path in African literature."[7]

  Personal life and education
  Cole was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, to Nigerian parents, and is the oldest of four children.[1] Cole and his mother returned to Lagos, Nigeria, shortly after his birth,[8][9] where his father joined them after receiving his MBA from Western Michigan University.[1] Cole moved back to the United States at the age of 17 to attend Western Michigan University for one year, then transferred to Kalamazoo College, where he received his bachelor's degree in 1996.[1] After dropping out of medical school at the University of Michigan, Cole enrolled in an African art history program at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London,[9][10] then pursued a doctorate in art history at Columbia University.[1][11] He is the Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing[12] at Harvard University and currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.[13]

  Career
  Author
  Cole is the author or co-author of several books, among them the novella Every Day Is for the Thief;[14] the novel, Open City;[8] a collection of more than 40 essays, Known and Strange Things;[15] and a photobook, Punto d'Ombra (2016) (published in English in 2017 as Blind Spot). Salman Rushdie has described Cole as "among the most gifted writers of his generation".[16]

  He was a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.[17] From June to November 2014 he was "writer in residence" of the Literaturhaus Zurich [de] and the PWG Foundation [de] in Zurich.

  Every Day Is for the Thief
  Main article: Every Day Is for the Thief
  Published in 2007, Cole's debut novel, Every Day Is for the Thief, is the story of a young man who sets out to visit his home country, Nigeria, after being away for fifteen years.[18] The novel reads like a travel diary explaining the way of life in the city of Lagos and along the way, exposes how the democratic nature of corruption can affect anyone regardless of their status in the society.[18]

  Open City
  Main article: Open City (novel)
  Written in 2011 and published in 2012, the novel focuses on "Nigerian immigrant Julius, a young graduate student studying psychiatry in New York City, has recently broken up with his girlfriend and spends most of his time dreamily walking around Manhattan. The majority of Open City centers on Julius' inner thoughts as he rambles throughout the city, painting scenes of both what occurs around him and past events that he can't help but dwell on. Ostensibly in search of his grandmother, Julius spends a number of weeks in Belgium, where he makes some interesting friends. Along the way, he meets many people and often has long discussions with them about philosophy and politics. He seems to welcome these conversations. Upon returning to New York, he meets a young Nigerian woman who profoundly changes the way he sees himself."[19]

  Open City was translated into ten languages and has received generally positive reviews from literary critics. James Wood in The New Yorker calls it a "beautiful, subtle, and, finally, original novel".[8] According to The New York Times, "the novel's importance lies in its honesty."[20] The Independent characterizes Open City as "hypnotic", "transfixing", and a "striking debut" for Cole,[21] while Time referred to the novel as "a profoundly original work, intellectually stimulating and possessing of a style both engaging and seductive."[22]

  Known and Strange Things
  In 2016, Cole published his first collection of essays and criticism. Writing for the New York Times, the poet Claudia Rankine called it "an essential and scintillating journey,"[23] and singled out, in particular, his essays on photography, wherein he "reveals [his] voracious appetite for and love of the visual."

  Journalism and social commentary
  Cole is a regular contributor to publications including the New York Times, Qarrtsiluni, Granta, The New Yorker, Transition magazine, The New Inquiry, and A Public Space. Quarrtsiluni (2005–2013) was an online literary magazine that attempted to edit blog software from social media; the purpose behind it was to give full access to writers/commentators of various issues "who never quite realized our dream of creating a print-on-demand option for each issue."[24] His monthly column for The New York Times Magazine, "On Photography," was a finalist for a National Magazine Award in 2016.[25]

  Cole has been credited with coining the term "White Savior Industrial Complex" with a series of tweets followed by an article published in The Atlantic.[26][27][28] The original series of tweets that precipitated the article elicited a response from NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof whom Cole named as an example of a white savior. Kristof mistakenly referred to Cole, a Nigerian-American, as a Ugandan, said that he believed Cole was part of a backlash against white humanitarians from middle-class African scholars. Kristof said that he felt uncomfortable because he thought that Cole was saying that "white Americans should not intervene in a humanitarian disaster because the victims are of a different skin color."[26] Cole responded, saying that he was concerned by Kristof's sentimentality and his lack of analysis of the context of humanitarian need in Africa: "All he sees is need, and he sees no need to reason out the need for the need."[26]

  Alongside Michael Ondaatje, Francine Prose, Peter Carey, Rachel Kushner, and Taiye Selasi, Cole was one of six writers who protested the PEN American Center gala honoring the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo with its "Freedom of Expression Courage" award in April 2015 by withdrawing as co-hosts of the event.[29] Writing in The New Yorker two days after the massacre of the Charlie Hebdo staff by Islamists in Paris, Cole claimed that the French publication was "racist and Islamophobic", a charge met with criticism from numerous commentators,[30] including the president of SOS Racisme, France's leading anti-racism organization, who praised Charlie Hebdo as "the greatest anti-racist weekly in this country."[31]

  Photography
  Cole's photography was shown in a solo exhibition in Milan in 2016 called Punto d'ombra.[32] The photographs from this exhibition were published by the Italian publisher Contrasto Books in 2016,[33] and by Random House in 2017 under the title Blind Spot.[34]

  For Performa 17, Cole created the instillation Black Paper (2017) in which his photographs and videos were accompanied by a score of field recordings and readings of incisive text. The artwork was presented at the BKLYN Studios at City Point.

  Social media
  Cole's innovative use of social media (particularly Twitter and Instagram) as a creative platform has been widely acknowledged.[35][36][37][38][39]

  Publications
  Cole, Teju (2007). Every Day Is for the Thief. Nigeria: Cassava Republic Press. ISBN 9789780805159. A novella.
  Cole, Teju (2014). Every Day Is for the Thief. New York: Random House. ISBN 9780812995787.
  Cole, Teju (2014). Every Day Is for the Thief. London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 9780571307920.
  —— (2011). Open City. New York: Random House. ISBN 9780812980097. A novel.
  —— (2016). Known and Strange Things. New York. ISBN 9780812989786. An essay collection.
  —— (2016). Punto d'ombra. Foreword by Siri Hustvedt; translated by Gioia Guerzoni. Italy: Contrasto. ISBN 9788869656538. A photobook.
  —— (2017). Blind Spot. Random House. ISBN 9780399591075. English-language edition.
  —— (2020). Fernweh. ISBN 978-1-912339-54-9. Photographs.[40]
  —— (2021). Golden Apple of the Sun. ISBN 978-1-913620-21-9. Photographs and text.[41]
  —— (2022). Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-64135-5. Text and illustrations.
  Tremor. Faber and Faber, 2023. ISBN 9780571283354. A novel.[42][43]
  Pharmakon. London: Mack, 2024. ISBN 978-1-915743-39-8. Photographs.
  Awards and honors
  2011 Time magazine's "Best Books of the Year" for Open City[22]
  2012 National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for Open City[44]
  2012 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award winner for Open City[45]
  2012 Ondaatje Prize shortlist for Open City[46]
  2012 The Morning News Tournament of Books finalist[47]
  2013 International Literature Award for the German-language translation by Christine Richter-Nilsson of Open City[48][49]
  2015 Windham–Campbell Literature Prize (Fiction) valued at $150,000[50]
  2018 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for Creative Arts[51]

By Teju Cole

Literary Fiction

Most people eventually think about permanence--how one could live on after inevitable death. Some are drawn to photography for what has been, until recently, incontrovertible proof of what once existed. But attempts to secure a permanent place in history are often complicated by changes in technology, the prejudices of others, or, in the case of art, the purloining of treasured works. Conflicts like these animate Teju Cole's dazzling novel of ideas Tremor (Random House, $28, 9780812997118), his first novel since 2011's Open City.

