Teju Cole’s essays offer as much richness as his fiction, and are just as imaginative

It isn’t just the title – whose very contradictoriness draws you in – but the element of duality that pervades the essays in Teju Cole’s new collection. Ranging across subjects, these essays hold several things: humour and deadpan seriousness, irreverence and anger, and for all the direct simplicity of the words, these essays are also politically charged – as any writing, Cole seems to tell us, must be in our times. For the creative impulse, drawn from everything known and seen, is also invariably revelatory of political truths, some of them hidden through time.

Time indeed comes up several times in these essays; especially in the two on the German writer WG Sebald. Cole has written elsewhere of his own realisation, soon after his first work, Open City, of how much his work evoked Sebald; how Cole’s narrator, Julius, speaks with that haunting mix of memory and present detail as he walks down New York city.

The connectedness of all things

In an essay in this present collection, Cole writes of a visit to Sebald’s grave in an East Anglian church. The cab driver ferrying Cole recounts his own obsession about the old airfields dating from the early years of World War II. Fighter planes had taken off from this part of East Anglia to bomb the German cities of Dresden and Cologne – and Sebald’s works bring to life the tragic, inevitable destruction that these cities, and their people, suffered. Conflict, Sebold was aware, left no side unscathed.

A universal duality seen, as Cole is told later, of Sebald’s act of wearing two watches on either wrist – as if he understood a moment wasn’t just something fixed in the present. This sense of connected moments, to Cole, also means finding connectedness, not merely with writers such as Sebald, but other creative artists as well: poets like Thomas Transtromer, the philosopher Jacques Derrida, photographers like Rene Burri, and music composer Peter Sculthorpe, for instance.

The quality of time holding multiple truths (could one call them identities?) appears in Cole’s essay on James Baldwin. Fifty decades on, as he follows in Baldwin’s footsteps to visit the Swiss village of Leukerbad, Cole finds himself being stared at – something that, as a black man, he is used to. But this gaze, as Cole also explains, is somewhat different from what Baldwin was subject to. The children, who once chased Baldwin down the streets, are now “inside”. And the people around are different – there are more outsiders, more tourists, for instance.

Multiple and hidden truths

Yet in Switzerland, Cole is only too aware of the Black Lives Matter protests and demonstrations across US cities. Baldwin understood racism, the deep divides that existed in American history and culture, and Cole realises that the “othering” of blacks persists, in current policy and policing on American streets. For, as he writes, racism, like misogyny, “can hold its malice in great stillness for a long time and then look the other way”.

In Cole’s pieces on three Nobel Prize winners – VS Naipaul, his fellow West Indian, the poet Derek Walcott, and the Swedish “poet of solitude”, Thomas Transtromer – there is a conscious focus on their legacy, on what they mean specifically to Cole and to other latter day writers and readers. Naipaul questioned post-colonialism, was scathing of the victimhood practised by the colonised themselves, and yet his questioning, his very raising of these issues, remains important. And Transtromer’s poems, economical to the point of being evanescent, hold timeless truths; objects hold mysteries and Transtromer’s words bring these alive to the unwary reader.

That immediate truths are not really all that matter appear in Cole’s review of Sonali Deraniyagala’s Wave. Deraniyagala who lost her entire family to the tsunami of 2004, returns after a long grieving hiatus to linger on moments of happiness. Coping, Cole appears to suggest, isn’t a matter of forgetting; it’s about remembering as well.

The interview-essay with the writer Alexsandar Hemon – where the two writers ask if there really is a dividing line between fiction and fiction – has its focus on photos and the historical truths they contain. Indeed, photos will take up the section that follows, “Seeing”. A photo can be revealing, and yet a photo can revel in what it chooses to conceal.

