‘Known and Strange Things’
Essays explore literary, visual and travel culture
Teju Cole delights in following his curiosity to unexpected places. He is lively, funny and more of a rambler than his concise writing would suggest, prone to amusing tangents — about, for instance, his ability to detect whether someone prefers Rihanna or Beyoncé.
“I am cool on the page and animated in person,” Cole writes in his new essay collection, “Known and Strange Things,” and it’s hard to disagree with his assessment.
In the book, the Nigerian-American author darts with acrobatic ease among subjects as wide-ranging as Nobel Prize-winning poet Tomas Tranströmer, Black Lives Matter, Malian portrait photography, ’20s blues singer Bessie Smith and the plight of Mexican immigrants trying to cross the U.S. border.
Cole rose to prominence in 2011 with the publication of “Open City,” a meditative novel narrated by a young Nigerian medical student that earned Cole comparisons to W.G. Sebald, James Joyce and Zadie Smith. He now writes a photography column for the New York Times Magazine, where many of the essays in “Known and Strange Things” originated, and will publish a collection of his own photographs, called “Blind Spot,” next year.
Cole’s widely acclaimed “Open City” was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The novel’s success “showed me that this was something I could do for a living,” Cole said, “not writing novels but engaging with the world as somebody who wrote, thought about art, made pictures. Stitching all those things together became my life.”
Cole stitches these passions together throughout “Known and Strange Things,” organized into three sections. The first, focused on literary criticism, opens with the essay “Black Body,” in which a visit to the Swiss village where James Baldwin wrote parts of “Go Tell It on the Mountain” prompts Cole to reflect on his identity as a black man — a recurring theme throughout the collection. “To be a stranger is to be looked at, but to be black is to be looked at especially,” he writes.
In the middle section, Cole contemplates visual culture, including not just film and photography but videos of Tamir Rice, Eric Garner and other African Americans killed by police. (True to Cole’s intertextual style, the book is illustrated with many of the photos he writes about.) The final third of the book finds Cole on exploratory journeys — or, as he puts it self-effacingly, “going to places far away from home and being cranky about it.”
“Known and Strange Things” also includes “The White Savior Industrial Complex,” a scathing essay about patronizing Western attitudes toward Africa that began as a series of tweets in response to the “Kony 2012” documentary (it initiated an awareness campaign hoping to arrest indicted war criminal Joseph Kony; he remains at large).
Largely absent from the book is traditionally autobiographical writing; personal details are scant in Cole’s essays, as are mentions of his parents, wife and family.
“I don’t necessarily want to talk to you about what’s happened inside my bedroom,” he concedes, saying that what passes as personal is often just prurient. That’s not to say his writing lacks intimacy or insight into his passions; indeed, Cole focuses on what he calls “the really secret stuff” — the art, ideas and images that bring him pleasure.
“After all,” he said, “this is all about what’s really deep and close to me.”