Fans of Cole's work know he is a photographer as well as a writer. His moving, introspective 2017 book of images, Blind Spot, features photos from his worldwide travels. Cole draws from those experiences in Tremor, in which Tunde, the protagonist who, like Cole, is a Harvard professor raised in Nigeria, perpetually examines the tensions of life as a Black man in a white-dominated country where he is never seen as belonging anywhere.

Tremor is split into eight exploratory chapters in which Cole addresses injustices both personal and global. During a talk Tunde gives at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, which forms the fifth chapter, he describes the circumstances under which many of their paintings and plaques came into their possession, from the Nazis' cultural genocide to Britain's 18-day massacre in Benin in 1897 that led to the expropriation of 4,000 artworks. He ends with "a plea to take restitution seriously, a plea to reimagine the future of the museum."

In a brilliant extended sequence in the sixth chapter, Cole includes the first-person perspectives of numerous people Tunde interviews during a trip to Nigeria to depict the complexities and struggles of life in that country. Other sections address colonialism and the reluctance of many in the United States to "change their essential faith in American superiority." Hanging over these discussions is the specter of impending death. A Harvard colleague is diagnosed with colon cancer, and Tunde fears, even in his 40s, signs of his own inevitable decline.

A lesser writer would have turned this into a depressing jeremiad, but Cole makes it a thrilling and important work. During Tunde's Nigeria visit, one interviewee says, "We have to know how to forget the past in order to make progress into the future." As Tunde does in his talk, Tremor issues a plea to reimagine the future for the betterment of humanity.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Magras, Michael. "Tremor." BookPage, Nov. 2023, p. 24. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A768657032/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=eccbb49c. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.

His new novel, ''Tremor,'' uses images and artifacts to look deeply into trauma, identity and consolation.

TREMOR, by Teju Cole

Novelist, essayist, critic, photographer, teacher -- most writers or artists are content with one or two of these titles, perhaps blurring the distinctions between main and side pursuits. In his new novel, ''Tremor,'' all of Teju Cole's capacities are present: the fiction writer of ''Every Day Is for the Thief'' (2007) and ''Open City'' (2011), the adventurous essayist of ''Known and Strange Things'' (2016), the Harvard professor, the devotee and practitioner of conceptually cool but classical photography.

''Tremor'' is the most sundry and vagrant of Cole's works to date, with abrupt changes in form, perspective and theme. At times it feels familiar, especially in the ease with which Cole moves from the tight focus of his lightly fictionalized protagonist to the wide-angle lens of historical events and forces.

This feature of his work is a lure, a formal and ethical trap for the reader who is at first seduced by Cole's mastery of anecdote before being immersed in rich, sometimes discomfiting ideas. He has written admiringly about, and frequently been compared to, the German writer W.G. Sebald; they share among other things a capacity to tunnel back from a single image or artifact to scenes of historical barbarism. (I almost wrote that Cole seems like a postcolonial version of Sebald -- but Sebald is already the postcolonial Sebald.)

''Tremor'' opens with the sort of wide-screen dissolve, gliding over centuries and continents, that one sees frequently in Sebald's 1995 novel ''The Rings of Saturn'' -- except here the starting milieu is academic-bourgeois New England. A Nigerian American photographer and professor named Tunde is antiquing in Maine with his Japanese wife, Sadako, when they find a West African antelope headdress, or ci wara. A cheap artifact without provenance, it nonetheless starts Tunde thinking about colonial violence on both sides of the Atlantic.

The trade in ''authentic'' African art, the modern museum as storehouse for imperial loot, narratives of Native American attack and kidnapping as precursors to the ''war on terror'': The novelist can invite readers to hold all of this history and more in mind, even (or especially) when it is relayed through a character as faintly outlined as Tunde.

I say relayed ''through'' and not ''by'' because Tunde is mostly a third-person figment. For sure, we know things about his life: that he spent his youth in Lagos, that he teaches art history, that at least one previous lover was a man. But as a voice, Tunde is fully present only in his reflections on images and on history. Nowhere is this more true than in a chapter-length lecture on J.M.W. Turner's 1840 painting ''Slave Ship'' and stolen artworks in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston -- a talk interrupted by a brief loss of sight in one of Tunde's eyes. (Cole has suffered the same intermittent condition.)

The lecture, like the novel that surrounds it, is haunted by two questions concerning the fate of faces and bodies seen in art and in other kinds of images, or read about in novels. First, ''every image of a human being proposes a question to the viewer: Why am I being shown this?'' That is, what interests are served?

Second, there is always the vexing enigma of those whose images or identities have been erased or only partly shown. In Turner's painting, and the real event of 1781 that inspired it, almost 150 enslaved people have been thrown into the Atlantic from the British ship Zong. Turner's original title was ''Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On'' -- a title Tunde prefers because ''there's no one whose essence or true description is 'slave.''' All that's visible of the victims are a few chained hands and feet, dwarfed by the raging waves.

What is obscured in Tunde's own meditations on art and politics, or elided in his recollections of life in Lagos, his travels in Europe and Africa? In one of the novel's most pointed episodes, Tunde remembers coming out of the Louvre and enraging, by taking his photograph, a Senegalese seller of Eiffel Tower trinkets. Tunde thought such Black traders were his ''brothers,'' but the man ''saw nothing but a class enemy.''

Here both character and novel reach the limits of essayistic self-scrutiny as ethical corrective to one's own power and privilege. Only invention -- of new voices, new forms -- will answer adequately. And so, after what had seemed, in Tunde's lecture, like the peak of autofictional solipsism, Cole presents 24 short monologues from diverse inhabitants of Lagos -- all unnamed but indelible. (The city is a character of sorts in ''Tremor,'' one of the ways Cole pays homage to another influence, Italo Calvino.)

There is the young man who says: ''Orgies happen at every level in Lagos. This is not about rich or middle-class people. I'm not rich.'' The woman who details an encounter with a man into BDSM: ''I guess my inner Yoruba woman came out. Don't slap me man!'' In many or most of these stories, other lives lie submerged or have been silenced in the telling: a mother raped decades ago during a home invasion, a domestic servant raped by her employer's driver.