“On Photography”

Photography, as Cole writes, and this is unfortunately repeated in a couple of his essays in this section, is now far too common – its very instantaneity is a problem, for it remakes memories and makes the creation of memories an uncertain, even futile exercise. For the meanings that old, historic, photos have, change over time, in unfathomable ways. (Consider all the recent reactions to Facebook’s “censoring” of an iconic image of the Vietnam war, while present day responses to Alfred Eisenstaedt’s World War II photo of the “kiss"’ range from the disturbing to the very dark.)

For a viewer, as even Susan Sontag has written in her On Photography, the act of having seen a photo too many times can “anesthetise the vision, deaden the conscience”. Yet a photograph can contain several things – and Cole, a writer with an “unwriterly” presence on Instagram and Twitter, teases out several meanings within a photo, not just for its subjects, but also for its viewers, the photographer, and time itself.

A photo can have its mysteries, as Cole narrates, several pages later, of Rene Burri’s photo of working men atop a Sau Paulo skyscraper; its secret locked in the creative instincts of the photographer himself. And there are photos whose truths become visible only on a closer reading.

A photo of a man posing with a rake in a garden could be perfectly innocuous until you realise, a while later, that it is a photo of Nelson Mandela as prisoner. But in the immediate pages of the essay, Mandela makes an appearance only as “Khulu or great one”, someone with fury barely contained, who says (of the photograph) that the authorities brought people there that day “to prove we were still alive”.

Does history matter?

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up to address the grievous tragedies of the Apartheid era attempted to bring about some closure for those tortured, and those with loved ones gone, or missing. “But the tortured, remain tortured.” For the torturers want to move on, Cole suggests, and to forget the past. Does this mean that an attempt to correct history is always doomed?

Perhaps this question doesn’t really need an answer. Yet everywhere the past lingers on in the present, and we are “pinned” to history. This is evident when Cole’s elaborates on his much tweeted epic mini-essay, The White Saviour Industrial Complex, the responses to it; or his visits to East Jerusalem, where the “slow and cold violence” of Israel’s legal system continues to erode Palestinian history; and how Barack Obama’s election as the first African-American president in US history, evokes in Cole, reactions he finds complex in the beginning.

There is no acknowledgment, no “constellational thinking” that American foreign policy has much to do with Africa’s ills of the present, Cole writes, but he does not go far enough in calling for a change in how history – especially for school children – might necessarily be (re)written to bring in, in turn, a change in generational thinking. In another essay, Cole describes in visceral detail the strange neuroses in Nigeria’s streets where mob violence and crowd justice attempt resolution where its corrupt governmental systems fail. But such responses, especially when such violence often targets the wrong victim, are clearly partial – limited by class and regional disparities. Cole does not tell us if history’s mistakes can be righted, but he does indeed make us ask this.

Moment versus time

Cole rides the subway from Rockefeller Centre to Harlem, with Faiz’s Aaj Bazaar Mein playing in his ears (sung by none other than Nayyara Noor); he joins the celebratory crowds as news of Barack Obama’s election victory come pouring in via television screens. And he feels an unwilling “catharsis”. Cole asks if Obama’s victory is really one that balances a historic wrong – is Obama really one of the “angry black men”? – or does his victory epitomise the success of the new immigrant story in the US?

The real history may always remain hidden, as these essays appear to be telling us. There are also those hidden moments within every single moment. For every moment isn’t just the present, but it holds the past, no matter how difficult it is to replicate a particular historical moment. Then again, a moment can hold within it glimpses of the future; for instance, in Cole’s almost epiphany-like realization of how tyranny can and does continue over time.

Glimpsing a moment in its entirety is difficult. Which is why Cole’s last essay, making up this collection’s epilogue, about how for a few hours his right eye lost vision, has a certain poignancy. Yet it is still possible to be aware. Knowing a thing may render it strange, we may become strangers to ourselves, yet understanding – a thing, an event, history – is worth it, even if the attempt to do so, leaves us, as Cole says at the end of one of the essays, “Perplexed…Perplexed.”

Known and Strange Things: Essays, Teju Cole, Penguin Random House.