Essay volume by writer Teju Cole: Personal, but not private

In his essays, Cole discovers healing powers in the Western tradition. They should also be effective where colonial power relations still exist.

It’s better not to ask who, but where this man is: Teju Cole Photo: Stefan Boness

One of the great themes of contemporary literature is identity. Origin, gender, sexuality, affiliation, all of these are ancient subjects. What is new is that characters and narrators are no longer merely touched and motivated by them, but are now battlegrounds for these forces themselves. The central conflict occurs where someone is not yet or is not allowed to be, which corresponds to their authenticity. Or there, where he rebels against precisely this provision.

The writer Teju Cole is right in the middle and in person in these discourses. Born in Michigan, he soon moved to Lagos with his family. As a child, he leafed through illustrated books, drew and painted incessantly, was thinking about the old masters. Later, back in the USA, he learns under pressure from his environment that he is an “African”, of course without knowing what that means. He also had to learn to be black and – understood in a cultural and political sense – “black”.

These are characteristics of identity that played no role during his socialization in Nigeria, but which are now becoming both: attributions from others, an imposed interpretation of his own existence as well as an opportunity to design himself in confrontation with social expectations.

Today, Cole is many things: Nigerian and American, photographer, curator, award-winning writer and professor of creative writing at Harvard Elite University. Yet, in an age of autofictional testimony, a readership must consider all these attributes superficial. So who is this man really? Cole refuses for long stretches of his volume of essays “Black Paper. Writing in Dark Times” is an answer. He talks personally, but not privately.

Citizen of the world, with an emphasis on the word

Even in intimate moments, when he’s mourning, when he’s overcome with anger, when he’s masturbating in a hotel bed at night, you don’t get the impression of recognizing a whole, bare human being, but only, like a photographic negative, all the impressions and ideas that shape his environment in soul, head and body.

So it’s better not to ask who, but where this man is. Many of his essays were written while traveling, are self-explorations in the mode of odyssey. Cole sometimes stays in New York, sometimes in Benin, Beirut, Oslo, Naples, Malta or Berlin and usually quickly finds access to these places. A citizen of the world presents himself here, with an emphasis on the second part of the word. The world appears before his eyes as an ensemble of bourgeois representative features.

The art history graduate visits all the museums and galleries, marvels at Florence Cathedral or enjoys Brahms’ Violin Concerto in the Berlin Philharmonie. This odyssey is intellectually stimulating because the historically central conflict of identity-political debates is looming on the horizon. The great intellectual achievements of the West – universalism, democracy, the nation, human rights, artistic autonomy – have been up for grabs for a number of years because they cannot be thought of without their downsides, the colonial exploitation of other parts of the world, racism, enslavement and appropriation.

The freedom of the Western citizen, i.e. the role model for the modern subject par excellence, was bought with the disenfranchisement of others. The fronts in this conflict could be clear for an artist like Cole who is not difficult to locate politically. In one chapter on Donald Trump he speaks openly of “evil”, in another he calls for resistance with undiminished American pathos.

Cole challenges western heritage

But he does not go as far as those activists who dismiss humanism and enlightenment as instruments of enslavement. Rather, Cole challenges Western heritage, bringing it into resonance with the present. In one text, he alternately pays tribute to two of his heroes: Ludwig van Beethoven and Edward Said, founding father of postcolonial theory.

They meet here under the keyword of difference, Cole plays around the musical as well as political motif and probably wants to point out that the Viennese classic and the Palestinian rebel have enough in common in the deep structure to understand the respective work as the key to the other.

One of Said’s comrades-in-arms, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, once compared the Enlightenment to a child who has been raped and who still needs to be loved. Is that what Cole is trying to do here? A reconciliation with the evil legacy that one cannot and does not want to do without? In any case, his ambition to discover healing powers in the Western tradition, which also have an effect where colonial power relations continue to exist to this day, is striking.

Intellect and emotion mutually support each other in this undertaking, feeling forms the basis of ethical urgencies: “That’s exactly why I travel, I read, I’m interested in art: to fathom, to feel, to tremble.” And further: “I open myself up to detach myself from ‘consciousness raising’ and move closer to ‘witnessing’, to get closer to feeling what I feel there (wherever ‘there’ is), noting what my senses are telling me, and putting it in sharing responsibility, knowing that my body – our bodies – are equipped to do just that.”

Literature and painting can educate

That sounds like an offer to help discredited universalism to regain its honour. Now, however, no more than the assumption of the equality of all human beings before the idea of ​​a general dignity. Rather, Cole’s concern is to keep an open mind, to sharpen the senses in order to be able to perceive this equality in the omnipresent danger to the human creature. No genius, no Kant, Hegel, Goethe or Schiller creates the knowledge that all human beings are brothers.

However, literature and painting are able to educate in such a way that one notices misery and knows how to react accordingly. Cole’s aesthetic analyzes are consequently committed to uniting morality and sensuality. Art in general appears to him as a tool for training a body that is naturally inclined towards empathy and solidarity.

In a text he discovers in Caravaggio’s paintings knowledge of the misfortune of the refugees who are washed up on the coasts of Italy 400 years after the master’s death. In any case, the depiction of the body, especially the injured one, is of the greatest interest to Cole.

In an essay on war and crisis photography, based on a famous book by Susan Sontag, he reflects on what it means to look at the suffering of others. According to him, the exposure of political injustice does not always legitimize the exposure of its victims. “Human rights include the right to remain indistinct, unseen and in the dark.”

Shadows, to which Cole devotes himself in several texts from an aesthetic and political point of view, can therefore be understood as protective zones, as places where people find refuge from violence, from looks, from attributions. Which finally would answer the question of who this man named Teju Cole actually is. One who appreciates the shadows. Someone who would rather use all their senses than be seen for themselves.