Lifestyle
The Perpetual Stranger
Teju Cole’s powers of observation and analysis underpin his unique gifts as an essayist, but his forte lies in his ability to be a stranger everywhere. This ability to maintain a certain critical distance from a place when writing about it is central to his skill. In this review of Known and Strange Things, Jeremy Klemin analyses the perpetual stranger in Cole.
Published
8 years agoon

As a native of the larger Los Angeles area, I often think about the fact that I’ll never be able to look at the city impartially. My own experiences and observations are too closely woven into the fabric of what I understand Los Angeles to be, too personal to be of use to anyone aside from myself. Some people are able to escape this, but I am incapable of stepping outside of my own familiarity with the place. In some sense, I know the city less than a tourist would. My eyes have become undiscerning.
In a conversation between writers Amitava Kumar and Teju Cole, hosted by the Lannen Foundation, Cole talks about the need for a writer to maintain a certain critical distance from a place when writing about it: “The gift of being a stranger everywhere is something I have learned … not just from [V.S.] Naipaul’s work but from all the writers I admire.” Cole’s prior two works of fiction, Every Day is for the Thief (2008) and Open City (2011), both, in some sense, deal with the concept of being a stranger. Every Day is for the Thief chronicles a narrator’s return to Lagos and how the city is at once the same and irrevocably different. Open City details the wanderings of Julius, a young psychiatrist in New York.
The gift of being a stranger everywhere is something I have learned … not just from [V.S.] Naipaul’s work but from all the writers I admire.” Cole’s prior two works of fiction, Every Day is for the Thief (2008) and Open City (2011), both, in some sense, deal with the concept of being a stranger.
In his new collection, Known and Strange Things, published by Penguin Random House, Cole’s essays span geographically from Palestine to Rio de Janeiro and thematically from Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe to how the rise of Big Data provides for new ways of thinking about the artistic presentation of photography. The collection is split into three parts: Reading Things, Seeing Things and Being There. The sections are about authors, photographers/photography and specific places respectively, though these are rough categories and there is considerable overlap. Cole’s ability to shift seamlessly from one topic to the next within an essay is evidence of his gift for writing and his penchant for associative digression. An essay on photographer Gueorgui Pinkhassov gradually becomes a meditation on how Instagram has impacted on the art of photography. His essay “Angels in Winter” morphs from ‘conventional travel piece’ to ‘meditation on art’, and culminates with the stories of how multiple immigrant families ended up in Italy.
Most of the actual photographs Cole mentions are absent from the collection, so at times I found it useful to refer back to the original version of the essay online. As a result, I left the essays on photography specifically for when I knew I had a reliable Internet connection. Where some readers might become alienated by reading about authors or artists they are not familiar with, others may be thankful for being pointed towards previously unfamiliar work. Thanks to Cole’s essay “Red Shift” (entitled “Home” in the original version of the essay), I have since watched (and been captivated by) Krzysztof Kieślowski’s film Three Colours: Red.
His essays also illuminate his fiction, at times providing insight into the real-world events that Cole took as a model for fictional events in Open City and Every Day is for the Thief. In “Perplexed . . . Perplexed”, Cole writes about a group of four students at the University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria, who became victims of mob justice and died as a result. In Every Day is for the Thief, Cole writes about an 11-year-old boy who was killed after being accused of stealing a woman’s bag in a market in Lagos. Later in the essay, Cole notes how four days earlier, a massacre in the largely Muslim Northern Nigeria that claimed the lives of between 26 to 40 people received little media attention. This essay, written in 2012, hints at what is now all too apparent when comparing responses to terror attacks in France and Belgium and terror attacks in places like Kenya, Iraq and Lebanon: Not all victims ‘deserve’ the same amount of mourning; not even our grief can be impartial.
Cole’s critics (of which he has no shortage, especially for pieces like “The White Savior Industrial Complex”) point towards the tired ‘angry black man’ trope, either overtly or implicitly, but what becomes apparent throughout the collection is that he continues the project of cosmopolitanism when all but its most ardent supporters have lost faith in its tenets. He adamantly defends the notion that Shakespeare and Bach belong chiefly to humanity and secondarily to their respective countries.
In “Object Lesson”, an essay about Ukrainian photographer Sergei Ilnitsky, Cole writes about Ilnitsky’s photograph of a ruined kitchen: “How many cups of coffee were made in that kitchen? Who bought those tomatoes? Were there children in this household who did their homework on this table? Whose blood is that?” These questions arise only with the knowledge that the kitchen is in disarray because of the conflict in Ukraine; both personal and collective history is buried within the otherwise banal. Later in the collection, Cole muses to himself, “What do we miss unless we are told? What do we fail to see?”
Cole’s critics (of which he has no shortage, especially for pieces like “The White Savior Industrial Complex”) point towards the tired ‘angry black man’ trope, either overtly or implicitly, but what becomes apparent throughout the collection is that he continues the project of cosmopolitanism when all but its most ardent supporters have lost faith in its tenets. He adamantly defends the notion that Shakespeare and Bach belong chiefly to humanity and secondarily to their respective countries.
In “The White Savior Industrial Complex”, he writes that journalists like Nicholas Kristof, benevolent though they are, “only see need” and “see no need to reason out the need for the need”. Many of Cole’s essays are an attempt to find this “need for the need”, to reflect thoughtfully about events that are reproduced ad nauseam in the news but scarcely understood in any substantive sense.
The vast majority of these essays warrant reflection in their own right; I can suggest only that readers take the collection slowly. From Instagram to Obama, Cole is able to write comfortably while avoiding the platitudes that are usually inevitable byproducts of proximity. He is, to use his own words, a perpetual stranger. In the erudition, humour and humanity of his writing, we are all made a bit better by taking his writing seriously.