Talking Bard, Kony and Art with Teju Cole
by J.p. Lawrence
Teju Cole is Bard’s Distinguished Writer-in-Residence this semester. He has earned critical acclaim for his debut novel ‘Open City,’ published by Random House. On Twitter, Cole posts what he calls ‘Small Fates’ - condensed stories based on stories from 1912 newspapers. One recent example: “Mr Roberts, of Lawrence St, Brooklyn, who was fond of examining his revolver, did so for the last time yesterday.” He recently authored a piece in The Atlantic entitled ‘The White Savior Industrial Complex,’ partly in critical response to Invisible Children’s ‘Kony 2012’ campaign.
Free Press: You are teaching two classes this semester - ‘Writing the Modern City’ and ‘Modern African Art.’
Teju Cole: In the literature class [‘Writing the Modern City’] we are reading a number of books set in cities of the present - Bombay, New York, Tokyo, and Johannesburg. And in the art history class [‘Modern African Art’], we’re looking at African art in a way that very few people look at it. We are not dealing with rituals and dances and masks, or anything like that.
There are a lot of young artists doing interesting work in media that people don’t necessarily associate with African art…Modern art that is as complex and provocative and interesting as modern art in the UK, or China, or Brazil.
FP: What is most important to you in teaching about Africa?
TC: I insist on African modernity, and that Africa is a space that is contemporaneous with us… Though we are dealing with problems of security and infrastructure, we are also plugged into Twitter and YouTube and Facebook. Almost nowhere in the world is truly far anymore, because we’re all participating in the same technology, and increasingly technology is a driver of ways of thinking. It means that young people in Nigeria or New Delhi or New York, are increasingly thinking in the same ways.
FP: After your Kony 2012 tweets, one commentator said that you had launched a crusade through Twitter.
TC: Unfortunate choice of words, “launching a crusade.” That is the last thing I want to do. I thought about it in terms of language that needed to be out there in the public sphere, and that hadn’t gotten out there…That the relationship non-African people have with Africa has been deeply troubled in the past – the primary encounter being that of colonialism. And that colonial encounter continues to color the way many people, especially white people, relate to Africa today. There is an inadvertent, in most cases, assumption of superiority, and an inadvertent practice of condescension.
FP: And you talked about what you termed the ‘white savior industrial complex.’
TC: I’ve seen it in movies, I’ve seen it in artwork, I’ve seen it in books. Africa is merely used as a backdrop for the ambitions of white people. This is not controversial to say. But public discourse in America has degraded to the point that if you say something that is uncontroversial, someone else will make it controversial. It’s not controversial to talk about the fact that white privilege continues to be a fact, just like male privilege continues to be a fact.
So the piece was basically a plea for caution when we are interacting with people in a situation where there is a power differential. Simple as that. I think that the Kony video mostly turned me off because of its pretense of innocence, trying to make a ‘different’ innocent - and nobody is innocent. History is not over.
But since then, a lot of people have asked me for commentary on Kony 2012 - to say more, to participate in symposiums, to go on the radio and all of this. If I was doing a crusade I would have said yes to any of those, and I have said yes to none of them… because the point was not to get involved in an argument, or to get involved with people who are telling me how racist I am for writing this.
The fact of the matter is that we have to be bold, but without being cruel to each other or without defaming each other. But we have to be bold about speaking truth to power when need be.
But I’m a novelist and I’d rather do creative work than do polemic.
FP: You also post your photography daily on Flickr. What informs your work in that area?
TC: I’m driven by the desire to see things in a way that no one else would. My photos are not staged, they are from real life, but I’m drawn to complicated forms.
FP: Is it the same with your writing - a quest to see things differently?
TC: Absolutely. If I wanted to just take a picture of two guys standing and talking, I would just have taken a picture of them. But what interested me was to create a narrative and see them from a different point of view.
So if I was going to write about them, I might also write about it from a different point of view. You know, a little bit of wit, some visual puns...but for the most part it is patterning that interests me. Of late I have gotten very interested in layers, broken up forms, things in front of each other, so that the layers are not very distinct. Reflections have become very, very important, because then you're not sure what’s in front and what’s behind.
So crowds, cities, surprising use of reflections, lights, strangers - including the world. Not just the flowers, but the chain link fence.
FP: What normally would be the footnotes....
TC: ….have that be part of it. I don’t want to just take a picture of that building - I want everything that’s in my way.
FP: It’s like what Chinua Achebe wrote - he wanted to tell the story that would be the footnote.
TC: That’s right. That’s a good way of thinking about it– the part of the story that perhaps gets ignored.