Teju Cole / Features / Untitled Books

“A city is organic and, in fact, psychological. Like a person, it can be open-hearted, curious, exuberant, traumatised and cruel… and no one is as good as he or she imagines.”

Teju Cole

Teju Cole's debut novel, Open City, picks up the life of a young Nigerian-German psychiatrist who has taken to pacing the streets of New York, apparently in search of meanings to the great global conundrums. But as the narrator spikes his personal journal with wide-ranging observations on socio-political and critical theory, racial and religious tensions, segregation, stifled aspirations and unequal opportunities - all amid the continuing aftermath of 9/11 - the reader slowly realises this surface confessional is tinged with a peculiarly mannered evasiveness. Mark Reynolds investigates.

New York is considered to be an open, cosmopolitan city, where immigrants from all over flood in and slowly mingle. I ask Teju Cole if he believes the city is anything like as colour-blind as its reputation suggests.

"No, but which city is truly colour-blind?" he replies. "It seems to me that every cosmopolitan space in the world today is poisoned by the legacy of the slave trade. Even places that didn't have a great deal of direct exposure to the trade - cities in the Far East, for instance - are still unpleasant places for black immigrants. That said, I feel that New York is better than most."

In the book, Cole shows how segregation is built into the formal and informal structures of New York society: from detained immigrants and ethnic neighbourhoods at the edges of the city, to concert audiences made up almost exclusively of middle-aged white people. Does this suggest that liberal multiculturalism, despite its good intentions, can in fact promote segregated communities and exclude many in need of nurturing and protection?

"That's a policy question. I'm not sure I can say either way. My instinct is that liberal multiculturalism isn't the problem, but neither is it a panacea. It can be a very lazy way of being in the world: 'I like black people', with the unsaid assumption that those black people should, of course, check their blackness at the door. White privilege is more intricate than even some open-minded whites realise. There's also the real conundrum of what to do about self-segregation, when oppressed parties, for instance, aren't keen on integration. What should be done about that? The answer to that is often: nothing."

There's certainly a sense of acute tension between communities at the time the book is set, five years on from 9/11 and halfway to the present 10th anniversary of the attack.

"Yes, I don't think that's changed much. These things change glacially. But, as with glaciers, there's plenty going on under the frozen surface, and there are sudden terrifying cracks. 'Race war' sounds dramatic, but after what we've seen in Paris and London lately, I think these quiet tensions - which are racial as well as economic - could erupt into civil disorder."

So to what degree does Cole consider Open City to be a post-9/11 work?

"That's what it is. It's written in the shadow of that event, and tries to come to terms with the event indirectly. I don't mind the label at all. As a general rule I have no problem with labels, as long as they are many."

The phrase "open city" is double-edged, suggesting freedom and exchange, but also surrender, as in the case of wartime Brussels or Paris, which were declared "open" to invading forces at the point of imminent capture to stem the destruction of monuments and infrastructure. It appears that a city's identity can be as prone to reinterpretation and reinvention as that of an individual, and that New York's personality must have shifted significantly since the towers came down.

"I think so. That's one of my guiding metaphors, that a city is organic and, in fact, psychological. Like a person, a city can be open-hearted, curious, exuberant, traumatised and cruel. Those terms fit the New York of my novel, and possibly they fit Julius, the narrator, too."

The book closes with a historical fragment about disoriented birds crashing against the newly-erected Statue of Liberty to their deaths, which has been read as a metaphor for the planes hitting the twin towers. It also signifies dashed hopes of freedom, and probably much more besides.

"I like all interpretations," Cole agrees. "The image satisfies me, it's worrying and suggestive, which is why I ended the book with it. So any further readings would be welcome. The Statue of Liberty out-World-Trades the World Trade Center as a symbol of American virtue and American Empire. As for the birds, yes, I'm a devotee of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Bring me your tired, your poor, your disoriented birds doomed to suddenly die in the dark. It's maybe a Nabokovian idea writ large: 'I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/ by the false azure in the windowpane.'"

Julius is concerned about big global problems and small details (especially concerning history and culture), but for a psychiatrist his sense of self is strikingly incomplete, and he mostly resists intimacy. Although inquisitive, in seeking out the stories of the downtrodden, he lacks real sympathy. He's introspective, morose, lonely and evasive. Did Cole originally set out to put such a shadowy figure at the forefront of the story?

"Very much so. Do you know any psychiatrists? I find that they are neither more nor less perceptive in their own lives than are the rest of us. I hope my psychiatrist friends won't take offence at this, but it's true. Having a strikingly incomplete sense of self, as you put it, is actually true of most of us. There are falsehoods we tell ourselves, just to keep going (or at least we would find them to be falsehoods if we checked, but we don't check)."