The Lagos stories connect to a series of troubling images Tunde analyzes with his students at Harvard. At times, ''Tremor'' devolves into a near-theoretical disquisition on regarding the pain of others. Even (is ''even'' the right word?) the most exquisite or entrancing images are fraught with vicious associations, obscene elements just out of frame.

The stories of sexual assault go unexamined by Tunde, which is apt for a character who is troubled by the ethical quandaries of representing violence but who approaches them with a somewhat distancing, if cultured, eye. In ''Open City,'' Cole's aesthete narrator, Julius, appears to have blocked or forgotten the fact he raped a girl while in his early teens. The new novel, leaving Tunde to his bout of temporary blindness, again gives us more insight than its protagonist can: The testimony of the citizens of Lagos exists in a different fictional realm from Tunde's (unless these characters are passing through his mind).

Ambiguous about the possibility of fully relaying trauma or violence, ''Tremor'' is also a collection of consolations. Cole the photographer and Cole the essayist are ever-present, casting an eye on evanescent drawings a Lagos artist makes under a bridge, or trying to net in words the nighttime flights of jazz, flamenco and high life. Behind it all is a suspicion that writerly attention to such textures and transports is itself a form of partial sightlessness -- but it might also be the best preparation for facing down the worst the light reveals.

TREMOR | By Teju Cole | 239 pp. | Random House | $28

Brian Dillon is the author, most recently, of ''Affinities: On Art and Fascination'' (New York Review Books). He is working on ''Ambivalence,'' a book about education.

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Dillon, Brian. "Sight Lines." The New York Times Book Review, 29 Oct. 2023, p. 13. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A770647454/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d9a7260a. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.

TREMOR: A NOVEL BY TEJU COLE. RANDOM HOUSE.

OPEN CITY, Teju Cole's 2011 American debut novel, follows a half-Nigerian, half-German psychiatry student named Julius who takes long, lonely walks across Manhattan late at night. These peregrinations are as mental as they are physical: As one neighborhood dissolves into the next, his mind skips from classical music to Chaucer to the transatlantic slave trade to memories of his childhood in Lagos. Imagine a younger version of the wandering, ruminative narrator in the books of W. G. Sebald, except instead of the English countryside, Cole's protagonist traverses a city where the open wounds of 9/11 are still visible. And while Cole adopts Sebald's detached, melancholy affect, he presents Julius as edgier, livelier, more worldly. The narrators of Sebald's books never hanker for Goan fish curry.

This sort of plotless, discursive writing, in which a swirl of associations and memories and ideas are held together by the centripetal force of an impeccably educated flaneur, is exceedingly difficult to pull off without sounding like a colossal bore--and Cole did pull it off with great lyricism and sensitivity, his sentences strolling majestically through Julius's neighborhood in Morningside Heights.

Cole's long-awaited follow-up, Tremor, has a lot in common with its predecessor: its protagonist, Tunde, meditates on art and history and reminisces about his childhood in Lagos as he rambles across time and space. But this is a far weaker book, one that trades dark complexities of character for po-faced lectures and moral self-regard. The problem is not the craft, even if Tremor is not the flawless jewel that is Open City. It is, I think, a problem of politics. The central emotion of the earlier book is ambivalence. Julius is unsure whether he's Nigerian or German or even a New Yorker. He bristles at the presumption that he might have anything in common with his African "brothers," while expressing an uneasy solidarity with radical Arab students who hate the United States. He is the ultimate cosmopolitan, at home everywhere and nowhere--a fluid figure perfectly suited to deciphering a globalized world riven by dislocation, terror, and economic crisis.

Tunde is also a cosmopolitan. He lives in Cambridge, teaches photography at Harvard, travels the world. But Cole is no longer interested in ambivalence. Tremor is one of the most politically unobjectionable books I've ever read: It is hard to disagree with anything Tunde thinks and feels, making him a perfect representative of a different era, one in which the cosmopolitan ethos of haughty independence has come under suspicion and the claims of group identity have never been stronger. Whether such a figure makes for good reading is another matter.

Tremor begins on an ominous note: Tunde is taking photographs late at night in his neighborhood when a harsh voice calls out that he is on private property. Tunde, shaken by his neighbor's aggressiveness, packs up his camera and walks away, his art thwarted by this invisible menace. The scene is troubling not because we believe something awful might happen to Tunde but because it presents the book's themes--the peril of being a Black body in a white space, the inability to be oneself in a racist society--so overtly. From the opening sentences, we know exactly what sort of novel we're going to get.

Cole proceeds with great solemnity to fulfill those expectations. Tunde and his partner, Sadako, visit an antique shop in Maine where they come across a West African headdress known as a ci wara, which prompts Tunde to catalogue the ways in which the concept of authenticity has been corrupted by museums and art dealers in the West. Tunde sees a note documenting an Indian attack on a white homestead in the 18th century, which leads him to think about how Native Americans have been turned into villains in historical narratives of white victimhood. He goes to check out a book from the Kennedy School, where a librarian rushes up and asks if she can help him "in a tone he recognizes." White racism is the medium through which Tunde moves, as if it were a bad dream, the very air.

While I don't doubt the veracity of this depiction of contemporary Black life, it has specific consequences for the kind of plotless book Cole favors. All those freewheeling associations now circle the same drain to deadening effect. There is, too, an uncharacteristic obviousness to each discovery Tunde makes about "the obliterative arrogance of Western culture." The arcane forays of Open City came as revelation, opening the reader to both the wonder and the brutality of the world. Tremor feels closed off in comparison, laboring through a set course trod by so many fellow travelers.

For example, there is a scene in which Tunde delivers a sweeping lecture at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts on how western museums plundered colonies for their collections--a topic that would presumably be familiar to anyone who has read a newspaper recently. In many ways, this essayistic form is Cole at his best, weaving together a discussion of the paintings of J.M.W. Turner with riffs on avant-garde poetry to make the case that the museum is "a storehouse of other people's stolen worlds." Yet Cole presents this lecture, with its deftly delivered and wholly uncontroversial thesis, as one that would cause an educated, progressive audience discomfort and fear.

This passage inaugurates a series of pastiches, including first-person vignettes set in Lagos, that comprise the central portion of the book, and they are the most enjoyable sections in Tremor. The reader (and, apparently, the writer) is delighted to be released from Tunde's morose musings. We are treated to rare flashes of irreverent humor, such as when one Lagosian declares, "I mean there's something about Macbeth that always works well in an African context, all those witches, all that blood and struggle for power." Though these passages are told with skill and confidence, it's hard not to detect a larger crisis of confidence behind this postmodern mimicry, as if Cole knows he can't trust Tunde to carry the book on his own.

This might be because the central tension in Tunde's life is "his wish to be good." He is having problems with Sadako-- he is reticent, remote--but diligently works to solve them. He is a conscientious teacher, a loyal friend, an ally of the downtrodden and the oppressed. He is a kind of saint, which is not quite the same thing as a human being and the opposite of what Julius is: a monster. Toward the end of Open City (and here comes a significant spoiler), a woman accuses Julius of raping her when they were young--an incident that he has completely buried under his high-minded thoughts about Mahler and Barthes. The revelation comes as a genuine shock, completely altering all that has gone on before and raising the possibility that Julius thinks so much about art, history, and literature not to better engage with life but to escape it. It also has the effect of implicating the reader who has been in his thrall. Tunde, too, implicates the reader, though in ways that enlarge the gap between them.

