Known and Strange Things Page 8
On the other hand, I (and the people like me, whoever they may be) engage with it perforce. There is no way to leave history. There is no other place to go. As a diasporic person I’ve learned that it’s in fact really easy to leave your country. What is difficult is leaving its history, as it follows (or leads) you like a shadow. That kind of history is in your body (as it was in Lazarus’s) and cannot be relegated to a museum or, as in America, to entertainment.
I loved the chapter in Every Day Is for the Thief in which the narrator visits the National Museum, which is nearly devoid of art, while the historical wing consists of a mention of slave trade and narratives of recent dictators. What is Nigeria to you? What does its history mean to you, as a writer, and as a citizen?
TC: Nigeria is an ideal for me in two ways. One, it’s a space of possibility, an opportunity for its people to move beyond the pressures of tribe or ethnic group. This opportunity is often squandered. Two, it’s a soccer team, one that could be one of the world’s best—there’s certainly enough talent to be, at least, on Uruguay’s level. This opportunity, too, is often squandered. So, Nigeria haunts me in terms of being a space of unfinished histories. But my identity maps onto other things: being a Lagosian (Lagos is like a city-state), being a West African, being African, being a part of the Black Atlantic. I identify strongly with the historical network that connects New York, New Orleans, Rio de Janeiro, and Lagos. But, as a subject, Nigeria won’t let go of me.
Like you, I am now in a country where people (convinced of their innocence) sleep well; and, like you, I’m still one of history’s amnesiacs.
AH: Amnesiacs?
TC: I meant to write “insomniacs”! But the error is illuminating.
AH: You not only identify with but also write about—and in—cities. Open City is one of the great city books, it’s also a great wandering book, as is Every Day Is for the Thief. It seems to me that it is impossible to write in a linear way about and in cities—they’re necessarily nonlinear places. This is the case with a city like Lagos (though I’ve never been there) perhaps even more so than New York, with its orderly grids and spatial hierarchies. To my mind, the ultimate city-wandering book is Ulysses, radically devoid of linear narration and plot, built of fragments that exist simultaneously and often conflictually. What attracts you to cities? What connects the four cities in “the historical network”? Is it that cities are more conducive to nonlinear narratives, or is it that nonlinear narrators end up in cities?
TC: Thank you. Halfway through writing Open City, I thought to myself that I should learn some of New York history “properly.” So I bought a stack of worthy books and started to read them. But, you know what? Doing that offended the sense of drift I relied on for my novel. The books were too systematic, too knowledgeable. So I just went back to my previous method: relying on the things I already knew, walking around aimlessly, and filling in facts and figures later as needed. The thing had to breathe, it had to drift, and it had to pretend not to know where it was going. (A dancer in mid-dance can’t think too much about her legs.)
As for cities in general: I think they might be our greatest invention. They drive creativity, they help us manage resources, and they can be hives of tolerance. In a village, you can’t stick out too much. In the city, if anyone judges you, you tell them to go to hell. So, there’s that positive side. But the other side is that they are simply so congested with material history and the spiritual traces of those histories, including some very dark events. Your contemporary Chicago is haunted by the Chicago of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Chicago of innovation and of systematic exclusions. Rural landscapes can give the double illusion of being eternal and newly born. Cities, on the other hand, are marked with specific architecture from specific dates, and this architecture, built by long-vanished others for their own uses, is the shell that we, like hermit crabs, climb into.
The four cities I listed—New York, New Orleans, Rio de Janeiro, and Lagos—are simply four that were important nodes in the transatlantic slave trade and in black life in the century following. They are the vertices of a sinister quadrilateral.
AH: Cities do offer spaces for uncontrollable exchanges, but then there is always controlled commerce, which not so long ago included slave markets. But cities also erase and reshape themselves in ways that are different in different places. American cities tend to erase their pasts, particularly the conflictual parts, just as they marginalize the inconvenient and unjust parts of the present—the killing and the greed are always elsewhere. Take the Bloombergian New York, the Vatican of entitlement, where glamour conceals the greed that drives (and destroys) it all.