It's only in the penultimate chapter that we understand that Julius is haunted by a single shocking event that he's been trying to keep in the background. It's a revelation that makes the reader re-evaluate and distrust much that has gone before, yet also to empathize with his habitual reticence. At what point in the writing did Cole plan this delayed bombshell?

"From the very beginning. It's essential to the story, because I wanted to draw a parallel between New York City and Julius, and between Julius and the reader: no one is as good as he or she imagines."

It's a relatively short book, but intense. The reader has a sense of drifting into and out of a troubled life that pre-existed and will continue along its preordained and uncertain path after the last page is turned. With background material that some might have written as a multi-generational epic, Cole elected to produce a concentrated fragment of a single life that leaves many questions unanswered.

"Multi-generational epics bore me," he explains. "I want to get to the heart of the matter, I want texts that explore that tension between deep description ('Why is he telling me all this?') and fearless editing ('Wait, what happened?'). So you're right, I probably gathered enough material and back-story for this book to make a nice, solid 450-page story about the life and times of a Nigerian-American family but the very idea makes me yawn. Trollope is admirable, but I don't see why I should rehash him in the 21st century. Interiority is what interests me."

Speaking of interiority, Julius is a psychiatrist: why won't he tell us more about his mother?

"That's just about the only joke in the book. Sadly, it's an unsaid joke, so most people miss it."

Cole's first book, Every Day is for the Thief, a shorter fiction with accompanying photographs, seems to mirror Open City insofar as it's about a young Nigerian man's return home to Lagos from New York. Do the two books inform each other in any meaningful way?

"Every Day is for the Thief, a novella, was strongly based on memoir, with a few fictionalised parts woven in. Open City is more conventionally novelistic, but by having moved in the direction of invention without taking on all the conventions of invented material, I think it falls a bit in the uncanny valley. I included stasis, uncertainties, and the names of books he's reading and other features more common to real life than to 'realistic' fiction. I've had letters from readers who were truly distressed by some of the things I had done - by which they meant the things Julius had done."

Cole is listed in biographies as a writer, art historian and street photographer. Are these equal passions? And what other identities might be added to that list?

"Photography is much more time consuming," he reveals. "It's a much greater struggle for me. I'm trying to find a voice, I see glimpses of possibility, but I'm still deeply uncertain about where it will go. So I spend a lot of time on it. Art history is a great love for me. There's no anxiety there. I'm keen to teach a Contemporary African Art at Bard College in upstate New York next year, and also a course on Literature and Modern Cities. Other identities? I love music, though I'm not a performer. I get very deeply engaged in listening, and I think deep engagement can be creative too. I love everything from hip-hop to contemporary classical. Like many writers (Berger and Ondaatje come to mind), I love music more than I love books. I also love movies. I think in my writing I've learned as much from filmmakers that I have from writers. The key names for me are Kieślowski, Malle, Fellini, and our great contemporary Michael Haneke. My deepest wish is to have the effect on readers that these filmmakers have on me. But what else? I live a normal life, as a son to my parents, a husband to my wife, a cleaner of the apartment, a forgetter of picking up the groceries..."

His next book will be a non-fictional narrative of contemporary Lagos. I suggest the approach must be very different from writing fiction, and wonder why he decided to make the switch.

"I grew up in Lagos. Not enough has been written about it, and I wanted to make a further contribution - in addition to Every Day is for the Thief, but a more deeply researched one, and one more grounded strictly in the facts. The approach in non-fiction is different, the risk is smaller, and the reward is smaller. There's a sense of danger in fiction that you get nowhere else. Two-thirds of the way through a novel, the narrator could turn out to have been dead all along. That's a hard trick to pull off in a factual work... But reportage is very important, and I think it isn't easy to do it well. What we describe with the catch-all term 'non-fiction' has its own master-practitioners: Galeano, Malcolm, Didion and others. There's heavy lifting involved with non-fiction: fact-checking, transcribing interviews, and you have to put yourself out into the world and make demands on people, and possibly annoy them. So I suppose it has its own risks too. In any case, I'm enjoying working on the book, and it'll take a few years. But after it's done, I'd like to get back on the fiction high-wire."
................................................................................................................................................
Open City by Teju Cole is published by Faber & Faber.

Mark Reynolds is a freelance editor and writer and Literary Editor of The Drawbridge.
................................................................................................................................................

Monday, 5 September, 2011