Known and Strange Things Read online

  This is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.

  Copyright © 2016 by Teju Cole

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  The excerpt from “Questions of Travel” is from Poems by Elizabeth Bishop, copyright © 2011 by the Alice H. Methfessel Trust.

  All of the essays that appear in this work have been previously published in the following publications: The Atlantic, the cassandra pages, Financial Times, Granta, The Guardian, The New Inquiry, The New York Times, and The New York Times Magazine. In addition, “Double Negative” was originally published as the introduction to Double Negative by Ivan Vladislavić (High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, England: And Other Stories, 2013), “Touching Strangers” was originally published as the introduction to Touching Strangers by Richard Renaldi (New York: Aperture, 2014), and “Housing Mr. Biswas” was originally published as the introduction to A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul (London: Picador Classics, 2016).

  Art permission credits are located on this page.

  Text permission credits are located on this page.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Cole, Teju.

  Title: Known and strange things : essays / Teju Cole.

  Description: New York : Random House, 2016. | Consists of various essays some previously published in various journals and periodicals on art, literature, and politics.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015042074 | ISBN 9780812989786 | ISBN 9780812989793 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PR9387.9.C67 A6 2016 | DDC 824’.92—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/​2015042074

  ebook ISBN 9780812989793

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Simon M. Sullivan, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Alex Merto

  Cover photographs: © Teju Cole

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Preface

  Section I: Reading Things

  Black Body

  Natives on the Boat

  Housing Mr. Biswas

  Tomas Tranströmer

  Poetry of the Disregarded

  Always Returning

  A Better Quality of Agony

  Derek Walcott

  Aciman’s Alibis

  Double Negative

  In Place of Thought

  A Conversation with Aleksandar Hemon

  Section II: Seeing Things

  Unnamed Lake

  Wangechi Mutu

  Age, Actually

  An African Caesar

  Peter Sculthorpe

  Red Shift

  John Berger

  Portrait of a Lady

  Object Lesson

  Saul Leiter

  A True Picture of Black Skin

  Gueorgui Pinkhassov

  Perfect and Unrehearsed

  Disappearing Shanghai

  Touching Strangers

  Finders Keepers

  Google’s Macchia

  The Atlas of Affect

  Memories of Things Unseen

  Death in the Browser Tab

  The Unquiet Sky

  Against Neutrality

  Section III: Being There

  Far Away from Here

  Home Strange Home

  The Reprint

  A Reader’s War

  Madmen and Specialists

  What It Is

  Kofi Awoonor

  Captivity

  In Alabama

  Bad Laws

  Brazilian Earth

  Angels in Winter

  Shadows in São Paulo

  Two Weeks

  The Island

  Reconciliation

  Break It Down

  The White Savior Industrial Complex

  “Perplexed...​Perplexed”

  A Piece of the Wall

  Section IV: Epilogue

  Blind Spot

  Photo Insert

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Art Permission Credits

  Text Permission Credits

  By Teju Cole

  About the Author

  Preface

  So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by

  and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.

  We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.

  WHEN I AM trying out a new pen in a shop, I write out the first words of Beowulf as translated by Seamus Heaney. Years ago, I memorized that opening page. After a while, those were the words that came most readily to hand when I was testing the flow of ink. And, once, an attendant in a shop, reading over my shoulder, said: “Hey, that’s real nice. Did you just make that up right now or…?”

  We are our habits in sum. If someone asks me to say something in Yoruba, almost without thinking about it, I recite a tongue-twister from childhood: “Opolopo opolo ni ko mo pe opolopo eniyan l’opolo l’opolopo.” (“Many frogs do not know that many people are very intelligent.”) During soundcheck at a speech or public event, to test the microphone, instead of singing scales or counting, I start telling Lucian Freud’s favorite joke, a joke about bodily fluids that is also notable for not being particularly “Freudian” in the sense associated with Lucian’s grandfather Sigmund.

  The wife of an alcoholic man had finally reached the end of her patience and said to him, “Listen, I can’t take this anymore. If you come home drunk one more night, with drink on your breath and vomit all over your shirt, it’s over. We’re getting a divorce.” He manages to stay out of trouble for a while, but soon he gets the itch to drink again, and his friends insist that he come out with them that weekend. Usually, by this point, the sound engineers tell me they’ve got what they need, and so the joke ends there.

  I reiterate Beowulf, I recite my Yoruba tongue-twister, I tell Lucian Freud’s joke: we are creatures of private convention. But we are also the ways in which we enlarge our coasts. This book tracks some of my most vital enthusiasms, and even the semi-alert reader will quickly determine which places and writers are my touchstones. But it also registers some first encounters, including encounters with certain things I now consider irreplaceable parts of my life.