Cole's evolution, if that's what it is, is understandable. Racism is not something you grow out of or transcend, and its effects can become more pernicious the longer you live in this country. Also, as a Black man, Cole might have grown wary of being used by white critics to reinforce the old white-dominated order. And with age comes the realization that you are not a self-created individual free of your parents, your race, your country--that the key to who you are may lie in the area of darkness that precedes your birth. But the appeal of cosmopolitanism lies in its assertion of some independence from race and other markers of identity, which, no matter how overbearing, can never wholly define you.

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Spaeth, Ryu. "The Reluctant Cosmopolitan: In his first novel in 12 years, Teju Cole is at odds with himself." New York Magazine, vol. 56, no. 21, 23 Oct. 2023, pp. 97+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A771382402/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f720b23a. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.

Tremor

by Teju Cole

Faber, [pounds sterling]18.99, pp. 256

The protagonist of Teju Cole's latest novel is a composite of his earlier creations, which in their turn are partial self-portraits. An artist roaming around with his camera, Tunde photographs hedges and trinkets, contemplates colour and listens to Malian music. Having left his native Nigeria three decades earlier, aged 17, by 2020 he is settled in New England. Meanwhile, Lagos has become 'a reality of his life so large and at the same time so intimate, so intense and so various', a feeling that increases whenever he returns to the city in person or in his imagination.

The narrative moves between the first and third person, now presenting Tunde's point of view, now sketching out a vignette. A much-missed friend is occasionally evoked: 'You'd been dead three years and he had never lost anyone that close to him before.' It takes Tunde several conversations with the man's son to remember what that friendship meant to him. While making or teaching art, Tunde thinks of the past and its atrocities. He looks back to the times when it went without saying that 'the Indians surely must be massacred'; he researches the 'witch hunts that convulsed the Salem colony in 1692 and which... had their beginnings in the false accusation made against Tituba, an enslaved woman'. Not all of these stories are widely known; each deserves a retelling.

A lecture on art, reproduced in the first person, continues the theme of slavery and colonial aggression. Halfway through it, Tunde momentarily goes blind in one eye. Then he recounts the sacking of Benin by British troops in 1897, when thousands of art objects were 'expropriated... and scattered across the world, ostensibly to pay for the cost of the invasion', and then 'violently decontextualised'. 'Any ethics that persistently considered works of art more valuable than human life is no ethics at all,' he believes. Tunde's thoughts on historical wrongs and authenticity in art are sometimes interrupted by the kind of everyday racism that will be familiar to readers of Open City, Cole's 2011 debut novel, as will be the fact that 'walking at night is a consolation'.

In Tunde's classes, the only banned subject is Brexit, since 'an anticolonial side of him resents having to hear about British politics'. Instead, he and his students discuss Samuel Little, an American serial killer, a black man who 'understood racism and misogyny and used that understanding as a cloak' as he raped and murdered dozens of women, mostly black and vulnerable. A video of Little talking about his victims reduces Tunde to tears for reasons that are never clearly articulated; nor can he explain why he grows addicted to this and other screen depictions of 'inexhaustible brutality'.

There is more realism than plot to this multi-threaded novel. As Cole's fans would expect, Sebaldian reflections abound. 'The observer thinks and is meant to think: why?'concludes one passage on the meaning of art. The same could be asked about this book. Questions addressed here are important, and there will always be reasons to write about them, either in a variety of ways or going for one tried and tested technique. Cole has been favouring the latter approach. Let's hope it's not his final choice.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
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Aslanyan, Anna. "One outrage after another." Spectator, vol. 353, no. 10182, 21 Oct. 2023, p. 35. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A771602638/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c520abd1. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.

JULIAN LUCAS

In “Tremors,” Cole aims to capture the world without recourse to portraiture. (PHOTOGRAPH BY DONAVON SMALLWOOD)

In the autumn of 2020, while stargazing on his balcony in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Teju Cole was inspired to start taking photos of his kitchen counter. He decided that the daily migrations of his pots, pans, spoons, and graters paralleled the revolutions of celestial bodies, and began to track them in a “counter history.” A year later, he published the results as “Golden Apple of the Sun” (2021), a book-length photo essay that magnifies his solitary domestic experiment until it seems to encompass the world. Cole writes about the hunger he suffered as a boarding-school student in Nigeria, Dutch Golden Age still-lifes, slavery and the sugary recipes in an eighteenth-century cookbook, and why “the later a photograph is in a given sequence, the heavier it is.” Somehow, from this kitchen sink of memoir, art history, and observant boredom emerges a spectral portrait of the pandemic’s collective solitude, “this year of feeling buried in the dark earth like bulbs.”

Cole’s work makes an art—and a necessary virtue—of close looking. Across his fiction, photography, and criticism, he combines forensic rigor with a flâneur’s faith in style and sensibility, aligning aestheticism and ethical vigilance. “Open City” (2011), his début novel, won acclaim for its portrayal of post-9/11 New York, whose buried histories of violence and displacement resurface in the course of a medical student’s wanderings. In Cole’s essays, tranquil Vermeers reveal traces of empire—silver from the hellish mines of Bolivia, pearls from Dutch-ruled Ceylon—and stormy Caravaggios prefigure the precarious journeys of twenty-first-century migrants. “Looking at paintings this way doesn’t spoil them,” Cole insists. “On the contrary, it opens them up, and what used to be mere surface becomes a portal.”

His great theme is the limits of vision, and the way that these limits, when imaginatively confronted, can serve as the basis for a kind of second sight. “Among the human rights is the right to remain obscure, unseen, and dark,” he writes in “Black Paper” (2021), a recent essay collection, which investigates subjects such as colonialism’s weaponization of the camera and the depiction of nuclear disaster. In his own pictures, people seldom appear directly, but their presence is everywhere implied. “Blind Spot” (2017), an experimental photo book chronicling his travels, gathers images of hotel rooms, border fences, ships, and cemeteries into an ethereal atlas. Cole shuttles between sinister systems—forced migration, the arms trade—and chance moments when beauty, briefly, slips from the shadows. “Darkness is not empty,” he writes. “It is information at rest.”

“Tremor” (Random House), Cole’s first novel in twelve years, also wrestles with what falls beyond the frame—and it begins, aptly enough, with a photograph deferred. Tunde, a Nigerian artist who teaches at Harvard, is out walking in Cambridge when he decides to set up his tripod in front of a blossoming honeysuckle hedge. The first sentence finds him in mid-rapture: “The leaves are glossy and dark and from the dying blooms rises a fragrance that might be jasmine.” But the spell is broken by an aggressive voice warning him away from the property. It could be racism, or at least the fortress mentality of American homeowners. Whatever the reason, Tunde packs up his tripod, and, with it, any expectation of innocent reverie. What follows, instead, is an elegant and unsettling prose still-life, which reflects on art’s relationship to theft and violence, to privacy and togetherness, and to the way we mark time.

