Neo Africanus: In Teju Cole’s World*
Of the many encounters in which Julius, the protagonist of Open City – Teju Cole’s elegantly disarming novel – finds himself, two strike me as constituting the pulse of the subtle cultural politics animating the novel. In the first, the young psychiatrist is about to post a letter when the post office clerk, Terry, struck by his choice of stamp, says, “Say, brother, where are you from? ’Cause, see, I could tell you were from the Motherland. And you brothers have something that is vital, you understand me. You have something that is vital for the health of those of us raised on this side of the ocean. Let me tell you something: I am raising my daughters as Africans.”
The man then goes on to importune the narrator to listen to the declamation of a Spoken-Word poem titled “The Unconquered.” Walking away from what must have been an ordeal for him, Julius says, “I made a mental note to avoid that particular post office in the future.”
In the second encounter, several pages later, he is telling a patient, Mr. F., about his medications when the man, suffering from depression, says: “Doctor, I just want to tell you how proud I am to come here, and see a young black man like yourself in that white coat, because things haven’t ever been easy for us, and no one has ever given us anything without a struggle.” Julius does not comment on this statement, which ends that particular chapter.
These two moments are important, I think, because they say much about Julius, and more pointedly about the attitude of his creator toward belonging. Julius is biracial, born of a German mother and a Nigerian father, and he does not, cannot, hide the fact that his poised, aestheticized, yet pernickety lifestyle is intended to guard against unresolved family problems.
Imagine the novel as an opera, and episodes from Julius’s childhood and family life in Nigeria would be indispensable arias oddly bereft of the kind of consequence one expects from the accompaniment to the here-and-now story of a New York flâneur. Given his predisposition up till this moment, it is not a puzzle that Julius swears never to go again in the direction of the Terry’s post office. If a man so well-informed about what James Baldwin once called “the white centuries” (Gustav Mahler, El Greco, Gaston Bachelard, Brussels, the “city of monuments”), feels so much unease about race-based identity claims, what does he expect us to make of Mr. F’s untroubled observation?
Teju Cole apparently did not consider this question seriously enough: the problem of racial identity is complicated, divisive, and like most things that matter, ultimately insoluble. Giving the protagonist of the serious, erudite, emotionally nimble novel a biracial identity owed to a union between a Nigerian and a German allows Cole to chart a cultural genealogy free of the racial politics of the United States, and of the vast archive of the movement called Pan-Africanism. In one of the novel’s many remarkable insights into the hidden histories of New York, Julius considers the effacement of an old cemetery specifically designed for black slaves at a time when “negro” was the word. But a biracial person is black (the word Mr. F uses), especially in the United States, and to pointedly refuse to take Terry’s (and a taxi-driver’s) more aggressive claims seriously is to undermine the graceful wisdom of Mr. F’s observation.
This point should not be overlooked. I think it holds a key to a productive engagement with the novel, indeed with Cole’s work, and I shall devote more time later to a variation of the cultural politics it signifies. One unarguable quality of this novel is its deftness. Cole characterizes Julius with such precision that his choices, encounters, observations, questions, and desires give the novel its aura.
Character is the attainment of a moral position in relation to an environment, but in Open City, Julius comes about his ethics through an uncanny understanding of the idea of individuality. It is as if this character has resolved a given moral issue before it is presented to him, and so does not need to arrive at his conclusions in the crucible of visceral or rational experience. Blackness is only one of the character’s several identities, and the one whose importance the author clearly, though unsuccessfully, minimizes. The part of Julius that is given greater purchase in the novel is his work as a psychiatrist.
Any number of modern professions can provide insight into human nature, but psychiatry is perhaps unique in this respect in that it is concerned with the fundamental questions of how the human mind works, and more crucially about the consequences of those questions, the categorization of humans in terms of their conduct in a social space. What Julius professes is, all told, the result of an extremely sophisticated calculus, “the potent neurotransmitter, the analytical trick, the surgical intervention,” as he declares in a revealing moment of self-analysis a third of the way into the novel.
Julius is mostly attentive when dealing with remote, remarkably intelligent, worldly, but understated people – Professor Saito, a survivor of the US government’s historic internment of Japanese-Americans; Dr. Maillotte, a retired physician who numbered musician Cannonball Adderley among her famous patients. But captious people forged in grievance, such as Farouq, the Moroccan immigrant he befriends in Brussels, and Moji Kasali, a hurt-bearing Nigerian acquaintance who becomes his girlfriend after a chance re-encounter (in a long monologue one dawn, she accuses him of having raped her in Lagos), get on his nerves in ways he’s too self-conceited to show. His ability to display this kind of sensibility is as much a result of the severe repressions that pass for his psychiatric tutelage as of his other education – the accretions of the arts, family memory, and monumentalized history he calibrates so carefully the better to impress his own sanity upon the reader. It’s a complex, the superiority type.
