Teju Cole: making sense of the sorrow of the world

Nigerian-American author Teju Cole wants to understand the reasons for the rage in the world.

RAMALLAH, WEST BANK - JUNE 5: Nigerian-American author Teju Cole walks in terraced hills outside Ramallah during the 2014 Palestine Festival of Literature on June 5, 2014 in Ramallah, West Bank. The festival is an annual event that aims to bring a cultural festival of international standard to audiences in Palestine to assert "the power of culture over the culture of power." (Photo by Rob Stothard/Getty Images) Single use, fee applies, must credit

It may not be immediately apparent but Teju Cole and Harper Lee share a significant literary similarity: each wrote their second novels first. Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird “sequel”, penned first but published 50 years after that towering bestseller, has had mixed reviews. The experience of Nigerian-American writer Cole has been a little different: the surprise international success of his 2011 second novel, Open City, led to the wide reissue of his debut, Every Day is for the Thief, first published four years earlier by a small press in Nigeria.

“A lot of people say, ‘I am reading your first novel’, and I don’t really know what they are talking about,’’ Cole says with a laugh. “It’s hard for me to think of them in terms of first and second now — but the important thing about them as far as I’m concerned is they are both books I wrote.’’

Cole, speaking by phone from his home town of Brooklyn, New York, does not mean that immodestly. He remains “astonished” at the response to Open City, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award and drew comparisons with the work of WG Sebald.

The novel’s protagonist, Julius, is a Nigerian immigrant in New York, a graduate student completing his training as a psychiatrist. He breaks up with his girlfriend and roams the city, observing, thinking, having unexpected encounters and making connections between the present and past (a workman checking air vents on a train, for example, makes him think of “the final terrible moments in the camps … when the Zyklon B was switched on”).

He’s a “dark, unsmiling, solitary stranger’’ who ‘‘could, in the wrong place, be taken for a rapist’’, a sentence that comes back with the force of a slap in the novel’s surprise twist towards the end. In Every Day is for the Thief, the ­Julius character (unnamed in the novel) returns to Nigeria for an extended visit 15 years after he left “under a cloud’’, and does much of the same: walks, observes, thinks, meets people and frets about our inattention to history.

“Like any author I take a good deal of pride in my work and I tried to write the best book I could,’’ Cole says of Open City, “but I never imagined it would be the kind of book that would be widely ­reviewed and discussed by so many people.’’

He laughs, as he does frequently during our talk. “I still can’t really figure out what happened because, you know, it doesn’t have a plot, it’s not an easy read and nor is it exactly what one expects from a Nigerian immigrant living in the US. It’s quite possible that people would be more comfortable with someone like me writing a multi-generational family saga …”

When I suggest a such a book might have put him on the Man Booker Prize radar, he says, “Yes, I think so too! … and of course those books can be quite brilliant but it’s not what I did, and I have nothing to complain about because this book has brought me so many readers and opened other doors.’’

Cole, who is also a photo­grapher and art historian, is looking forward to taking his work to a new audience at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Bali this month. He is one of the high-profile international writers on the program, along with Booker shortlistee (and fellow Nigerian) Chigozie Obioma, Anuradha Roy, Mohsin Hamid, Michael Chabon and Christina Lamb. Australian authors include Nam Le, Drusilla Modjeska, Sofie Laguna, Emily Bitto and Graeme Simsion, while the festival is also a showcase for Indonesian writers.

Cole says he is excited by the prospect of his first visit to Indo­nesia, as he sees parallels with ­Nigeria. “It seems like a similarly complex country that the world doesn’t know enough about: incredible linguistic diversity, complicated history, a country that has to make sense of ethnic and ­religious diversity in a very intense way.’’

That last point is crucial for Cole. If his books have a theme it is the challenge of how best to live together on this multicultural, globalised planet, a world he characterises in his fiction as being full of rage and sorrow. He is determined to think beyond condemnation of atrocity — a terrorist attack, say — and consider what causes it. It’s an attitude that has brought him into conflict, such as with his refusal to endorse a PEN award for French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in the wake of the Islamist attack on its Paris headquarters in January that left 12 dead.

Cole was not alone in this: other writers who withdrew from the PEN event in New York included Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje and Rachel Kushner. Their argument was that while they condemned the attack and supported Charlie Hebdo’s right to publish whatever it chose, they dissented from the decision to honour the magazine for its content. The pro-award camp was led by Salman Rushdie, who called the dissenting writers “fellow travellers” and “pussies” (a choice of word he later said he regretted).

It’s clear the wounds from this skirmish remain raw. Cole says “there was one side who thought the way to litigate in the public sphere was to insult the other side”, but agrees the debate was quickly lost in the maelstrom of social media. When I mention that soon after Rushdie tweeted on the issue, someone replied calling him a “shitc..t”, Cole sighs. “Yes, once it took on a carnival atmosphere, keeping an interest in the nuance of the arguments became a losing battle.’’

Cole has not used Twitter for a year but remains interested in new media and citizen journalism, which he sees as having usurped the place of traditional reporting as the first draft of history, a draft we now receive constantly, urgently but “undigested, unfinished, unread’’.

And too easily lost. There is a horrific scene in Every Day is for the Thief where a young boy is murdered by a mob. His death is recorded and broadcast, “to outrage, and to instant forgetting’’.

Yet there’s also a moment in Open City when Julius visits the Brussels grave of conservative French writer and diplomat Paul Claudel, a man scorned during his lifetime for his support of Vichy leader Marshal Petain. Julius ­recalls WH Auden’s couplet, “Time will pardon Paul Claudel, pardon him for writing well’’, and wonders “if indeed it was that simple, if time was so free with memory, so generous with pardons, that writing well could come to stand in the place of an ethical life’’.

It’s not a simple question and Cole has no easy answer. To the observation that he is an engaged writer, one concerned with political and social reform, he laughs. “I think in most societies around the world, except for maybe the Anglo-American publishing sphere, an author is actually supposed to be engaged. So it’s nothing particularly strange for me.’’

He continues: “I suppose the answer you would expect from me is: No, writing well is not enough. But the answer is also that writing well is very important.’’ He pauses for emphasis. “Writing well is very important because it represents a human moment of attention which, devoid of politics, is itself valuable. You are a human being who sits down and makes something beautiful or thoughtful or ­attentive.’’

He cites as an example the Trinidad-born British Nobel laureate VS Naipaul, “whose politics are quite different from mine, but who writes well — or at least has very often written well — and who has written well about other ­people’s lives’’.

“There’s a quality of attentiveness that is tremendously helpful if you read what he says about, say, Iran in the early 80s. It remains one of the more clear-eyed and patient and human examinations of what this revolutionary fervour was about.

“You have all kinds of Left and liberal writers who could never reach that because they had an overarching politics they were imposing on a quite complex set of circumstances. So it goes from one extreme to another: time might pardon you for writing well and it might still say, no, you know what, you are a piece of shit, doesn’t matter how well you write.

“So never mind time — I think we have a responsibility to the present, to the people in our immediate chronological vicinity.’’

Cole says part of that obligation “is a kind of inclusiveness that recognises the patterns of exclusion that are present in history’’ and this thought returns him to Charlie Hebdo.

“If I am thinking of exclusion of, say, new immigrant groups, I’m thinking on the basis of race or sexuality, but I also have to be cognisant of the fact that satirists or other people who write offensive stuff are also often an excluded group, and there is a responsibility to them as well. So it is never ­simple.’’

Teju Cole will be a guest of the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival from October 28 to November 1. The full program is at www.ubudwritersfestival.com.