The novel spans the autumn just before the pandemic. Tunde, internationally recognized for his “portraits of unpeopled scenarios”—which, like Cole’s, are “suggestive of human presence, charged with human absence”—is selecting photographs for a new exhibition. We follow him to Bamako, for the photography biennial, and to Lagos, his home town, but mostly remain in Cambridge, where he teaches a weekly seminar and enjoys a cozy domestic life. Tunde is married to a woman named Sadako, a Massachusetts native who works in pharmaceuticals. Childless, they spend their free time buying antiques and cooking for their circle of noteworthy friends, which includes an astronomer, a scholar working to revive spoken Wampanoag, and a Pulitzer finalist. Even their toiletries are pedigreed: Tunde bathes with natural black soap made by an artist for Documenta 14, and its swirling suds elicit visions of nebulae, along with the “paradoxical thought of a blackness that wicks filth away.”

Amid this tranquillity, inner troubles reverberate. Sadako abruptly leaves home to stay with her sister. Tunde grieves a dead confidant, who is hauntingly addressed as “you.” Older agitations loom at a distance: the dissolution of a gay relationship in Tunde’s twenties, his precipitous departure from Lagos at seventeen. Cole, who grew up there, left at the same age; he also lends Tunde his celebrity, his intellectual interests, his ophthalmological problems—papillophlebitis, which causes temporary episodes of blindness—and his university post. (Cole teaches creative writing at Harvard.) If “Open City” was a bellwether of the last decade’s autofictional turn, “Tremor” occasionally sounds like a defense of the now-beleaguered genre. “Firsthand experience is what matters,” Cole writes. “It is by being grounded in what we know and what we have experienced that we can move out into greater complexities.”

At least half of the novel, which hews rather closely to its protagonist’s consciousness, consists of ideas about how to live, listen, think, and see well. Tunde never crosses Harvard Yard without remembering those enslaved by the university. His marital problems—“complacency,” “fear of abandonment”—are unpacked in cruelty-free sessions of couples counselling. So keen is his conscience that even the sight of preschoolers led via a walking rope reminds him of “prisoners being transferred … a forced march to the unending tune of ‘The Wheels on the Bus.’” It’s tempting to characterize the novel as what the critic Becca Rothfeld calls “sanctimony literature,” a mode of fiction designed to showcase the author’s ethical awareness. But there’s more going on than virtue signalling. Tunde’s worries over various moral problems—art restitution, the portrayal of the dead, artificial intelligence—converge on a dilemma that bedevils both him and his creator: Is there a way to represent the world and not “cannibalize the lives of others”?

“Tremor” begins to read like a renunciation of the soul-stealing that’s latent in fiction and photography. “I fear the demands that portraits of people make,” Tunde confesses. “For portraiture not to be a theft I would have to be even more patient and intent than I am now.” Yet the novel’s subtle shifts in perspective—including a section that leaves Tunde behind for the streets of Lagos—also strive to reconcile this humility with the world beyond the “I.” Cole hints at his ambition through his protagonist’s reverence for the Micronesian navigator Pius Mau Piailug, who crossed from Hawaii to Tahiti without maps or instruments, in 1976:

He sailed alone … guided only by the knowledge he carried in his head and by what nature presented of itself to him: the movements of the stars by night, the position of the sun by day, the behavior of oceangoing birds, the color of the water and of the undersides of clouds, the taste of fish, the swelling of the waves. Who is to say the universe is hostile? All this information gathered up by the alert navigator and subtly interpreted made the ocean a friendly and readable book.

Cole moved into fiction “sideways” from art history. He was studying early Netherlandish painting in a doctoral program at Columbia when he began his first book—almost by accident, during a trip to Lagos in 2005. Cole hadn’t been in the Nigerian metropolis since he left to study in the United States, in 1992. He was so struck by the city’s deeply familiar but swiftly changing face that he wrote daily vignettes about it for the next month, adopting the persona of a young man who, like him, had returned to Nigeria after years in America. Cole paired each installment with aphotograph online, where the series attracted enough interest that a newly founded Nigerian publisher, Cassava Republic, persuaded him to publish it as a novella, “Every Day Is for the Thief.” Cole’s narrator wanders through the streets of a city as varied and surprising as a Bruegel tableau. Corruption is everywhere, from the national museum, where derelict exhibits airbrush the legacies of dictators, to lawless markets where crowds film the lynching of suspected thieves. (Cole has described the novella as “a guidebook in the negative.”) But it isn’t crime that draws the young man’s attention. He seeks out the city’s deeper rhythms on side streets and in the faces of strangers, caught between the aspiration to exploit its “wealth of stories” in writing and a discretion that restrains him. “I want to take the little camera out of my pocket and capture the scene,” he muses while watching coffin-makers at work on a quiet lane. “But I am afraid. Afraid that the carpenters, rapt in their meditative task, will look up at me; afraid that I will bind to film what is intended only for the memory.”

Most readers came to know Cole from “Open City” (2011), which turned his talent for psychoanalyzing cities on a wounded Manhattan. Julius, its cultured and evasive Nigerian narrator, takes refuge from stressful shifts as a fellow in psychiatry at New York-Presbyterian Hospital by wandering the streets. His mind is as restlessly crowded as his personal life is desolate; estranged from his mother, and recently separated from a girlfriend, he fills his free time with books, classical music, and people-watching. The city that emerges from his perambulations is haunted by its previous incarnations: a Levantine neighborhood bulldozed to make way for the World Trade Center, a Haitian shoeshine man who speaks like a refugee from nineteenth-century wars. “What Lenape paths lay buried beneath the rubble?” Julius wonders. “The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten.… Generations rushed through the eye of the needle, and I, one of the still legible crowd, entered the subway.”

With its cool voice, slashing erudition, and existentially vexed outlook, “Open City” quickly entered the contemporary canon of New York novels. Critics favorably compared Julius, Cole’s Afropolitan Gen X Hamlet, to the narrators of W. G. Sebald, and identified his opacity as a rejection of the self-revelation expected from immigrant narratives. More controversial was the novel’s twist ending, which dramatically undermined the idea that imaginative sympathy is any proof of integrity. Julius is revealed to have likely raped a girl in his youth; his lingering over violent neighborhood histories and Mahler’s late style is suddenly recast as an evasion of his submerged conscience. The novel’s title, too, has a shadow side, alluding to the wartime strategy of giving enemy troops free access to a city in exchange for a promise to leave it intact. The flâneur, coolly assessing a world that doesn’t look back, might be the occupier’s twin.