On the face of them, Julius’s walks around New York City can be seen as an opportunity to advance a view of the city in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 2001, the city without the shadow cast by the two towers. But this is only on the surface, and in novels, especially of the kind that Open City proposes to be, depth matters. Or, better still, surfaces conceal. In this city lives not only Professor Saito, but another of Julius’s patients, V, a Native American whose life and death (by suicide), like the bones of dead black slaves, is part of the invisible detritus of the city. The three – Saito, V, black slaves – were the scars of the wound within, but Cole is too clever to come across as proposing these as some sort of “Invisible, Everyday 9/11.”
One of the best-achieved set pieces in this novel (actually, the best, in my opinion) is Julius’s account of viewing the work of John Brewster at the American Folk Art Museum, occurring early in the novel. From looking at this special exhibit and reflecting on Brewster’s personal circumstances and social milieu (mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century America), Julius is able to articulate the perspective he himself would affect in the novel: “a sealed-away world, visible from without, but impossible to enter.”
This series of small stories is showcased as counterpoint to the protagonist’s fascination with the miniature accounts of the lives of bed bugs and migratory birds, although again Cole does this in an unobtrusive manner. Setting the encounter with Farouq in Europe seems to me to follow the same pattern. In a way, the debate Julius has with Farouq and his friend Khalil about fundamentalist Islam, and particularly the role this phenomenon plays in the thorny issue of the relationship between Israel and Arab/Islamic countries, is better presented outside of the controversial context of anti-Semitism in the US.
This is very well done. It is a rich piece of prose with all the embellishments of creative and critical writing. I love it.
Having taken a bit more time, now, in reading Akin’s excellent piece on Cole, I offer the following criticism. The problem is not that Cole confuses himself with Julius, the protagonist, but that Akin refuses to take Julius as a character created by Cole. in the exchanges with Farouk and especially Dr. Maillotte, Julius records her remark that people like Farouk are angry and resentful. That voice, the voice of a certain form of contemporary racism, is one that Naipaul adopted from an early point, and which informs the worst of his racist novels like Bend in the River. However, Julius doesn’t accept Dr. Maillotte’s judgment; he creates a sympathetic dialectic between the two possible positions that might be adopted toward the activism of Farouk and Khalil, and Osama Bin Laden, and that of the disengaged, privileged class from which the Belgian rulers and aristocracy emerged, like baron Empain and Leopold 1, 2, 3, etc. The voice that uses terms like angry and resentful is not Julius’s, and when he is mugged late in the novel he hides from others the fact that his attackers were young men of color. He never posits an automatic black mentality grounded in resentment, or resistance, but cannot prevent others from perceiving him as they will, i.e., as the African, the black man, etc.
i don’t see him at all, at all, in the role of the creole/mulatto/metis type. He creates a unique, high culture personage for himself, but also turns to the term “brother” when the occasion arises, even if he is uncomfortable in what assumptions that implies. an example is when he meets farouk, calls him brother, and asks himself why he did it.
Anyway, i want to emphasize (to akin especially) how much racial identity, which akin sees Julius as dodging, is consistently applied to him by others. All the time. That’s what Cole created, not Julius, and he does this so as to highlight both the inevitability of a racial consciousness under those circumstances, as well as the possibility of someone who is a black man embracing a certain range of texts and cultural objects that don’t fall into a neat racial or class bundle. He is uniquely gifted, we can say, but only along certain lines: classical music, but of a certain style and period. No Beethoven please, but Mahler, and the baroque, to the full hilt. Ironically including the coffee cantata, to skate back, over and over, to the edges of race. A supreme example of this is when we discover that Julius’s credit card is issued by city bank after we just learned the history of city bank’s involvement in the slave trade.
That is where the real politics of this novel are located: in the indictment of those in history responsible for the holocausts visited on those undeserving of such blows and traumas; from his patient V and her histories of Native Americans to the Jews to the African slaves. At the same time, Julius seems not to be able to come to terms with his own complicity. Cole tells us that when we learn of V’s death, after Julius denied her access to his phone while he was in Europe, and while his newly prescribed medications for her depression seem to have failed to prevent her suicide. There would be no resonance with this if Julius had not “heard” Mr. F’s praise for him. He doesn’t disparage those words; and isn’t going to bask in an easy posture of smugness in having come to his level of accomplishment. In fact, he doesn’t go the whole route in his profession by choosing an academic career. He offers the figure of someone who is flawed, who can’t quite dodge those flaws, the memory of a woman he took advantage of when he was 14 and she, 15, was drunk. but he also listens to others, cares for others, and displays sensitivity both to them and to cultural works that speak especially to him. to reduce this to “individuality” rather than a broader racial identity would seem to enforce a certain conformity on the possibilities of black characters: either for or against the revolution. but he is watching the skies for someone else, caught in the melancholy of life, of Mahler’s music, of Brewster’s images, and especially of loss in a multiplicity of registers that strongly evoke what Freud meant by that term, melancholy, a form of internalizing suffering without the capacity to work it through, like mourning, and so to be cured of the loss. julius is too silent to work through his melancholy, which is why the musical moment to which he most responds is the last of Das Lied von der Erde called the Der Abschied, the departure – or, I’d say, death. Maybe he wears its mantle, too, like the birds whose auspices are read, like the livers of the sacrificed, to help us read the signs of harbingers of death.