  The man says, “No, my wife has reached the end of her rope. I can’t come home drunk anymore.” And one of his mates says, “Listen, it’s easy. Just put a twenty in your front pocket.” “A twenty in my front pocket? What for?” “So that when you come home, in case you’ve thrown up on your shirt, you can tell her: ‘I’m sober, but some fellow in the pub threw up on my shirt. He was very apologetic, and in fact, what’s this’—you bring out the twenty—‘he gave me a twenty to get the shirt cleaned.’ ”

  I used to wonder what creative freedom would look like. If I could write about anything I wanted, what would I write about? It has been my immense good fortune to have exactly that opportunity. Through the work I was assigned at various papers and magazines, in response to various occasions and invitations, I was able to follow my nose and think through a wide variety of subjects. The area I returned to most often was photography. But literature, music, travel, and politics were also subjects in which I was deeply absorbed. Through the act of writing, I was able to find out what I knew about these things, what I was able to know, and where the limits of knowing lay.

  So this guy thinks, That’s a brilliant idea. That weekend, he goes out with the lads, and they get drunk out of their minds as usual. He staggers home. He
’s thrown up on himself. He’s a mess. She’s waited up, and immediately says, “Look at you, you’re disgusting, you lack self-control, it’s over.” “Wait, wait,” he sputters. At this point, the sound engineers reiterate that they definitely have enough, thanks very much.

  This book takes a more flexible approach to “essays” than most books of its kind. But it is not a compendium of all the nonfiction I have in print over an eight-year period of almost constant writing. It is certainly not an attempt to give a systematic account of all my preoccupations. I have excluded a large number of smaller pieces, a few newspaper columns, and some essays that were too topical for inclusion. In the years covered by these essays, I thought a great deal about poetry, music, and painting, I traveled to dozens of countries, and I engaged with many interesting artists whom I did not write about, or did not write about to my satisfaction.

  There is another possible book that contains all that is not in this one. In that book, other habits take center stage, other unfamiliar experiences are recorded, and the jokes are told all the way to the end. That book’s disadvantage, though, would be its exclusion of what is published here. It would omit these gathered experiences in favor of others. That other book might have a different tenor: it might perhaps be more critical in tone, be more analytical in approach, contain more argumentative opinion. But this book, the one you hold in your hands, though it has all those elements, favors epiphany. I think of Mrs. Ramsay’s words in To the Lighthouse: “Everything seemed possible. Everything seemed right….Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures.”

  This book contains what I have loved and witnessed, what has seemed right and what has brought joy, what I have been troubled and encouraged by, and what has fostered my sense of possibility and made me feel, as Seamus Heaney wrote, like “a hurry through which known and strange things pass.”

  TEJU COLE

  Brooklyn, July 2016

  SECTION I

  Reading Things

  Black Body

  THEN THE BUS began driving into clouds, and between one cloud and the next we caught glimpses of the town below. It was suppertime and the town was a constellation of yellow points. We arrived thirty minutes after leaving that town, which was called Leuk. The train to Leuk had come in from Visp, the train from Visp had come from Bern, and the train before that was from Zürich, from which I had started out in the afternoon. Three trains, a bus, and a short stroll, all of it through beautiful country, and then we reached Leukerbad in darkness. So Leukerbad, not far in terms of absolute distance, was not all that easy to get to. August 2, 2014: it was James Baldwin’s birthday. Were he alive, he would be turning ninety. He is one of those people just on the cusp of escaping the contemporary and slipping into the historical—John Coltrane would have turned eighty-eight in the same year; Martin Luther King, Jr., would have turned eighty-five—people who could still be with us but who feel, at times, very far away, as though they lived centuries ago.

  James Baldwin left Paris and came to Leukerbad for the first time in 1951. His lover Lucien Happersberger’s family had a chalet in a village up in the mountains. And so Baldwin, who was depressed and distracted at the time, went, and the village (which is also called Loèche-les-Bains) proved to be a refuge for him. His first trip was in the summer, and lasted two weeks. Then he returned, to his own surprise, for two more winters. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, found its final form here. He had struggled with the book for eight years, and he finally finished it in this unlikely retreat. He wrote something else, too, an essay called “Stranger in the Village”; it was this essay, even more than the novel, that brought me to Leukerbad.

  “Stranger in the Village” first appeared in Harper’s Magazine in 1953, and then in the essay collection Notes of a Native Son in 1955. It recounts the experience of being black in an all-white village. It begins with a sense of an extreme journey, like Charles Darwin’s in the Galápagos or Tété-Michel Kpomassie’s in Greenland. But then it opens out into other concerns and into a different voice, swiveling to look at the American racial situation in the 1950s. The part of the essay that focuses on the Swiss village is both bemused and sorrowful. Baldwin is alert to the absurdity of being a writer from New York who is considered in some way inferior by Swiss villagers, many of whom have never traveled. But, later in the essay, when he writes about race in America, he is not at all bemused. He is angry and prophetic, writing with a hard clarity and carried along by a precipitous eloquence.