“Tremor” is even more haunted by the idea that the artist’s work is a kind of trespass. Tunde recalls the fury of a vender in Paris whose merchandise he photographed without offering compensation. A Maine shopkeeper sells him a possibly “authentic” Malian ci wara figure—not made for the tourist trade, in other words—and he wonders why Western collectors of African art prefer “alienated” works, “so that only what has been extracted from its context becomes real.” Later, at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, he delivers a stirring chapter-length lecture on plundered art—an homage to J. M. Coetzee’s “Elizabeth Costello”—which decries the hypocrisy of institutions that for too long have “loved other people’s objects with a death grip.” At home, he watches interviews with Samuel Little, a prolific strangler who sketched his victims “with an unnerving softness.” Those drawings become the first item in a triptych about the perversions of portraiture, joined by forensic photos of unidentified corpses and A.I.-generated images of unreal individuals: “the remembered dead, the remembered undead, the imaginary never-liveds.”

We begin to understand why there aren’t people in Tunde’s pictures, or fully realized characters in “Tremor” besides him. Yet his wariness about representation is countered by an equally strong desire for connection—a yearning, in his words, “to be integral and to be peopled in balance.” Tunde broods over his distance from Sadako, the inexorably fading memory of his late friend, and the “paradoxical” emptiness of his forthcoming exhibition on urban life. Are there only two paths for photography—vampirism and solipsism? Or can Tunde find a way to make the lives of others manifest in his portraits of “planks, tires, culverts, basins, stones, ships, plants”? In the studio, he struggles to create a sequence of images greater than the sum of its parts. “The slowness of the accretion it-self guarantees nothing,” he ref lects. “Most of these photographs will fail.”

His gambit is also Cole’s. “Tremor” is a work of autofiction with the ambition of a systems novel, aspiring to illustrate the world’s interconnectedness without recourse to the fictional conventions of plot and psychological portraiture. Instead, it moves like an essay, interweaving slices of life with musings on Malian guitar virtuosos, astronomical phenomena, films by Ingmar Bergman and Abbas Kiarostami. Cole’s mind is so agile that it’s easy to follow him anywhere. But—as with Olga Tokarczuk’s “Flights” or László Kraznahorkai’s “Seiobo There Below”—there is a method to the meandering. Cole uses the resonance between fragments to imply a dimly apprehended totality, like a seismologist integrating measurements from different sites to map an earthquake.

“Tremor” returns again and again to motifs of doubling and coincidence—duets, twins, binary stars. A flute-playing soldier from a Bruegel painting reappears in a contemporaneous Benin plaque: “In such mysterious ways do synchronicities occur across vast distances,” Tunde observes, “as though one person’s two hands were simultaneously drawing two images from a single model.” Cole suggests that being sensitive to such invisible intimacies is a form of solidarity that doesn’t require interpersonal connection. In “Golden Apple of the Sun,” he quotes the poet and cultural theorist Édouard Glissant, who believed that respect for opacity was the foundation of ethics: “Although you are alone in this suffering you share in the unknown with those you have yet to know.”

The climax of “Tremor” arrives following a moment when Tunde briefly loses sight in one eye during his museum lecture. Soon after, in lieu of an account of his trip to Lagos, Cole presents twenty-four vignettes of life in the city, one for each hour in the day. The ex-principal of a private school recounts outwitting a troublesome parent—her state’s martinet governor, Brigadier (Hitler) Okon. A wealthy man lies in a casket during an annual party to rehearse his own funeral; someone else tells of the exhumation of a long-dead relative for the construction of a new road. “I’m not a doctor or therapist or priest, but I think people are consoled by the mere fact of being able to call a stranger in the night,” a radio host who lets listeners vent on the air reflects. “My show is a space for softness in a city that doesn’t have too much of it.”

Here are the missing crowds of Tunde’s “depopulated” photographs; a book about one solitude opens to encompass many. In a parallel section, which pays homage to the allegorical style of Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities,” Cole describes “a city of doubles, a pluripotential city of echoing selves and settings,” whose choreography “would be amazing could it be seen in a single encompassing moment.” His evocation of Lagos is all the more powerful for arriving as an interruption of Tunde’s narrative—which resumes in the first person, as if the cascade of anonymous voices had restored his own. “Epiphany,” Cole said in a lecture on the dense city writing of Joyce, Woolf, Pamuk, and others, is “not only revelation or insight, it is also the reassembly of the self through the senses.”

Fiction takes the transparency of other minds so much for granted that it can obscure the rarity of true communion—which doesn’t always require explanation, or even the exchange of words. “Tremor,” with its vision of separateness and synchronicity, is obliquely about the pandemic, much in the way that “Open City” revolved around 9/11. In January, 2020, Tunde and Sadako throw a dinner party that reads like a still-life—a tableau of abundance shadowed by the losses to come. “The pleasure of having the house full of people is exceeded perhaps only by the pleasure of seeing the last few leave,” Tunde muses. It’s once they’re gone that he remembers to return to the hedge, where—in the frost and the silence, no blossoms to be seen—he takes a photograph that is now much heavier than the one we imagined before. ■

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"LONG EXPOSURE." The New Yorker, 16 Oct. 2023, p. 66. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A775610354/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=11637703. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.

A young Gambian man, let's call him D, waits in Syracuse. He arrived in Italy eight months previously, having been smuggled into the country by boat from Libya. D has an easy-going, intelligent manner -- an unexpected grace given what he has endured. At a rendezvous with his companion for the afternoon, Teju Cole, D confesses that he has never set foot in a church: he was raised Muslim. As the two of them enter Santa Lucia alla Badia together, he is amazed that no one questions his presence. What a rare taste of unencumbered movement. The pair gaze in awe at Caravaggio's early 17th-century painting Burial of Saint Lucy. It is enormous: 10ft across, more than 13ft tall. Centuries have passed and the effects of time show in the damage to large areas of paint, but the work is no less magnificent for it.

This vignette takes place in the first essay of Cole's astonishing new collection. Cole is celebrated for his novels, Open City and Every Day Is for the Thief. But his curriculum vitae contains a great deal more: a PhD in art history from Columbia, opinion pieces on culture and politics in the New York Times, exhibitions of photography and, most recently, the Gore Vidal professorship of the practice of creative writing at Harvard. These jewel-like essays, developed from a series of lectures that Cole delivered at the University of Chicago in 2019, are testament both to his many talents and to the uncanny acuity with which he observes the world. His writing weaves together travelogue, art criticism and meditations on the cruelty of 21st-century politics. But it is perhaps ultimately about humanity's grappling for meaning and belonging.

