By Sophy Kohler for The Times
Open City (Faber & Faber)
Days before I am scheduled to interview Teju Cole, I hear mixed reviews, both of his writing and his personality. True to form, he makes an ambiguous impression at the Open Book Cape Town literary festival, where the strongest criticism involves the words “smug” and “boring”. On the flip side, his fans treat me with reverence, as though I’m about to meet Virginia Woolf. They would trade places with me faster than you can say “stream-of-consciousness”.
While the award-winning Open City is often regarded as Cole’s first book, his true debut came in 2007 with the novella Every Day is for the Thief, published in Nigeria. Cole understands this misconception to be less a case of reader ignorance than the result of his inhabiting “two worlds” where “not everything happens in sync.” He simply considers Every Day is for the Thief to be his Nigerian debut and Open City his American debut. While the latter has already reached Nigerian readers, Every Day is for the Thief will only be released in the US and the UK next year, reproduced with some of Cole’s new photography of Lagos.
The protagonist of Open City, a Nigerian psychiatrist named Julius, wanders the streets of Manhattan to “avoid dealing with other things”. While Cole inevitably has plenty in common with Julius, his own life has run counter to the classic immigrant narrative. For example, he is recognised as a scholar of Netherlandish art.
Born in America in 1975, Cole moved to Nigeria with his parents when he was four months old, returning to the US at 17. He visits Lagos every year, sometimes twice a year, where his parents still live. Notably, September 2013 marks his first trip to South Africa, a country he “heard about and had ideas about” growing up.
By the time we meet, I have compiled a portrait of the artist, coloured by his appearance on a panel in which he reflected on his status as a New Yorker contributor, observing, “You have to resist the temptation to pat yourself on the back.” Cole does write regularly for The New Yorker, but mostly he writes for Twitter, where he has built up an enviably-large follower count (over 100 000), largely due to his “small fates” project.
Cole’s small fates – which sprang from the French literary device of fait divers (“incidents”) as a way of documenting “small news” – are rich in dark humour which, although intrinsic to his personality, is oddly absent from Open City. “The three bodies found after the Ibadan floods, a woman and two girls, had traveled far from home and couldn’t be identified,” he tweets. And: “In Ikotun, Mrs Ojo, who was terrified of armed robbers, died in her barricaded home, of smoke inhalation.” As with many writers, Cole’s sense of the absurd helps him “deal with the complexity of the world” and he believes that, with seven billion of us on the Earth, “every combination of ridiculousness and absolute terror will eventually happen.” I suggest a comparison between his tweets and the headlines one sees on a newspaper’s placards – eye-catching and ephemeral – but Cole, a natural contrarian, is reluctant, insisting that his small fates are more “crafted”. He describes them as having a “certain force that is aphoristic”, as being “shaped like epigrams”.
For a number of reasons, Cole brought the project to a close at the beginning of this year. “I’m a quitter,” Cole tells me. “But I also like to give a shape to what I do.” He became aware that the bigger his audience got, the more difficult it became to manage “the different kinds of reading that were happening.” Some of his followers saw his tweets as “silly entertainment”, which opposed his aims to “present Nigerian stories to a wide audience” and to confront his own fears around “fate, mayhem, disaster and crime”.
Despite his deep connection to Lagos, Cole is skeptical of calling “being comfortable in two countries” an influence. “The biggest influence on my writing,” he says, “is the fact that I’ve lived a certain number of years in the world.”
Inverting a phrase by the poet George Seferis, who once said that “A lion is made up of all the lambs he has eaten”, Cole forms his own metaphor: “In the body of an antelope is the memory of every chase it has survived. I consider myself more like an antelope who has had narrow escapes.” And when Cole asks if we can “wrap-up” halfway through our scheduled hour, I can’t help feeling like a patch of grass under the hoof of a stag that’s leapt away. – @sophycola
Book details
- Open City by Teju Cole
EAN: 9780571279432
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