What i want to know is, why isn’t he talking to his mother?
Hi, Ken. Thanks for this response, which I enjoyed reading. What you say is persuasive and I don’t think my essay went against the spirit of those fine points about Julius’s flaws and conflicts, familial, social or racial. If anything I addressed them by drawing a connection between his psychiatry training, his aesthetic education, and personal history, and how he strains at coming across as “sane”.
I disagree, though, that I refused to accept Cole’s creation in Julius. The point is that the writer is not fully aware in that novel of all the signs attached to blackness, especially in the US. So, we know that Julius is biracial. How can anyone who is objectively “mixed-race” appear to “be from the Motherland”? What does that mean? Am I missing something there? Would not that apply to Cole who, as far as I know, is not “mixed-race”? Do you think that’s a minor point? However, to Mr. F a biracial person is black, and so there’s no reason for Julius to comment on that, or reject it even rhetorically. Also, for the narrator to be silent about the race of the kids who mugged him and for you to read that as you have done strike me as quite telling. Both the writer and the reader—you—now participate in the unsaid (unsayable?) in a discursively normalized manner that simply consecrates the idea of ‘black criminality’, never mind that it is passed over in silence. I think that having given us such a protagonist, Cole ought to demonstrate greater acuity in keeping every possible reading in view.
There’s more to the novel than this, of course, but I read it closely and I see in places that, like most African/poco/worldlit writers (among whom I count myself, by the way), Teju’s cultural politics are written all over the novel. It is the case that African writers invent biographies–back stories–for themselves that have to be read alongside the books they produce, hence the reference to both Cole and Julius as “fictions.” This is a topic to invite further reflection, surely, and I hope to do that as some point.
As for the novel highlighting “the possibility of someone who is a black man embracing a certain range of texts and cultural objects that don’t fall into a neat racial or class bundle,” I would think that that’s one thing I emphasized most in the commentary, for instance in contrasting al-Wazzan with Blyden, and bringing in the example of mavericks like Mbembe and Borges.
It’s puzzling that you totally reject the mulatto/creole paradigm. True, Cole tries to side-step it but his protagonist is biracial, and while the Cesairean model of stigmatizing the mulatto is not useful and is dated for this purpose, the archive leaves a mark. This is why I find Zadie Smith’s essay on Obama so pertinent. Akin
let me give a brief rejoinder here to just one or two points. when julius first passes by the youths who later mug him, he states that they were the two young men he had nodded to earlier. this is on page 210. those two were conversing, and part of their conversation makes their race clear:
“He come up yo, said the other. I thought you knew that nigga. shit, said the first, i don’t know that motherfucker, etc…’
he goes on to describe their easy loping gait: “They walked effortlessly, lazily, like athletes, and i marveled at their prodigious profanity etc” when he then states he isn’t afraid when accosting them in the park, later, he says they were connected (p.212) based on our being young, black, male: based on our being ‘brothers.'”
why would you assume that i would normalize the criminality of his muggers on the assumption that they were black? not only is it not passed over in silence, it highlights the point that he is uneasy in his racial location, not wishing to be automatically identified with the “type,” yet encountering it inevitably, both for negative encounters (the children on the subway) and for the praise. did i misunderstand your point, or did you miss this in your reading?
as for his being biracial, that term is irrelevant in the states, for 99.999 percent of the time when a person of dark skin color is simply taken as black. no one says, are you part black? black here means all shades. when the interlocutor says, Motherland, who knows what triggers that association. was it julius’s speech? his manner? the novel is silent; it is somehow assumed; or simply the speaker wants to make a political connection, and offers it up to julius. it makes sense that julius would still retain enough of an accent, given his youth abroad, that an interlocutor would hear it.
i’ll have to read zadie smith on obama. but i’ll tell you my opinion. whatever obama may have been before he ran, what he is now to virtually all americans, and all people on earth, is america’s first black president, not first biracial president. why would they say that? they’d say, look at him. now, what determines what people see? if he were in nigeria, they’d see a biracial man. in the states, they see a black president. as for julius, well, do we really know, from the novel, what his actual appearance might be?
I read with great interest this erudite review, as well as the discussion that ensued afterwards.
It made me want to read the novel, and to hear both Mr. Adesokan and Mr.
Harrow discuss Roth’s The Human Stain.