  I took a room at the Hotel Mercure Bristol the night I arrived. I opened the windows to a dark view in which nothing was visible, but I knew that in the darkness loomed the Daubenhorn mountain. I ran a hot bath and lay neck-deep in the water with my old paperback copy of Notes of a Native Son. The tinny sound from my laptop was Bessie Smith singing “I’m Wild About That Thing,” a filthy blues number and a masterpiece of plausible deniability: “Don’t hold it, baby, when I cry / Give me every bit of it, else I’ll die.” She could be singing about a trombone. And it was there in the bath, with his words and her voice, that I had my body-double moment: here I was in Leukerbad, with Bessie Smith singing across the years from 1929; and I am black like him; and I am slender; and have a gap in my front teeth; and am not especially tall (no, write it: short); and am cool on the page and animated in person, except when it is the other way around; and I was once a fervid teenage preacher (Baldwin: “Nothing that has happened to me since equals the power and the glory that I sometimes felt when, in the middle of a sermon, I knew that I was somehow, by some miracle, really carrying, as they said, ‘the Word’—when the church and I were one”); and I, too, left the church; and I call New York home even when not living there; and feel myself in all places, from New York City to rural Switzerland, the custodian of a black body, and have to find the language for all of what that means to me and to the people who look at me. The ancestor had briefly taken possession of the descendant. It was a moment of identification. In that Swiss village in the days that followed, that moment guided me.

  “From all available evidence no black man had ever set foot in this tiny Swiss village before I came,” Baldwin wrote. But the village has grown considerably since his visits, more than sixty years ago. They’ve seen blacks now; I wasn’t a remarkable sight. There were a few glances at the hotel when I was checking in, and in the fine restaurant just up the road; there are always glances. There are glances in Zürich, where I spent the summer, and there are glances in New York City, which has been my home for fourteen years. There are glances all over Europe and in India, and anywhere I go outside Africa. The test is how long the glances last, whether they become stares, with what intent they occur, whether they contain any degree of hostility or mockery, and to what extent connections, money, or mode of dress shield me in these situations. To be a stranger is to be looked at, but to be black is to be looked at especially. (“The children shout Neger! Neger! as I walk along the streets.”) Leukerbad has changed, but in which way? There were, in fact, no bands of children on the street, and few children anywhere at all. Presumably the children of Leukerbad, like children the world over, were indoors, frowning over computer games, checking Facebook, or watching music videos. Perhaps some of the older folks I saw in the streets were once the very children who had been so surprised by the sight of Baldwin, and about whom, in the essay, he struggles to take a reasonable tone: “In all of this, in which it must be conceded that there was the charm of genuine wonder and in which there was certainly no element of intentional unkindness, there was yet no suggestion that I was human: I was simply a living wonder.” But now the children or grandchildren of those children are connected to the world in a different way. Maybe some xenophobia or racism is part of their lives, but part of their lives, too, are Beyoncé, Drake, and Meek Mill, the music I hear pulsing from Swiss clubs on Friday nights.

  Baldwin had to bring his records with him in the fifties, like a secret stash of medicine, and he had to haul his phonograph up to Leukerbad,
so that the sound of the American blues could keep him connected to a Harlem of the spirit. I listened to some of the same music while I was there, as a way of being with him: Bessie Smith singing “I Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl” (“I need a little sugar in my bowl / I need a little hot dog on my roll”), Fats Waller singing “Your Feet’s Too Big.” I listened to my own playlist as well: Bettye Swann, Billie Holiday, Jean Wells, Coltrane Plays the Blues, the Physics, Childish Gambino. The music you travel with helps you to create your own internal weather. But the world participates, too: when I sat down to lunch at the Römerhof restaurant one afternoon—that day, all the customers and staff were white—the music playing overhead was Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.” History is now and black America.

  At dinner, at a pizzeria, a table of British tourists stared at me. But the waitress was part black, and at the hotel one of the staff members at the spa was an older black man. “People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them,” Baldwin wrote. But it is also true that the little pieces of history move around at tremendous speed, settling with a not-always-clear logic, and rarely settling for long. And perhaps more interesting than my not being the only black person in the village is the plain fact that many of the other people I saw were also foreigners. This was the biggest change of all. If, back then, the village had a pious and convalescent air about it, the feel of “a lesser Lourdes,” it is much busier now, packed with visitors from other parts of Switzerland, and from Germany, France, Italy, and all over Europe, Asia, and the Americas. It has become the most popular thermal resort in the Alps. The municipal baths are full. There are hotels on every street, at every price point, and there are restaurants and luxury-goods shops. If you wish to buy an eye-wateringly costly watch at 4,600 feet above sea level, it is now possible to do so.