II
Open City is described and marketed as Cole’s first novel. This is inaccurate. Sometime in 2005, around the time of his return to Nigeria, the country of his childhood, after a long absence, Cole created a weblog called “Modal Minority,” and the dominant entries in this blog were the lengthy accounts of his experience during that visit. From these blog posts Cole developed an unusual manuscript published as Every Day Is For the Thief (2008) by Cassava Republic Press, a resourceful publishing company based in Abuja, Nigeria.
This 128-page book is explicitly characterized as a novel in an Author’s Note, although to my mind it should have been called a memoir, if a category was so important to the author and the publishers. The point is that Every Day Is For the Thief occupies a generic no-man’s-land. The brisk, free-flowing, yet reflexive prose text is interspersed with poetically poignant images. The chapters are short and in some cases are just vignettes of Lagos, some of which are fictionalized out of sheer poetic license. The unnamed narrator “is similar to me in certain ways,” Cole notes, “and different in some other ways.”
The book is set in Lagos, the cultural and commercial capital of Nigeria which has in the past fifteen years become the focus of interest among journalists, policymakers, architects, urban planners, and the like, on the account of its status as a “megacity.” Lagos, a city of extremes and paradox, has always been that way, but the recent global focus on cities, plus Nigeria’s storied identity as a political conundrum, have ensured that anyone with a sense of proportion (or of the absurd) would look at Lagos not once, not twice, but more, and be compelled to write about this microcosm of the society. What’s more, Cole lived in this city until 1992, and what the book does is to use his perspective as a worldly man of letters to think through the present state of things.
The unnamed “I” narrator gives very little away that could be used to figure out personal circumstances, until more than three-quarters into the book. Here, we are told of the sudden decision to leave the country following the death of his father and the widening of the chasm between him and his mother.
The young man was in the final year of secondary education at a military school in Zaria. He bid his time until the holidays, and without informing any family members (except the one person who lent him money), he made his way out of the country to the United States, resolved to start life “on my own terms.” This biographical outline (the death in the family, the tensions with the white mother, the military school in the north, the flight to the US) is exactly the same as Julius’s, and in the opening paragraph there’s a mention of a hospital as a place of work. In institutional and aesthetic terms, this is the book that helped Cole to write Open City.
The end of a fifteen-year military rule in 1999, and the attendant liberalizations of the economy and the polity are some of the immediate reasons for the intensive focus on Lagos, and by extension, Nigeria. There is optimism in the air, there is money, though in very few and undeserved hands, there is imagination in small matters, and there is a self-assured spirit, as anyone walking around Lagos in the latter half of 1999 often heard, of “Never-Again!” But the narrator ofEvery Day Is For the Thief is far from impressed. Corruption, superstition, inefficiency, empty religiosity, and random cruelty are so ingrained in the society as to make the spectacular changes in communication, transportation, and urban renewal less of an opening-up and more of the same old.
The problem with this perspective, however, is that the young man who returns to Lagos lacks the kind of context that can enable him to experience the Lagos of the present in terms of what he used to know. There is an enormous lot by way of high-minded critique of the present order of things. Visiting the National Museum, he muses over the profligacy of a former head of state gifting a controversial artifact to the Queen of England. Sitting in an Internet café he reflects on the phenomenon of e-mail scammers (“419,” “Yahoo! Boys”). A band of “Area Boys,” street-hustlers, tries to intimidate his relatives as they take delivery of a consignment of goods arriving from the port. In everyday life, as indeed in the formal organization of society, things proceed on the basis of “all we need is a general idea or concept.” And so on. But this critique, necessary and well appointed, does not stand on a solid ground. The narrator is conflicted; engaged but disinterested.
Nonetheless, the book is a remarkable achievement. The blend of acute observations and essayistic reflections on Lagos and what inhabit it, the self-conscious deployment of literary and artistic references to declare the narrator’s personal taste, all posit something quite novel. There are fine historical and sociological studies of Lagos, and there are good novels about Lagos, but none of these has the kind of worldliness and sass that Cole turns into style in this book. While these stylistic choices raise questions about the degree to which Every Day Is For the Thief is about Lagos, they give it its unique character. One learns to understand its flaws. This is not so much because the perspective of the person who left is not as sharp as that of the one who returns – I don’t think Cole wants that conclusion drawn. It is because this is a novel, an utterance as a set of questions rather than as answers. It would be bad form, after all, to point out errors of fact in a work that does not pretend to be historical fiction.
Yet confronted with a book wishing to convey the idea that Lagos is a habited paradox, would the engaged reader be wrong to imagine a connection between the elitism of the Musical Society of Nigeria, which impresses the narrator, and the decrepitude of the National Museum across the road? Calling this book a novel, then, is a sleight-of-hand which gives the author the license he needs to avoid the many potholes in the road he has chosen to travel. Furthermore, the private domain is a hotbed of complicated emotions and he constantly turns to it in impressive, lightly touched, vignettes guaranteed to lure the reader away from argumentation around the seemingly insoluble problems of Lagos.
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.