For all the righteous rage in these pages, Cole acknowledges the limits of literature to change the political world

Raised by Nigerian parents between Lagos and Kalamazoo, Michigan, Cole moves comfortably between places, peoples and cultures. At one point, he spots Edward Said on 116th Street in New York. This must be in the early 2000s, since Said is still with us, though in the twilight of his career as an intellectual, activist, orchestra impresario, negotiator for Palestinian rights, and one of the most transformative thinkers of the last half-century. Cole, by contrast, is a shabby graduate student. It is easy to see why he's enamoured of the humanist icon who stands before him. Said is, as Cole puts it, "the word made flesh, the books in human form". In the same essay, Cole takes us from New York to Ramallah where he confronts the "insult to human dignity that is military occupation". His outrage consumes the page. He insists, rightly, that we must repudiate antisemitism and end the suffering of the Palestinian people. Anything less is unconscionable. We move to Beirut then Berlin in just a few passages. Cole renders these cityscapes as vivid fragments, the urban quartet bringing together the places that marked Said's life. The result is really an elegy for Said; it is touching when Cole describes the late scholar as a "navigational help" who guided him toward his own style as a writer and thinker.

Said's influence crops up again when Cole addresses the power of imagination to organise beliefs about Africa. "Have you ever heard anything so absurd?" he asks, "Africa, sun-stunned and light-inundated Africa, described as the 'Dark Continent'?" The poverty and prejudice of the colonial imagination has a long, dishonourable history. Where might we find new vistas of appreciation for Africa in all its complexity? This question motivates an essay about the blockbuster film Black Panther. For all it did to establish a new mythology around African superheroes, Cole remains uncomfortable with how it cloaks the African experience in a simplistic grandeur aimed at delighting American eyes. As with everything Cole writes, though, there is more to his critique. Rather than being about a film, this essay is an interrogation of what it means to be African and Black in different settings. Cole teases out the diversity of Blackness; its ever-shifting and contingent and cultural meaning; its capacious and dissenting potential.

Cole's attention to the texture of things makes for extraordinarily vivid writing. He evokes doom in the paintings of Caravaggio and imaginative abundance in the photography of Marie Cosindas and Lorna Simpson. He conjures the sensory pleasure of having a human body when he writes about nature, nowhere more luxuriantly than in his essay Experience: "With my eyes I see the bright light on the water, with my ears hear the thrum and splash of the water, with my nose smell the grass and alpine flowers. I bring water to my mouth and I can taste its mineral intensity ... My fingers touch the stones rough and smooth, the bedlike grass, the marblelike pebbles, the fugitive water." For Cole, such moments in art and literature and nature are, in the words of Seamus Heaney, like a "hurry through which known and strange things pass".

Elsewhere, talk of water has a different significance. A recurring motif in this work is migration. In several essays, Cole reflects on the US-Mexican border. It bothers him like an inflamed wound that won't -- can't -- heal. The violence meted out to desperate travellers is heavy and atrocious. Those fleeing conflict, drowning in the Mediterranean or being sold into modern slavery face similar treatment. He rejects our use of "watery language" (a "flow", "wave", "flood") when speaking of refugees. These are people, not inanimate objects whose movement is an aberration. I am reminded of Liisa Malkki's analogous critique of botanical metaphors -- soil for nation, uprootedness for displacement -- that conceive of the natural/national order of things as sedentary. Of course it is only certain (usually dark) bodies whose movement tends to be punished and policed.

For all the righteous rage in these pages, Cole acknowledges the limits of literature to change the political world. Even so, I see it as fitting that he uses lyric essays to write about dark times. For me, that form's beauty, its hope and its power lie in its lack of rigidity, its defiance of preconceived notions. What we see is an individual taking stock of their surroundings, a mode that Cole has mastered. To read this book is to enjoy the generosity of his thought, to be invited into a contemplation of your inner life, to embrace the complexity of others, and to see in the darkness not only despair but also understanding and even refuge.

* Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time by Teju Cole is published by the University of Chicago (£18). To support the Guardian and Observer, order a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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Credit: Photograph: Christopher Lane/The Observer

Teju Cole moves comfortably between places, peoples and cultures.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 Guardian Newspapers Limited
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"Black Paper by Teju Cole review -- a spark of hope in dark times; From Caravaggio to Edward Said and Black Panther, this astonishing collection of essays explores art, politics and belonging." Guardian [London, England], 27 Oct. 2021, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A680413693/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4498fd98. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.

"I never stay long in one place," writes Teju Cole in Black Paper. "I have known half a dozen cities as home." Cole's writing, too, often deals with ideas of transience, restlessness and not belonging. Open City, his debut novel from 2011, tracks the meandering thoughts of a young Nigerian immigrant, Julius, who walks the streets of Manhattan as if in a waking dream. It was followed by Every Day Is for the Thief, in which a young man returns to his native Nigeria and finds himself adrift in a country that is all too familiar, but whose shortcomings have been amplified by his absence. In each story, constant movement, whether aimless or purposeful, generates a spiral of associative thoughts that evoke the restlessness and the constant self-reflection synonymous with exile.Black Paper, Cole's second book of essays, finds him travelling freely across a range of locations, subjects and styles -- art criticism, aphorisms, homage and reportage -- all of which, to different degrees, carry a political undertow in keeping with the book's subtitle: Writing in a Dark Time. It opens deceptively with Cole following the footsteps of Caravaggio across Italy and on to the island of Sicily. What appears to focus on "the quintessential uncontrollable artist" soon becomes something else entirely: a series of fleeting personal encounters that evoke the fugitive lives of the migrants who have survived the perilous journey by boat from Africa and beyond. "The places of Caravaggio's exile had all become significant flashpoints in the immigration crisis," elaborates Cole, before visiting the port cities in which the artist sought refuge but also found a kind of safety among the transient and the exiled.

The essay interweaves Cole's often vivid descriptions of Caravaggio's great biblical paintings with telling vignettes from his encounters with contemporary migrants who have survived the hazardous passage from north Africa to Europe.

In the port of Augusta in Sicily, it is not the migrants themselves, but the vessels that carried them that bring home to him the horror of their experience. While wandering alone, he comes across eight boats recently dragged from the sea, all of them "festooned with huge quantities of dirty life jackets, but also with plastic water bottles, shoes, shirts and all the filth of many days of human habitation at close quarters". As he moves among them, he is momentarily overwhelmed by the lingering smell of their human cargo. "I buried my head in my hands, ambushed and astonished by grief."

While there is nothing else here that quite matches the stylistic brilliance and visceral thrust of that opening essay, Cole's writing throughout hums with a quiet intensity and sometimes a palpable anger at the inhumanity he witnesses on his travels. A wonderful poetic elegy for the late academic, activist and literary critic Edward Said shifts locations from New York to Ramallah and on to Beirut and Berlin. In the process, it evokes the mystical depth of a Beethoven string quartet and decries "the regime of permits and walls and checkpoints and prisons" that control the lives of ordinary Palestinians, for whom Said was the most prominent advocate.

Elsewhere, though, Cole seems less sure-footed. Said, alongside John Berger, who is also movingly remembered here, is one of his literary touchstones. In a chapter that explores the nature of the Joycean epiphany, he mentions several others, including Joyce, Virginia Woolf, James Salter and, inevitably, WG Sebald. The essay ends, by way of acknowledging Cole's primary influences, with a long passage from his own novel, Open City. Even in the context of a piece that addresses ideas of influence and creative appropriation, this does seem slightly self-referential.

