Book Report: Every Day Is for the Thief

6. Teju Cole, Every Day Is for the Thief (2007, 2014) (April 23, 2025)

I read Teju Cole's Known and Strange Things, a collection of essays and criticism, a couple of years ago and was impressed. So in scanning my shelves recently for something short to read—short being about what my attention span can handle these days—when I spotted this book it was an easy choice.

And he did it again. This book is his first, a "novella" of 27 short chapters detailing the first-person protagonist's visit back to Lagos, Nigeria, after fifteen years living in the States. It feels like it must be autobiographical, but it is called fiction—and there are a few discrepancies between the narrator and Cole, beginning with the fact that the narrator has a white mother, though not much is made of that fact, and that the narrator is a psychiatrist, not a writer/photographer/art critic (though Cole did go to medical school for a while). Otherwise, perhaps he invented the family members and old friends he tells us about, and some of the places he visits, but they all feel 100 percent real. 

Cole is a wonderfully clear-eyed observer. He doesn't compare Nigeria and the U.S. exactly, but his experience allows him to see aspects of his homeland that its residents can't—the corruption, the dangers, the annoyances, the ways people get by, hopefulness in the midst of resignation. 

In one of the longer chapters, he visits the National Museum in old Lagos, a place he remembers visiting as a schoolboy. When he walks through its empty galleries, though, he is met with disappointment. 

I am the only guest in each of the interlinked galleries I enter. The rooms are indeed silent, save for the chattering of two museum staff in one room, and the solitary singing by another in the next room. The woman sits in a corner and sings from a hymnal as if, for all the world, she were not at a place of work. She ignores me until, standing at the end of a long row of cases, I take out my camera and capture an image.
     —Is not allowed!
     —Excuse me?
     —Is not allowed. Forbidden. No photo.
     She points at the offending contraption, flaps a hand at it, and fixes me with a withering stare. Her tone is acidic. But the voice changes back immediately as she picks up the verse were she left off and resumes sweetly singing the glories of her Lord. Her disconnection from the environment is absolute. A victorious Christian among the idols. Her voice floats through the rooms. The galleries, cramped, are spatially unlike what I remember or had imagined, and the artifacts are caked in dust and under dirty plastic screens. The whole place has a tired, improvised air about it, like a secondary school assignment finished years ago and never touched since. The deepest disappointment, though, is not in presentation. It is in content. I honestly expected to find the glory of Nigerian archaeology and art history on display here. I had hoped to see the best of the Ife bronzes, the fine Benin brass plaques and figures, Nok terra-cottas, the roped vessels of Igbo-Ukwu, the art for which Nigeria is justly admired in academies and museums the world over.
     It is not to be. Though there are examples of each kind of art, they are few, are rarely of the best quality, and are meagerly documented. The whole enterprise is clotted with a weird reticence. It is clear that no one cares about the artifacts. There are such gaps in the collection that one can only imagine that there has been recent plunder.

Cole's b&w photos, uncaptioned, punctuate the book. 

Cole has a website that lists his more recent writings, including regular pieces for the New York Times Magazine. His latest books are Black Paper, "thematically unified essays on the senses, photography, darkness, and ethics," and the novel Tremor, about a photographer living in Massachusetts (again, much like Cole himself). I will definitely be reading more of him.