Teju Cole lights up Jazzhole

The literati spent an enjoyable evening with US-based writer, Teju Cole, who had a book reading last Sunday, at Jazzhole, Lagos.

ASSERTIVE yet jovial. Serious but teasing. That was writer, photographer and art critic, Teju Cole in conversation with bibliophile and journalist, Kunle Ajibade, on July 29 at Jazzhole, Ikoyi, Lagos.

Coming some seven years after Cole’s last major Nigerian outing at Cinnamon Café, Victoria Island, where he sparred with writer Tolu Ogunlesi, it wasn’t a surprise that guests outnumbered the available chairs at the popular book, records and art store in Ikoyi. People simply stood in the aisle to hear the US-based author of Open City, Every Day is for the Thief, Known and Strange Things, and Blind Spot, offer insights into his creative worldview.

For those who might not be aware of Cole’s sterling achievements, Ajibade, Executive Editor of TheNews/PM News, chose to re-introduce him.  “This writer is on fire but he doesn’t look it which makes him very dangerous. The canvas of his imagination is wide, it is broad. To read Teju Cole is to read a writer with fascinating turns of phrase,” Ajibade said amidst other plaudits before inviting the writer to the stage.

“Bros, e se ganni o. (Thank you very much) I’m very moved by that introduction,” the writer said in response to Ajibade’s citation before exchanging some good-natured banters with the audience. He disclosed that he hadn’t read in Lagos in a long time and explained why he wouldn’t read from any of his four works but an essay, Water Has No Enemy published in Granta Magazine in 2013.

“I want to read this essay because it has curiously become a sort of time capsule. You might not think Lagos has changed that much from 2013 but of course, it has and in very substantial ways. I want to read it because when it was published, Granta made a small excerpt of it on their website. Some people read the excerpt, completely out of context and because the children of anger live on Twitter, I got a lot of stick because they just excerpted a random bit of it. So, I’m still carrying that grudge and I’m going to make you hear the whole thing,” he said in jest.

Ajibade’s first question to him after he finished reading the Lagos-centric story was how he would react to accusations of Afro- pessimistic attitude to Nigeria levelled against him.

The contributor to the New York Times, New Yorker and Brick, among other magazines, framed his response this way: “I stopped worrying about that stuff a while ago. I think we do have a responsibility to project stories in their complexities.  We can’t do the full complexity, we do the best that we can and when you’ve put all the layers into the story, you go back and put another two or three more layers because you never quite get it enough. But when writing also, you cannot cater to the concerned trolling of people who don’t really care. I mean people speak out of their bitterness, aggro and so the first responsibility is to do the piece of writing; have it stand by itself.

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“Commentary is cheap and easy, and it’s hugely abundant so it worries me a lot less now. This story, for example, is part of the material I’m working on as I think of a long-form non-fiction book about Lagos. But I’m very much in doubt about whether this is the direction I want to take it in.  It could work but I feel a greater responsibility to continue pushing myself to what I can try to do with language. “So, I think it’s coherent, I think it’s complete but it’s dissatisfying to me so that leads to criticism because no one can critic my work more stringently than I critic them.  So, categories like Afro-pessimism are just a little bit empty, sometimes. Lagos is s%5t; people really suffer so we are not going to paint a picture that makes it look rosy. But on the other hand, when you go ahead and acknowledge that Lagos is s%5t but it’s our Lagos, it’s our s%5t.  If you do something that has that many layers and somebody just has a tagline to describe it, then they are not talking about you. They are talking about themselves.”

On how the names of characters help the flow of his narratives, the winner of the 2015 Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction said, “When I sit down to write, I do very much try to account for every last possibility. I try to account for every eventuality and there are layers in the narrative; I put in symbols and metaphors. I drop something in chapter two, I take it up again in chapter 19 and I do a really tight weave… but what talking about my work has taught me is that you cannot anticipate every eventuality; you cannot plan for everything. Every Day is for the Thief is an unnamed narrator because I was much more interested in inhabiting the consciousness but in Open City, what was important for me was to have Julius and his mother have the same name.

“So, his mother’s name is Julianna and he’s Julius. Now that you mention it, it occurs to me that I named her Julianna because my grandmother’s name was Julianna but their family name is Ajibade which is something I picked randomly. In the process of creating a fictional character, even if it’s not sci-fi or fantasy, you are still engaging in world-building; you are creating a coherent and believable environment around something that’s actually invented which means there’s a lot of backend materials that doesn’t make it into the work. So, I had a very robust biography for Julius even if the book just ended up largely occupying his everyday thinking but I had a back story for him. I had a base built for him and all of that. Julius was born on January 23rd, 1975 and all of that but none of that shows up in the book but I need to know and you need to suspect that I know it so that you read it and say oh, is it biographical and I can say no.”

Asked how to elaborate on his confident assertion made in Eight Letters to Young Writers first published in the rested NEXT newspaper that Fela’s complete discography is the best novel of Lagos, Cole launched in a robust defence of the Abami Eda.

“Everybody say yeah, yeah,” he began before continuing: “A lot has been written about Lagos; people are writing about Lagos and they are writing novels. A journalist comes and does a Lagos book, a historical sort of thing. I read them and I learn a lot but I don’t think I read any of them and say viscerally, this is Lagos. Lagos is a visceral place, it’s intense and it’s not just intense, it’s multi-vocal. Lagos also has a rawness to its edges that refuses to be smoothened out. If you look at Lagos on a macro scale, it is struggle. If you come down to a micro level inside one person’s room, it’s also a sort of struggle and it’s all woven into that, very hard to do in literature.

“But if you listen to Fela at length, he’s a madman. Ferociously musical and yet there was something that; maybe with the exception of Koola Lobitos; by the time he really got into his own mode, there was something that was incessantly rough about it. Even though he was a master musician; he was a gifted theorist of music; he is one of the great arrangers of our time, his harmonic sensibility has not been surpassed in Nigeria and he could have taken all of that and be well behaved. But instead, he made something that was constantly falling over its borders. When you sit down and listen to 30 minutes of Beast of No Nation or that liquid groove of Look and Laugh, you think my God, this is the closest thing that comes to this experience because there’s optimism in it and there’s also refusal. There’s political courage.  I mean Fela would say, ‘oh our situation is too important to be singing about love; my music is for revolution’ except his music was just pure sex!

“And I think it was that completeness of it. So, I’m not trying to be controversial but I don’t really think that we’ve had…terrible person by the way; horrible man; terrible man; but I don’t think we’ve had a genius his equal in any field. The rest of you can compete for Number 2, he is Number 1, I think by far.”

Cole, who was born in Lagos and spent the first 17 years of his life in the megacity before leaving for the US, also took questions on the relationship between his fiction and photography, solitude in the writing process and maintaining the balance between loneliness and aloneness before the enjoyable evening came to a close.