Cities like Lagos, Sarajevo, Rio, or New Orleans do not project a harmonious version of themselves, because they cannot—the conflict is ever present and indelible. Hence they’re uncontainable, like language or literature—no experience or interpretation can be final, no delimiting or closure ever available.
Reading your books, I have a sense that, had you taken different routes in your wanderings, a different New York (in Open City) or Lagos (Every Day Is for the Thief) would’ve emerged. Or, to put it another way, there is no way to impose a self-sustaining narrative upon any city—only multiple, simultaneous plots/stories are possible. Could it be that cities are therefore more conducive to poetry, which allows accumulation of fragments and does not require narrativization? You invoke Ondaatje a lot, a great poet and wrangler of fragments, as well as Tomas Tranströmer. What does poetry do for you? Do you write poetry?
TC: I rarely sit down to write a poem, not the kind you can submit to Poetry magazine or The New Yorker. But I think poetry and its way of thinking does infect a lot of my work. I certainly read a lot of it—there’s a discipline and tightness in the language that very few prose writers can achieve. So, yes, people like Tranströmer and Ondaatje and Wisława Szymborska are touchstones for me. It’s a long list: George Seferis, Anne Carson, Charles Simic, Sharon Olds, Seamus Heaney: anyone who has found a way to sidestep conventional syntax. And for this reason, I take pleasure in reading those writers whose prose also contains the elusive and far-fetched. I imagine in reading you, for instance, that you must make notes of the odd and remarkable ideas or moments in a way similar to a poet. Is poetry important to your reading?
AH: Actually, I don’t make notes. I rely on memory and its failure. I do think in language and I imagine that is what poets do, except in tighter spaces, closer to the language, indeed inside it, wrangling its rhythms, uncovering its dormant possibilities. When I was coming up in Bosnia the most common distinction in literary discourse was between poetry and prose, and it was not unusual for writers to write both poetry and prose (stories/novels/essays). Consequently, if you were an invested reader, you would read poetry as well as prose. Whatever the reason for that, it foregrounded the notion of literature as made of language. The distinction was founded upon the different uses of language, and not, as in fiction versus nonfiction, upon the relation between representation and “truth.” Poetry is, as far as I’m concerned, essential to the field of literature, it is its purest form. Sadly, I’m not good at writing it (I’ve tried), but I love reading poetry.
Now, you say you don’t write poetry, but you’re one of the great tweeters of our time. Is it fair to suggest that you exercise your poetic instincts in tweeting? And didn’t much of Every Day Is for the Thief appear online first, in a blog? How do you see the future of literature? What are the possibilities in practicing literature in the context of social media? How are people going to read fifty years from now? What are they going to read? Will there be poetry?
TC: Now that’s a real surprise: I could have sworn you were an inveterate note taker. It leaves me even more impressed with your writing then, because whenever I come across one of your intriguing turns of phrase, the little genie of writerly envy in my head says, “He must have been saving this one for a while.” (First time I read The Question of Bruno, every couple of pages I would think, How th
e hell did he arrive at this phrase? He must have scribbled it down and saved it for this moment.)
Anyway, notes or not, I do get your sense of fascination and discomfort with language. The writers that interest me all have this wide-eyed amazement at what words can do. And since language is fresh in them, since they don’t take it as a settled thing, they can deliver it with corresponding freshness on the page.
The Twitter thing is interesting. “Great tweeter” is a term that would have literally been gibberish to anyone but an ornithologist five years ago. Now, apparently, there is such a thing.
