Known and Strange Things
Chalk it up to my TCK upbringing, but I am continually drawn to the work of authors and artists who live and create between cultures. That helps to explain why I’ve so appreciated Teju Cole’s writing and photography. Born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and raised in Lagos, Nigeria, Cole now lives and works in the United States. But he carries both cultures inside of him, always:
In Lagos, I was a regular middle-class kid. My first language was Yoruba, and I had Nigerian citizenship from birth. Yet I was also an American, the only one in my family – a fact and a privilege that my parents often alluded to. I didn’t dwell on it. I tried to wear it as easily as I could, like someone who is third in line to the throne: aware of extravagant possibilities but not counting on any particular outcome.
Cole will never not be Nigerian. He will never not be American. Identity for him will never not be complicated.
I relate to that. And I relate to this:
My parents live in Lagos, Nigeria. Sometimes, when I miss them or miss home, I go to Google Maps and trace the highway that leads from Lagos Island to our family’s house in the northern part of the city. I find our street amid the complicated jumble of brown lines just east of the bus terminal. I can make out the shape of the house, the tree in front of it, the surrounding fence. I hover there, “visiting home.”
I’ve done the same thing so many times: tracing the road to the rural village in Guatemala where we used to live, finding various apartments in Guatemala City, or tracking down other meaningful places in Pennsylvania, California, Washington, and Texas. “Visiting” home(s).
I’m sure this shared sense of “in-betweenness,” of liminality, is why I resonate with so much of what Cole has to say in his essay collection, Known and Strange Things. Even when he writes about people (Tomas Tranströmer), places (Shanghai), and topics (French cinema) in which I’m not particularly invested – or comes to conclusions I don’t share (atheism) – he always holds my attention. He’s a talented writer with a brilliant mind.
There’s so much in this collection I wish I could share with you, but we’d be here all day. So I’ll leave it at that.
