Photo of Teju Cole
Teju Cole

This article is a preview from the Summer 2014 edition of New Humanist. You can find out more and subscribe here.

After his first night sleeping at his aunt’s house in Lagos, a city to which he has returned after 15 years in the United States, the narrator of Teju Cole’s novel Every Day Is for the Thief recounts his dream: a family of acrobats walking in formation through the vast doorway of his bedroom. His life in the US was literally and figuratively more cramped than the one he could lead in Lagos. Except, it turns out, the imagery isn’t his: “These are incidents from a book I love. Incidents, to be exact, from a dream in that book. But is it any less real to me now for having once happened to someone else somewhere?” Later the narrator fills in that the book is by Michael Ondaatje, but for now it’s enough that he has made us stumble for a moment. It’s a warning to the reader to read carefully and less trustingly.

Teju Cole is an uncomfortable writer whose work encourages readers to think before they feel. In two elliptical novels and through his Twitter feed (as @tejucole), he questions the idea of authenticity and claims to wisdom at every turn. Cole was born in Michigan, raised in Nigeria and moved back to the US when he was 17; his work challenges the stereotype of the hyphenated-American (or British) writer who brings “news” from one end of the hyphen to the other. Requiring certain kinds of “content” from literature – from one kind of writer and not another – is the “subtle or not so subtle philistinism” Susan Sontag denounced in her essay “Against Interpretation”. It’s an expectation often placed on writers who have one foot in a non-Western culture – based on lazy assumptions about author and audience that are restricting for both. Cole is also collapsing the distinction between the highly stylised novels he’s written and Twitter as a place for the mob. As Cole has said, “If somebody tells you that a 5,000-word essay in The New York Review of Books is the only way of being serious, they’re lying to you.”

The unnamed narrator of Every Day Is for the Thief shares circumstantial, biographical details with Julius, the narrator of Teju Cole’s acclaimed first novel Open City (2011) – which, it turns out, is only his first novel published by an American publishing house. Every Day Is for the Thief, Cole’s real first novel, was published in Nigeria in 2007 and has just been reissued. The narrator of Thief is studying to be a psychiatrist in the United States, his Nigerian father died when he was a teenager, he left for the US in 1992, he is estranged from a mother who has yellow hair; Julius is just finishing his psychiatric residency in New York, his Nigerian father died when he was 14, he left for the US in 1992, he is estranged from his German mother. These co-ordinates are scattered through the novels and have almost nothing to do with the present, forward actions – the plot – of the books. Cole abandons plot in the sense of a chronological list of things that happen, but uses it in two older senses – a piece of ground and a strategy – by having his narrators walk around New York, or travel in Lagos (sometimes on foot, more often by car or bus), and deal with what or who they encounter. Open City, in particular, reads more like a dream narrative – a Pilgrim’s Progress where the allegory changes on each reading and the narrator is no everyman.

The narrator of Thief is more confiding and hopeful than Julius. At Lagos Airport, he says: “And I too, experience the ecstasy of arrival, the irrational sense that all will now be well.” He may not be in touch with his mother (who now lives in California), but has warm relations with his aunt and uncle and with old friends. In Open City, Julius remembers an ex-girlfriend, acknowledges a neighbour, visits a former English professor, mentions an interesting patient. But three of them die without his knowing about it at the time; he travels to Brussels, where his grandmother lives, without trying to see her; in New York he bumps into an old acquaintance from Lagos and they become friends – until she reveals that she’s hated him for years. Julius claims not to remember why. Recounting the confrontation, he says: “In the swirl of other people’s stories, in so far as these stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic.” It’s also a comment on how the powerful see themselves, both as individuals and as groups.

Julius’s most significant encounter is with Farouq, a young Moroccan man working at an internet café in Brussels. He first notices Farouq reading a book about Walter Benjamin, learns that he once wanted to be “the next Edward Said” and rapidly becomes less interested when he learns of Farouq’s disappointment with the West: “He had brought me too close to his pain, and I no longer saw him.”

A sighting of a girl on a Lagos bus reading his beloved Michael Ondaatje is an even bigger draw for the narrator of Thief: “It is incongruous, and I could hardly be more surprised had she started singing a tune from Des Knaben Wunderhorn.” The narrator is testing the reader here, too – it’s his first reference to the canon of high Western culture not easily encountered at school (in Lagos or anywhere else). Julius is more explicit about where a fondness for Mahler can take you, if you’re not white: to Carnegie Hall, where “I get looks that make me feel like Ota Benga, the Mbuti man who was put on display in the Monkey House at the Bronx Zoo in 1906.” But this feeling isn’t the whole story, either; it doesn’t stop Julius from appreciating the audience’s silence at the end of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony.

Both Every Day is for the Thief and Open City are set in a post 9/11, pre-Crash era. In the first, a banker is the thing to be in Nigeria; in Open City, Julius’s acquaintance from home works at Lehman Brothers. The two novels are almost commentaries on each other; it would be impertinent to say that they reveal anything about their author (apart from a liking for Marquez, Ondaatje, Tranströmer, Barthes, Bach and Mahler) but each fills in outlines, of which there are plenty, where the other is blank.

A more polemical writer is behind @tejucole. In an interview in Guernica magazine, Cole has said of Twitter: “The medium just gives us a chance to participate in the now.” The two aspects of the now that dominate his feed are expressions of unconscious privilege, which he expanded on in an article for the Atlantic called “The White-Saviour Industrial Complex”, and the quasi-hidden programme of US drone strikes. It’s rare to see someone creating new forms in real time and looking for new and more powerful uses for those forms. In the course of writing a non-fiction book about Lagos (still to be published) came the “Small Fates” series based on Nigerian news reports, an update of Félix Fénéon’s famous faits divers column in Le Matin. An example in Luc Sante’s translation: “Scheid, of Dunkirk, fired three times at his wife. Since he missed every shot, he decided to aim at his mother-in-law, and connected.” An example from Cole: “‘Nobody shot anybody,’ the Abuja police spokesman confirmed, after the driver Stephen, 35, shot by Abuja police, almost died.”

Since “Small Fates” ended in early 2013, Cole’s other series have included “Short Stories about Drones”, in which the openings of classic novels are cut short by a drone strike. For example: “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Pity. A signature strike leveled the florist’s.” Cole is now running @_kill_list (“all the kills in the Holy Bible, remixed by @tejucole”), which resembles Alice Oswald’s Memorial, a retelling of the Iliad as a list of the poem’s deaths.

In Every Day Is for the Thief, there’s a moment when the narrator sees two men fighting on the highway after a car crash: “Well, this is wonderful, I think. Life hangs out here.” He drops his psychiatrist-in-training mask to think like a writer: “I suddenly feel a vague pity for all those writers who have to ply their trade from sleepy American suburbs, writing divorce scenes symbolised by the very slow washing of dishes.” Updike, he suggests – to tip the idea of “content” into absurdity – would have won the Nobel Prize years ago if he’d had access to such material. As he walks round the National Museum in Lagos, the narrator also wonders: “Why is history uncontested here?” He’s seen better collections of Benin bronzes in New York, London and Berlin, and the prominent display of the bullet-riddled car of a ’70s military ruler depresses him. But he also knows that “The West has sharpened my appetite for ancient African art.” It’s not authenticity he’s after, but a conversation with more participants, conducted with more self-awareness.

Cole seems to be in steady demand as a speller-out of obvious truths to the mainstream media. But his sly hopping between different mediums and subjects suggests that he’ll continue finding ways to avoid falling into the dreaded authenticity trap himself.

Every Day Is for the Thief is published by Faber & Faber