Teju Cole: Seen and unseen.
I recently listened to a video in which American singer-songwriter Richie Havens recalls the aftermath of the inauguration of Barack Obama as president of the United States. Havens, a veteran of the momentous 1969 Woodstock concert, says the day after the election results were announced in 2008, not a single bird sang in his street. “I am still trying to figure out what that means,” he said.
This interview came to me while I was reading Teju Cole’s Known and Strange Things, a collection of essays that draws on his wide-ranging interests, principally photography. I mention Havens’ comment only to point out Cole’s predilection and preoccupation with coincidence. In a way coincidence events are Known and Strange Things’ leitmotif, alluding to the title and pointing to the very nature of image-making: a combination of the known and unknown, the seen and unseen.
But just as Cole cares about images, he also cares about the relationship between fiction and nonfiction. He views these distinctions as nonsensical, which is why his essays are a compendium of styles rather than a tedious exploration of format.
Known and Strange Things takes the form of four chapters, which tackle the author’s love of literature, visual art and travelling. The ghost of James Baldwin appears early in the book (in the opening essay Black Body), as Cole travels to the Swiss village of Leukerbab, where Baldwin made some major breakthroughs with his first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain.
More significantly for Cole, it is also the place where Baldwin wrote Stranger in the Village, which is about Leukerbab. The essay finds Baldwin musing, with the privilege of distance, about the institutional racism he encounters at home and the novel form of racism bequeathed on him in the village: “The children shout Neger! Neger! as I walk the along the streets.”
Cole attempts the complicated manoeuvre of embodying Baldwin as he “escapes the contemporary and slips into the historical”. Cole is retracing Baldwin’s steps some 60 years later. Some things have changed and others not. Black people are no longer novel in Leukerbab and they inhabit the collective psyche in subconscious ways, as their art pulses out of Swiss clubs.
But the point Cole is making is that illiterate villagers mocked Baldwin, and Baldwin felt they had a more legitimate claim to Shakespeare, Bach and Rembrandt than he could ever have. Cole, on the other hand, is laying claim to his right to being a cultural interloper in a world that co-opts “everything but the burden” from black culture.
So what follows in the book — Cole’s easy, studious riffing on Thomas Tranströmer one minute, Derek Walcott the next and John Berger in another — is a black writer asserting his right to turn his gaze on whatever subject he encounters. It is a rounded, nonessentialised take on the idea of blackness that allows Cole to infuse it with new ideas when he returns squarely to it.
Take, for instance, the essay A True Picture of Black Skin, in which Cole looks at the process of 20th-century photographer Roy DeCarava. Cole calls DeCarava’s penchant for under lighting an exploration of “just how much could be seen in the shadowed parts of a photograph”, an expression of human dignity through the use of light.
Cole then segues to Èdouard Glissant’s exploration of opacity as “a right to be misunderstood, if need be”, before making another leap, this time into the marvellous cinematography of Bradford Young, who transposes of DeCavara’s philosophies into the filmic realm.
Although Cole aims for a fuller grasp of his subject in Black Skin, in others, he seems to be skirting the surface, not in the sense of incompetence, but in exploring the ways in which patchy information may be more truthful than objective study.
This works to great effect in the essay on Wangechi Mutu, in which the author enters the artist’s wide oeuvre through a narrow sliver of light. There are parts when Cole is flippant, too, or at least creating the impression that he is.
In an essay on Robben Island, (which includes the occasion the photograph A Prisoner Working in the Garden was shot), he writes of Nelson Mandela’s death: “Many years later the prisoner finally dies. The torturers take a moment to praise him (to praise themselves). Then they return to work.” Here the essay is creative nonfiction, a memory mind map that is far more persuasive and engaging than the dialectical approach.
At this point, the reader will have caught on that, perhaps more than regaling us with stories of his favourite books and cities, Known and Strange Things aims to go where his previous novels hinted at.
Beyond sounding clever, Cole is interested in shattering notions of genre. With Known and Strange Things, he wins by a landslide