I was also unsure about the inclusion of a selection of Cole's critical writings on photography which, while trenchant, have a markedly different register to the more personal, and politically engaged, writing. Another brilliant example of the latter is an essay entitled Ethics, which begins by interrogating the loaded language of migration: "flow", "influx", "wave", "flood", which makes "our fellow human beings a cause for alarm, not on their behalf, but on ours". How we think of migrants, Cole reminds us, is shaped, above all, by the often dehumanising language that is used to describe them by politicians and journalists.

The distance between how they are portrayed and what they experience is brought into sharp focus by his account of a visit to the US-Mexico border, where, in a morgue in Tucson, he is shown the unclaimed, often disfigured bodies of those who have died in their attempt to cross it. "I saw many things that altered my sense of belonging in the United States," he writes. "Not only my sense of belonging, but also my sense of responsibility."

The most powerful essays in this book are born out of dissonantly transformative moments like this one. In articulating them, Cole asks hard questions of himself and of everyone who reads his work: questions about the nature of our shared sense of responsibility, and about how we live in defiance of this ever darkening time. How, to paraphrase one of his essay titles, we resist and refuse.

* Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time by Teju Cole is published by University of Chicago Press (£18). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

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Credit: Photograph: Maggie Janik

Teju Cole: 'his writing throughout hums with a quiet intensity'.

Credit: Photograph: Juan Manuel Blanco/EPA

Migrants on their way to Mexico City, November 2021.

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"Black Paper by Teju Cole review -- how do we defy these dark times? The novelist and critic travels through genres and across the globe in these thoughtful, powerful essays about the lives of migrants and man's inhumanity; The novelist and critic travels through genres and across the globe in these thoughtful, powerful essays about the lives of migrants and man's inhumanity." Observer [London, England], 21 Nov. 2021, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A683396397/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1f59c2d1. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.

BLACK PAPER

Writing in a Dark Time

Teju Cole, The University of Chicago Press (OCT 22)

Hardcover $25 (228pp), 978-0-226-64135-5, ESSAYS

Art is the lens through which Teju Cole examines and makes sense of our shared humanity in the essay collection Black Paper.

Across six sections, Cole uses different art forms, including painting, photography, and literature, to wrestle with what it means to be human during dark moments in personal or collective history. In "After Caravaggio," Cole goes on a pilgrimage to Italy. Following the path of the painter Caravaggio as he fled criminal investigation, Cole stops where Caravaggio did and gazes upon the artist's larger-than-life works. The need to connect with the artist opens Cole to connecting with others fleeing violence and economic inequity, refugees making the treacherous crossing from Africa to Europe. By turns personal and academic, this essay sets the tone for those to come, blending together masterpieces with the context of their creation and the experience of them in the current moment.

Meditative and complex, the collection also plays with the essay form. There are works within works, as with "Four Elegies" and "A Quartet for Edward Said." Each is separated into four distinct sections, with the former shifting focus across four artists and the latter maintaining focus on one individual. There are essays in pieces, too, broken into sections varying in length from a single sentence to no more than a few paragraphs, as in "Passages North" and "Room 406." But it is the title essay, "Black Paper," that illuminates the collection's themes of creation during adversity and of using art to process emotion. Using the simple method of a carbon paper to make a copy, Cole encapsulates his collection in a sentence: "Black transported the meaning."

Dense and provocative, the essays in Black Paper are a reminder that darkness cannot last forever, and even within it, there is meaning and hope.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 Foreword Magazine, Inc.
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McPherson-Joseph, Dontana. "BLACK PAPER." Foreword Interviews, vol. 24, no. 5, Sept.-Oct. 2021, p. 41. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A747715589/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3b4afc77. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.

Cole, Teju. Black paper: writing in a dark time. Chicago, 2021. 288p index ISBN 9780226641355 cloth, $22.50; ISBN 9780226641492 ebook, $21.99

Art historians and visual studies scholars are trained to frame, even cloak, the initial attraction and desire that drew them to a work in terms of "crises"--around the conditions political, religious, and/or social that gave rise to the work. In so doing, scholars unintentionally normalize "instinct" for what makes the work of interest to the cultural context that made it possible. In Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time, Cole (creative writing, Harvard) rejects this process. Instead, he offers a series of layered intentional engagements, "an emotional archaeology" (p. 63) that connects the compilation's essays, elegies, and reflections. Cole deftly warps and wefts his engagements with 17th-century painter Caravaggio, starting in the 1970s--80s as a boy in Lagos, Nigeria and later as a journalist traveling to view as many of the artist's works as possible during the immigration crisis in Italy that has swept up so many asylum seekers from Africa. Elegantly and urgently, Cole brings readers full circle. What links the essays in the book is Cole's understanding that people "make images in response to disaster. Seeing is part of ... coming to terms" (pp. 92-3). He importunes readers to reach beyond tragedy and discover a new language. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. All readers.--K. P. Buick, University of New Mexico

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 American Library Association CHOICE
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Buick, K.P. "Cole, Teju. Black paper: writing in a dark time." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, vol. 60, no. 2, Oct. 2022, p. 151. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A721467416/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a6dfc19b. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.

Magras, Michael. "Tremor." BookPage, Nov. 2023, p. 24. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A768657032/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=eccbb49c. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024. Dillon, Brian. "Sight Lines." The New York Times Book Review, 29 Oct. 2023, p. 13. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A770647454/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d9a7260a. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024. Spaeth, Ryu. "The Reluctant Cosmopolitan: In his first novel in 12 years, Teju Cole is at odds with himself." New York Magazine, vol. 56, no. 21, 23 Oct. 2023, pp. 97+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A771382402/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f720b23a. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024. Aslanyan, Anna. "One outrage after another." Spectator, vol. 353, no. 10182, 21 Oct. 2023, p. 35. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A771602638/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c520abd1. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024. "LONG EXPOSURE." The New Yorker, 16 Oct. 2023, p. 66. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A775610354/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=11637703. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024. "Black Paper by Teju Cole review -- a spark of hope in dark times; From Caravaggio to Edward Said and Black Panther, this astonishing collection of essays explores art, politics and belonging." Guardian [London, England], 27 Oct. 2021, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A680413693/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4498fd98. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024. "Black Paper by Teju Cole review -- how do we defy these dark times? The novelist and critic travels through genres and across the globe in these thoughtful, powerful essays about the lives of migrants and man's inhumanity; The novelist and critic travels through genres and across the globe in these thoughtful, powerful essays about the lives of migrants and man's inhumanity." Observer [London, England], 21 Nov. 2021, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A683396397/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1f59c2d1. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024. McPherson-Joseph, Dontana. "BLACK PAPER." Foreword Interviews, vol. 24, no. 5, Sept.-Oct. 2021, p. 41. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A747715589/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3b4afc77. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024. Buick, K.P. "Cole, Teju. Black paper: writing in a dark time." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, vol. 60, no. 2, Oct. 2022, p. 151. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A721467416/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a6dfc19b. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.

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