Book Report: Known and Strange Things

16. Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays (2016) (8/10/22)

What an intelligent, fascinating book! Comprising 55 brief essays and pieces of criticism, it is divided into three parts, "Reading Things," "Seeing Things," and "Being There," covering my own obsessions—with literature, with the visual arts (especially photography), and with place. The pieces were written over the course of some eight years, in which the Nigerian-American Cole traveled, thought, and wrote constantly. They cover a multitude. 

The authors Cole examines in part one include James Baldwin (who feels like a red thread through the entire work), V. S. Naipaul, the poets Tomas Tranströmer and W. G. Sebald, the Sri Lankan memoirist Sonali Deraniyagala, Derek Walcott, the South African novelist Ivan Vladislavić, and Aleksandar Hemon, in conversation. Many of these were new to me, and he made them all sound worth pursuing. In the conversation with Hemon, Cole says:

I rarely sit down to write a poem, not the kind you can submit to Poetry magazine or the New Yorker. But I think poetry and its way of thinking does infect a lot of my work. I certainly read a lot of it—there's a discipline and tightness in the language that very few prose writers can achieve. So, yes, people like Tranströmer and Ondaatje and Wisława Szymborska are touchstones for me. It's a long list: George Seferis, Anne Carson, Charles Simic, Sharon Olds, Seamus Heaney: anyone who has found a way to sidestep conventional syntax. And for this reason, I take pleasure in reading those writers whose prose also contains the elusive and far-fetched.

The same is true of the second part: so many photographers I'd not heard of, plus a few I had. The book includes two color insert sections, so I was able to see examples of some of the photos he discusses—and of course I spent time googling many others. Artists such as Wangechi Mutu, Malick Sidibé, Alex Webb, Roy DeCarava, Gucorgui Pinkhassov, Richard Renaldi, Saul Leiter, and Penelope Umbrico—and many, many more. He also writes more philosophically about the act of photography, or of representation generally, and about technology. Can a photograph be neutral? What does aerial photography offer us? Or the videography of death? One essay, "Object Lessons," examines photographs of conflict, as encapsulated in ordinary objects: a coffee mug, lace curtains, a Boko Haram victim's favorite blue blouse.

Proust once wrote in a letter, "We think we no longer love the dead because we don't remember them, but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears." Objects, sometimes more powerfully than faces, remind us of what was and no longer is; stillness, in photography, can be more affecting than action. This is in part because of the respectful distance that a photograph of objects can create between the one who looks, far from the place of trouble, and the one whose trouble those objects signify. But it is also because objects are reservoirs of specific personal experience, filled with the hours of some person's life. They have been touched, or worn through use. They have frayed, or been placed just so. Perhaps the kind of "object photography" made by [Sam] Abell, [Sergei] Ilnitsky, [Glenna] Gordon, [Gilles] Peress, and many others in conflict zones cannot ever effect the political change we hope for from highly dramatic images. Perhaps their photographs don't make us think of the photographers' bravery, the way other conflict pictures do, or urge us to immediate action. We look at them anyway, for the change that they bring about elsewhere: in the core of the sympathetic self. We look at them for the way they cooperate with the imagination, the way they contain what cannot otherwise be accommodated, and the way they grant us, to however modest a degree, some kind of solace.

The blouse of Hauwa Mutah, one of nearly 300 girls
who were kidnapped from a school in Chibok, Nigeria,
April 2015, by Boko Haram. Photo by Glenna Gordon

Part three takes us to Switzerland, to Harlem on the evening of the election of Barack Obama, to East Jerusalem, to Alabama, to Rome, to São Paulo, to South Africa, to Nigeria. It includes his notorious piece "The White Savior Industrial Complex," stemming from seven tweets he posted in response to the Kony 2012 video, as well as "A Piece of the Wall," a 4,000-word report about the U.S.-Mexico border that he posted entirely on Twitter. (He talks about it here.)

I'm just sorry the essays are now older; I'd love to read what Cole thinks about the past eight years. But for that, of course, I can go to his website, where he has posted (at least some of?) his recent writings. I'm pretty sure I will. I find his writing and thinking so stimulating. (P.S. Yes, there is a new volume of his short writings: Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time. It's on my list.)