III
Chloe Anthony Wofford. Ricardo Eliezer Neftali Reyes Basoalto. Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Eric Blair. These names never graced the covers of books, but they were names attached from birth to those who would become famous authors. The reasons that those writers opted for names other than the ones their parents gave them could be varied, but they came down to one thing: the imaginative freedom to choose what one wants to be. In some settings, the writer Teju Cole would be known as Obayemi Onafuwa. Besides his wide perspectives on the world (he knows and has written quite perceptively on music, cinema, art, philosophy and literature from a variety of aesthetic and national traditions), he is also familiar with a culture which says, “Abroad, one is free to answer to a name of one’s fancy.” And, come to think of it, what is adulthood if not the freedom to stop doing the biddings of one’s parents?
I bring up this issue for two main reasons. First, the rhetoric of Cole’s fictions is more discursive than narrative, and thus opens up a vast field of interpretations. Having made ideas the warp and the woof of his writing, blending the essay, reportage, criticism, and social analysis with fiction, and running the mix through the mill of the subjective I, the author has thrown down a juicy bone of contention. When you have the flâneur, rather than the raconteur, as the guide in a narrative undertaking, you can be sure of greater propensities for reflection along that Walter Benjamin one-way street. On this street, the most fleeting of observations contains multitudes. This also means that both Julius and Cole are fictions and open to interpretation.
Second, I imagine that as Cole’s unique imagination brings him deserved recognition in the coming years, some readers will try to link the kinds of work he produces and the identity he’s adopted, and are likely to come to trivializing conclusions. They will be wrong, but they will be justified because Cole has made deliberate choices against the background of a long and ongoing history of cultural difference and unequal exchange. Better to make those choices, make them the basis of debate, I think, and enrich our understanding of how values are created in a world where they count for much. For those familiar with the history of modern Nigeria, the name Cole (like Williams, Doherty, Leigh, Coker, Jones, Rhodes, Thomas, Haastrup, Simpson, etc.) immediately calls up associations with the elite of Victorian Lagos. These were the families of westernizing worthies either descended from freed slaves or patronized by the clerical and commercial establishments at a time the city was redefining its ambiguous past. For them, bearing names attached to African institutions, especially religious ones, was in many cases a sign of social or cultural backwardness. True, there were also those who in that very context deliberately brought back old and spectacular African names, but English-sounding names came with a great deal of cultural capital for those who bore them. Now when a writer with one such name, Cole, lives abroad in New York, produces work which consciously foregrounds departure, heterogeneity and difference, adopts biracialism as an ontological premise to the extent of fashioning subjectivities that assume Euro-American culture as patrimony, while at the same time shading in African institutions and settings as the repositories of questionable folkloric authenticity, well, there is going to be a debate, if not the sort of quarrel Baldwin once feared between himself and Leopold Senghor, whom he imagined as having equal access to both civilization and barbarism.
Without defending or condemning Cole’s choices as an individual or foreclosing this hypothetical debate, I think that our writer is fully aware of this question, one of the most contentious topics in postcolonial thought. One should expect nothing less from the owner-blogger of “Modal Minority” who once went by the pen-name Ibn Battuta. Indeed, in Open City, he causes Julius to deliberate on an aspect of this dilemma during one of his exchanges with Farouq in Brussels. The opinionated immigrant is trying to offer his views on the work of two Moroccan writers – Mohamed Choukri and Tahar Ben Jelloun – in terms of which was more authentic, and charges the Paris-based Ben Jelloun with affecting “a certain poeticity … in the eyes of the West.” It is the old compulsion to divide and choose, of course: between an Ariel and a Caliban, between a Martin Luther King and a Malcolm X, between a Borges and a Neruda, between a Derek Walcott and a Kamau Brathwaite. The unchanging assumption behind this division is that the first is the agreeable “cosmopolitan” and the other the problematic “nativist”. The first is the integrationist, while the other is the nationalist. Somewhere between or above them hovers the presence of The Man. If they exist in real life, and I think they do, the two pigeonholes are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but rhetoric requires them to be.
Julius’s response to this issue is quite instructive, and the novel’s originality lays partly in how it attempts to avoid this divisiveness. What it does is to change the joke, as it were. Since the division works through the formulation of class issues as racial ones (the “refinements” of class passed off as a function of racial background), Cole gives us a protagonist who is “divided to the bone,” as Walcott once puts it in an emblematic poem, and often proceeds from very abstract premises – the surface, the residue, the examination of the quality of the mind. Some of the best writers of the twentieth century (C.L.R. James, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, George Lamming) battled this deep-seated prejudice: they were not seen as just good writers, but as good black writers. Others like Toni Morrison, Alex Haley, Édouard Glissant and Alice Walker wrote to embrace it. Cole stands on the shoulders of these eminent writers, and assumes the privilege of speaking as a legatee of the world’s heritage located in Europe, but without being saddled with the conundrums of color. He gets Julius to reflect on the ideology of difference that operates between Arabs and Jews, and from the angle of the window thus opened on the world, invites comparisons not just with the V.S. Naipaul of The Enigma of Arrival but also with the likes of W.G. Sebald, John Berger and Thomas Bernhard whose works stand as complex reflections on European intellectual and artistic heritages. He writes about New York City as few contemporary writers have done. Above all, he gives us a thoughtful black psychiatrist without inducing thoughts of Frantz Fanon. We are no longer in the heavily politicized terrains of race and class, and so-called “white centuries” are no longer anything of the sort.