I’m not yet active on Instagram (though, in theory, it should be great for me), I couldn’t connect with Vine, and I’m not sure I even know what Snapchat is. But Twitter has been a real part of my creativity these past couple of years. For sure, there’s a poetic impulse there in me, perhaps not one disciplined enough to write finished poems, but still unwilling to let go of the intensely localized effect that poems can have. So, Twitter has been good for humor, for provocations, and for thinking about new ways to deliver the ideas that are important to me. Indeed, even new ways to find out which ideas are important to me. I should also mention that I’ve gotten more attention (maybe because of my more conventional published work) than lots of the other people who are doing seriously interesting work on Twitter. So, there’s that element of luck and randomness as well.
Every Day Is for the Thief appeared online in January 2006, as a limited-edition experiment. I wrote one chapter each day. In effect, I was blogging on this weird project eight hours a day for an entire month. Months later, after I had erased the blog, a Nigerian publisher showed interest, and the project was edited and found a second life as a book. But, yes, I believe in life online, the way a person in 1910 might believe in aviation, or a person in 1455 might believe in movable type: with excitement and apprehension.
But who knows where it’s going to go? For sure, some of the smartest and most interesting literary minds of our generation and the generations to come will work in areas that are not “books” as we currently think of them. That’s a given. But I think some of these people will also write books. It’s the way that, say, two hundred years ago, the most celebrated composers in Europe were all “classical” composers. Now some of the best composers are still writing so-called classical music, but others are writing rock, jazz, electronica, or other weird things. In writing, at the present moment, books have a near monopoly on the literary reward system (if not on actual literary production). I think that’s going to change very fast. I’m not saying there will be a Nobel Prize for tweeting, but I expect that the rewards of literary production will inevitably include people whose work is embedded inside these newer technologies. The Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Work in Snapchat. Whatever the hell Snapchat is.
AH: Yes, rationally, I agree with you. But it may be the function of my age that I increasingly find myself considering the possibility that the whole project of humanity is winding down and the end of it all is on the horizon of possibilities. For one thing, extinction of humans is one of the possible outcomes of climate change.
It is possible that we might have to rethink nearly everything in the light of the possibility that two hundred years from now there will be no one around to give a flying fuck about what we’re doing at this time. Our ethical and philosophical underpinnings—to the extent that we share any of them—will have to be reevaluated against the ultimate failure of humanity to outlive individual human beings. If we cannot continue our individual humanity in the collective project of humanity, if we cannot imagine a world better than this—and not by means of some spiritual opiate—this world is over. In that case, literature, which is always sent to some reader in the future, will have to renegotiate its modes of participation in human experience. If we ever find ourselves writing only for the present—which would essentially mean that tweeting is all we can do—I would feel absolutely defeated as a human being and a writer.
I was particularly struck by the last chapter in Every Day Is for the Thief, taking place on the street of carpenters who make only coffins. There is a devotion to their work of packing people away into the void, never questioning the meaning of it all. That perhaps redeems all the other failures in Lagos, in the world, in literature. And the photo that ends the book not only is sublimely beautiful but suggests a transcendence that is beyond death, something that might be available to the carpenters/writers if they maintain their devotion for the work.
The questions: Where do you stand in relation to transcendence? Do you pursue it? Must we pursue it? Is that a way to imagine better worlds?
TC: Well, open up yourself to our new overlords, Sasha. But, yes, I’m with you, particularly on the cataclysmic climate change that’s coming into view and that will cause so much needless suffering.
As for faith: I don’t believe in the Christian god, or the Muslim one, or the Jewish one. I’m sentimentally attached to some of the Yoruba and Greek gods—the stories are too good, too insightful, for a wholesale rejection—though I don’t ask them for favors.
What do I believe in? Imagination, gardens, science, poetry, love, and a variety of nonviolent consolations. I suspect that in aggregate all this isn’t enough, but it’s where I am for now.
