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Teju Cole

Teju Cole Books

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Open City

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“But, Julius, I don't know what you do in Africa, but I must say, I'm ready to fo into the forest. I am ready to go in. It is time for me to enter the forest and lie down, and let the lions come for me. I've done enough, I think, I've had a good life, and I'm in such terrible pain just now. Who might say ninety years is not enough? It is time. I say down next to him and held his small, cold hand in mine. He was tired, and I left him, so that he could rest. I told him I would return soon.”

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“It is dangerous. For people to fell that they alone have suffered, it is very dangerous. Having such a degree of resentment is a recipe for trouble. Our society has made itself open for such people, but when they come in, all you hear is complaints. Why would you want to move somewhere only to prove how different you are? And why would a society like that want to welcome you? But if you live as long as I do, you will see that there is an endless variety of difficulties in the world. It's difficult for everybody. I nodded. But it would of been different, I said, if you only heard him tell it. He's not a complainer, and I don't think he's full of resentment, not really. I think the hurt is genuine. Well, I'm sure it is, she said, but if you're too loyal to your own suffering, you forget that others suffer, too. There's a reason, she said, I had to leave Belgium and try to make my life in another country. I don't complain and, to be honest, I really have little patience for people who do. You're not a complainer are you?”

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“Almost everyone, as almost always at such concerts, was white. It is something I can't help noticing; I notice it each time, and try to see past it. Part of that is a quick, complex series of negotiations: chiding myself for even seeing it, lamenting the reminders of how divided our life still remains, being annoyed that these thoughts can be counted on to pass through my mind at some point in the evening. Most of the people around me yesterday were middle-aged or old. I am used to it, but it never ceases to surprise me how easy it is to leave the hybridity of the city, and enter into all-white spaces, the homogeneity of which, as far as I can tell, causes no discomfort to the whites in them. The only thing odd, to some of them, is seeing me, young and black, in my seat or at the concession stand. At times, standing in line for the bathroom during intermission, I get looks that make me feel like Ota Benga, the Mbuti man who was put on display in the Monkey House at the Bronx Zoo in 1906. I weary of such thoughts, but I am habituated to them. But Mahler's music is not white, or black, not old or young, and whether it is even specifically human, rather than in accord with more universal vibrations, is open to question.”

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“The sight of large masses of people hurrying down into underground chambers was perpetually strange to me, and I felt that all of the human race were rushing, pushed by a counterinstintive death drive, into movable catacombs. Above-ground I was with thousands of others in their solitude, but in the subway, standing close to strangers, jostling them and being jostled by them for space and breathing room, all of us reenacting unac-knowleged traumas, the solitude intensified.”

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“We men benefit, all of us men benefit, from rape culture. We benefit from the pain it causes women because we sprint ahead obliviously; we benefit from the way it knocks them off circuit and opens space for us; we benefit from the way it dehumanizes them so that our own humanity can shine more greatly; and we benefit from the aura of power it gives us as perpetrators or as beneficiaries. And because we benefit, explicitly or implicitly, we are not vociferous enough in our opposition to it.”

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“There was some kind of scuffle two hundred yards down the street, again strangely noiseless, and a huddled knot of men opened up to reveal two brawlers being separated and pulled away from their fight. What I saw next gave me a fright: in the farther distance, beyond the listless crowd, the body of a lynched man dangling from a tree. The body was slender, dressed from head to toe in black, reflecting no light. It soon resolved itself, however, into a less ominous thing: dark canvas sheeting on a construction scaffold, twirling in the wind.”

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“From Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest growth industry in the US is the White Savior Industrial Complex. The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening. The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm. This world exists simply to satisfy the needs - including, importantly, the sentimental needs - of white people and Oprah.”

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“He, too, was in the grip of rage and rhetoric. I saw that, attractive though his side of the political spectrum was. A cancerous violence had eaten into every political idea, had taken over the ideas themselves, and for so many, all that mattered was the willingness to do something. Action led to action, free of any moorings, and the way to be someone, the way to catch the attention of the young and recruit them to one's cause, was to be enraged. It seemed as if the only way this lure of violence could be avoided was by having no causes, by being magnificiently isolated from loyalties. But was that not an ethical lapse graver than rage itself?”

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“Het drong tot me door hoe vluchtig een gevoel van geluk kon zijn, en hoe kwetsbaar de basis daarvan was; van uit de regen een warm restaurant binnen lopen, de geur van voedsel en wijn, een boeiend gesprek, het buitenlicht dat zwakjes op de kersenhouten tafeltjes scheen. Er was maar weinig voor nodig om je humeur op een ander peil te brengen, als het schuiven met de stukken op een schaakbord. Dat besef alleen al, tijdens een moment van geluk, was alsof je een van de stukken verschoof en daardoor iets minder gelukkig werd.”

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“Alle politieke ideeën waren aangetast door een gewelddadig gezwel, met als gevolg dat dat die ideeën erdoor overheerst werden, en voor al te veel mensen ging het alleen nog om de bereidheid tot ingrijpen. De ene daad lokte de andere uit, zonder enige terughoudendheid, en als je iemand wilde zijn, en zeker als je de aandacht wilde trekken van jongeren en ze voor je karretje wilde spannen, dan moest je verontwaardigd zijn. Het leek alsof de lokroep van geweld alleen nog kon worden genegeerd door helemaal geen doel meer na te streven, door je op superieure wijze te onttrekken aan elke vorm van loyaliteit. Maar was dat geen morele tekortkoming die nog erger was dan woede?”

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“A woman had died in the room next to mine, she had died on the other side of the wall I was leaning against, and I had known nothing of it. I had known nothing in the weeks when her husband mourned, nothing when I had nodded to him in greeting with headphones in my ears, or when I had folded clothes in the laundry room while he used the washer. I hadn't known him well enough to routinely ask how Carla was, and I had not noticed not seeing her around. that was the worst of it. I had noticed neither her absence nor the change - there must have been a change - in his spirit. It was not possible, even then, to go knock on his door and embrace him, nor speak with him at length. It would have been false intimacy.”

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“Killing a bunch of people in Sudan and Yemen and Pakistan, it's like, "Who cares - we don't know them." But the current discussion is framed as "When can the President kill an American citizen?" Now in my mind, killing a non-American citizen without due process is just as criminal as killing an American citizen without due process - but whatever gets us to the table to discuss this thing, we're going to take it.”

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“Oh, I love labels, as long as they are numerous. I'm an American writer. I'm a Nigerian writer. I'm a Nigerian American writer. I'm an African writer. I'm a Yoruba writer. I'm an African American writer. I'm a writer who's been strongly influenced by European precedents. I'm a writer who feels very close to literary practice in India - which I go to quite often - and to writers over there.”

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“You know that this vignette and that vignette belong side by side, you know that a certain turn of phrase you've been saving will probably work best within a given section of the narrative. As in a jazz performance, writing lives or dies by what's produced in that moment. But that moment is attended by long preparation.”

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“In a sense, Open City is a kind of Wunderkammer, one of those little rooms assembled with bric-a-brac by Renaissance scholars. I don't mean it as a term of praise: these cabinets of curiousities contained specific sorts of objects - maps, skulls (as memento mori), works of art, stuffed animals, natural history samples, and books - and Open City actually contains many of the same sort of objects. So, I don't think it's as simple as literary inclusiveness.”

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