Publishing can be a cliquish and incestuous business; it is not uncommon for writers from the same agencies and publishers to review each other. So let me state upfront that Teju Cole and I have the same publisher, Faber, who have put out his new essay collection, Known and Strange Things, an appropriate and beautiful title, taken from a poem by Seamus Heaney, for a book that will be deservedly lauded. But even without this connection, Cole is still one of about 20 contemporary writers of whom I can say I have read just about every published word. So I am what you might call a “fan”, but I have avoided the temptations of friendship. To get too close to the people you admire can so often disappoint.
Cole affirms his right to be taken seriously on any subject to which he chooses to direct his searching attentionThis collection of essays previously published in the New Yorker and elsewhere is no disappointment. Read as a whole, it shows that Cole has fulfilled the dazzling promise of his novels Every Day Is for the Thief and Open City. He ranges over his interests with voracious keenness, laser-sharp prose, an open heart and a clear eye. His subjects are diverse and disparate. Readers are certain to find a personal favourite: I loved Always Returning, an affecting meditation on the death of WG Sebald in which Cole wanders through the cemetery of St Andrew’s in Framingham Earl, Norfolk, looking for Sebald’s grave and trying, at the same time, to have a coherent conversation about his pilgrimage with Jason, the taxi driver who got him there. The interplay between the externals of conversations with Jason and the deep interiority of Cole’s response to seeing Sebald’s grave is masterfully written, with Cole straining to act as a mediator between the worlds inhabited by these two very different men.
I also loved the essay in which he gives thoughtful attention to VS Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas. And there were surreal moments in Natives on the Boat, in which Cole meets Naipaul at a dinner party and, “ever the eager student”, puppyishly places a ball at the feet of the “wily old master”. The ball here is an allusion to La Rochefoucauld, to which Naipaul responds with barely veiled condescension: “He’s very good, he speaks so well, he speaks well.”
There is such richness in these essays that it is not possible, in this short space, to do justice to all their delights. I particularly admire the sure-footed negotiation Cole makes as he defies the conventions placed on writers of colour associated with the more temperate climes, swerving deftly away from the deadening expectations of “representation” and “authenticity”.
Cole affirms his right to be taken seriously on any subject to which he chooses to direct his searching attention. This is important. In a world where Gauguin is feted for his Tahitian subjects, Andre Magnin is a leading expert on African art, and squadrons of western international civil servants are trained at Ivy League universities to become experts in something called “African Studies”, the same assumptions, and indeed courtesies, are not extended the other way.
Africans are generally not expected to be experts on non-African subjects. We are perennially other people’s subjects, never the anthropologists, and when we show that we can return the gaze with equal intensity, that we can also glory in expertise that goes beyond the innate knowledge of our own worlds, the response is often similar to Naipaul’s: “He’s very good, he speaks so well, he speaks well.”
So I am grateful that Cole has quietly and calmly asserted his right to write in the key most harmonious to him, and to do so at the deepest level. He has asserted the right to write on Brahms and Kofi Awoonor, Derek Walcott and Tomas Tranströmer, Sebald and Wole Soyinka, Wangechi Mutu and Gueorgui Pinkhassov, Malick Sidibé and Krzysztof Kieslowski. The essays demonstrate the transformative power of communion with gifted and committed master craftsmen and women who have given, and continue to give, the very best of themselves, and thus raise their achievement from the merely competent to the sublime.
But even in this world of riches there are occasional discordant notes. I have long been uneasy with Cole’s famed essay on the “white saviour industrial complex”. Here, it strikes a particularly jarring note. What began as a viral tweet which, in his words, “cheekily” lacerates the liberal consciences of Oprah Winfrey, Nicholas Kristof and others, became an even more viral essay responding to a fatuous documentary about the Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony made by some of those wide-eyed, well-meaning Americans who decant themselves over “Africa” by the planeload.
The tweet may have been “cheeky” but there is no cheekiness in this deadly essay. This is not just returning the gaze: it is throwing a poison-tipped javelin in the eye of the beholder.
The manner in which African conflicts and misery are viewed from without is a subject that rightfully provokes ire and irritation. But it is self-evident that the biggest problem in many African countries is not the white gaze, however irritating, but, to paraphrase Soyinka, the black foot in the black boot that steps over so many of its own citizens.
This is not, of course, to say that there is nothing to criticise in the self-absorbed feelgood culture where poverty is the backdrop to individual empowerment, and where, as Cole writes, “the banality of evil transmutes to the banality of sentimentality”. But I wonder whether those brutalised by Kony would have the same concerns as Cole. Are the Chibok girls as deeply concerned with how their “Africa” is viewed in the west, or would they rather just be free?
So I was pleased to pass from these troubled questions, to which I have no answers, and instead take immersive pleasure in the more contemplative essays, where Cole celebrates the best of what makes us human. I had the pleasure of reading Portrait of a Lady, Cole’s all too brief essay on Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé, just before I attended a Keïta retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris. I dipped in and out of the essay again as I moved around, often welling up at the grace and playful dignity of Keïta’s subjects – his women with elaborate hairstyles and headdresses, with bare feet and hands calloused from overwork; and his achingly affectionate portraits of the strutting young men, newly made civil servants posing with stereos, plastic flowers, reading glasses and the same motor car in every picture, all symbols of their aspiration for modernity. Watching with strangers while reading Cole was like being with a perfect companion. His world of the strange and the known is open to everyone: the only passport required is curiosity.
Petina Gappah’s latest book is the short story collection Rotten Row, to be published by Faber in November. Known and Strange Things is published by Faber (£17.99). Click here to order a copy for £14.75
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