SECTION II
Seeing Things
Unnamed Lake
ON THE NIGHT of October 8, 2014, or, rather, early on the morning of October 9, I had trouble sleeping. I lay in bed, closed my eyes, and let my mind go blank. Hours passed. I was in something like sleep that wasn’t sleep. Around two in the morning, a light that had been bothering me went out, a neighbor’s lamp, perhaps, or one of the electronic devices in the next room (the door was ajar) that in these days keep watch over us at all hours. Now wrapped up dark, my thoughts, instead of dipping into the cool subconscious, began to churn and froth.
I paced inside my own mind like a tiger inside its cage, like the Tasmanian tiger going back and forth, maddened by the prospect of its coming doom. Where I had been pinned down in sleeplessness by one small glare, my eyelids now trembled with the flashes coming from within. So quick was the succession of images, each of which presented itself like a problem to be solved, that I could not at any instant remember what had gone before. It seemed to me instead that my consciousness had become like a narrow, high-walled corridor crammed with everything I had lately read or seen, every landscape I had recently passed through or touched on in my thoughts. The intensity and speed of these images—which had come to resemble a slide show played at absurd speed—became harder and harder to bear until I suddenly sat upright, shutting down the show, as it were, and got out of bed.
I went into the study, switched on a lamp, sat in a chair (not at the desk), and began to write notes (in a blank book, on my crossed knee). I wrote many pages. The room was peaceful like that, spotlit, silent. The shutters were drawn, the mountains in the distance invisible. I wrote for an hour or more with lucid ease, as though my hand were being guided by a benevolent spirit and there was no gap between the flow of my thoughts and the fluency of the ink. The next day, in daylight, I saw that the book was full of fevered scribbles, with only a clear word every now and again to hint at whatever it was I had hoped to set down in writing. I remembered only what I had watched on YouTube, what I had watched between having finished writing and not having yet returned to my bed.
For years now, when I cannot sleep, I rise from bed and watch Jacques Derrida talk. I watch what he said sometime in the late 1990s. Each time that I write something, he said, and it feels like I’m advancing into new territory (he demonstrates “advance” with his left hand), somewhere I haven’t been before, and this type of advance often demands certain gestures that can be taken as aggressive with regard to other thinkers or colleagues—I am not someone who is by nature polemical but it’s true that deconstructive gestures appear to destabilize or cause anxiety or even hurt others—so, every time that I make this type of gesture, there are moments of
fear. (Derrida has proud white hair, and wears a red shirt, and at times he touches his thumb to his lip or lifts a hand to his face.)
The concerts were in honor of the Führer, who had been in power since 1933. The conductor was Wilhelm Furtwängler. The end of the first movement grinds and rumbles like the thick of battle. Never has it sounded so frightful: this is music March 1942: for the despair in Lodz, the internment of Japanese Americans, the horrific winter of the Red Army on the Eastern front, the heavy fighting in Malta. (Later that same year, Derrida is expelled from lycée for being Jewish.) But the adagio is clear and tender, played slower than usual, reaching an even greater ecstasy than usual. No one who heard it could have failed to be moved to human kindness. Could they? (In addition to Hitler, both Himmler and Goebbels are in the audience.)
The concerts took place on March 22 and 24, 1942, on a stage draped with Nazi flags. A recording patched together from these performances is considered the greatest recording of Beethoven’s Ninth. The previous week, on March 17, a Nazi camp had begun operation in Belzec, southeastern Poland. For the first time, people were shepherded into “showers” and gassed to death. Not slave labor, not shootings, not gas vans: this was the beginning of the gas chambers. Belzec was designed for death and death alone. (“Is considered the greatest recording” by whom?)
This doesn’t happen at the moments when I’m writing, Derrida said. Actually, when I write, there is a feeling of necessity, of something that is stronger than myself (here he gestures with both hands raised to his head), that demands that I must write as I write. I have never renounced anything I’ve written because I’ve been afraid of certain consequences. Nothing intimidates me when I write. I say what I think must be said. (A fierceness in his narrowed eyes here. He is tanned, and cannot be unaware that he is handsome.) That is to say, when I don’t write, there is a very strange moment when I go to sleep.