Once upon a time in colonial society, whether in Fort-de-France, New Orleans, or in Lourenço Marques, to be biracial was to be viewed as a traitor. This is what gave rise to the figure of the tragic mulatto, who thought himself white, but was distrusted by black and white. That certainly provided a good argument for Aimé Césaire in Une Tempête, where Ariel returns as the mulatto and obstruction to the anti-colonial effort. But a lot has happened between 1959 and 2009 and as Zadie Smith, writing about Barack Obama not too long ago says, being biracial can also be a matter of learning to speak in tongues! She should know. Its presumed tragicness thus entirely reinterpreted in light of new realities, biracialism no longer needs to view itself as a form of otherness, especially not in relation to Africa or America. The division was artificial right from the start.
Part of Cole’s strategy in his writings, it seems to me, is to try to recapture that moment before the slave trade when, according to Berger in his controversial Booker Prize acceptance speech of 1972, “black and white approached each other with the amazement of potential equals.” Or to imagine it as our common future. And he wants to do this not on the terms of contemporary understandings of race and culture but on the terms of writing as the mode of fashioning individual sensibilities. This option is not to be construed as avoiding politics, but as conceiving of the political on terms that put the individual first. Thus, his literary references are not so much the post-slavery black writers, but those of a different clime and orientation, such as Ibn Khaldun, Ibn Battuta, and al-Wazzan who wrote about Africa within the context of worldly travels. As the historian Natalie Zemon Davis notes in Trickster Travels, her highly imaginative account of the life of al-Wazzan (better known as Leo Africanus), what is important about this kind of literary orientation is “how a man moved between different polities, made use of different cultural and social resources, and entangled or separated them so as to survive, discover, write, make relationships, and think about society and himself.” When travel and the writing which chronicles it are conceived as the modes of creating sensibilities, the author embodies a world of imaginaries, creating stories that can find home in the imaginaries of others, a world unfettered by artificial divisions.
The problem, though, is that artificial divisions crumble hard. They sooner acquire material force, become real and hard to transcend. They have an archive, leave a mark on institutions. People kill and are killed for them. The most powerful man in a very powerful country is relentlessly maligned by his citizens simply on account of the color of his skin. This is why, to return to where I started, Julius’s encounters with Terry and Mr. F in New York are important in grasping the cultural politics at work in Cole’s novels. For him, Leo Africanus might be a less ideological literary progenitor than Edward Blyden, but it is the latter who offers a more persuasive argument to writers of Cole’s temperament about how to approach creativity in an adversarial context. That biracial identity could be a viable option for a worldly character is itself a result of the ethical exertions of writers across generations, black and white—but they took up the challenge so that a Cole doesn’t have to. Julius had earlier promised to be in solidarity with a jailed Liberian asylum-seeker, but never kept his promise. (In The Enigma of Arrival, Naipaul writes about the letters he received from Angela, a certain young woman he’d roomed with in a hostel upon arriving in England, and about his simple resolve not to reply to any of them. Angela was in the past and no longer mattered.) He had been irritated into sullenness by the friendly chatter of an African taxi-driver trying to “lay claims on him.” It is therefore not a puzzle that he will make a point of avoiding Terry’s post office. The puzzle is that a cultural-nationalist like Terry can tell that biracial Julius is from the African continent. How can anyone conclude from merely seeing a biracial person that he is from Africa? That would be true of Cole, not of fictional Julius who, like the narrator of Everyday Is For the Thief, is “different [from the author] in some other ways.” It would be interesting to speculate if Terry’s insufferable poetry, rather than his simplistic view of African culture, is what puts Julius off.
Thinking of a conclusion, I am reminded of two seemingly incompatible writers, the Beninese philosopher Paulin Hountondji and the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. “Who could refuse Mudimbe anything?” Hountondji wonders at some point in his book, The Struggle for Meaning, the question an attempt to underscore the substantial cultural capital associated with his colleague from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Success has many friends, and although some may be critical of the choices the successful make to advance self-determined goals, most will come to terms with the reality of it.
Hountondji goes further to regret that Mudimbe’s career evinces “a certain type of apolitical position, of disengagement from Africa,” but he is also of the opinion that Mudimbe’s work expands the field of knowledge about the continent. I won’t go so far as to assert that Cole adopts an apolitical position as a writer—there is evidence to the contrary in the columns he published in the now-defunct NEXT newspaper published in Lagos, and in some of his recent interventions elsewhere. I will state categorically that he has started off his career through a strategic act of disidentification.
Such an act is not limited to the rhetoric of his novels, as witness the facts of the disagreement between him and his Nigerian publishers. Yet as Borges contends in “The Argentine Writer and Tradition,” responding to the criticism that his writing lacked national characteristics, anything that an Argentine writer can do with success stands to enrich the tradition on which she appears to be turning her back.
Cole is sending signals that being African does not, should not, commit a writer to engaging with African themes. I was disappointed to see him present his personal story as an American one in a short video following the publication of Open City, but quickly realized that that was his story, after all. I can deal with that because I imagine that he knows what he is doing. He (or Julius?) is in New York. He knows Irewolede Denge as well as he knows Tomas Tranströmer. He is a scholar of Netherlandish art, but he must be aware of the itinerant Yoruba artist, Are Lagbayi who, as contexts go, was better traveled than Delft-bound Johannes Vermeer and produced his work in ex-ile, a maker of art as a gesture of perpetual departures.
*This essay first appeared in the Nigerian Premium Times Newspaper in August 2013
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.