An Interview with Teju Cole

(conducted by Calvin Evans and Dan Roussel)

Teju Cole,  the Fall 2019 Writer-in-Residence at the Writers House, is the author of five books. In addition to writing fiction, he is a photographer, critic, and curator.  He was the photography critic of The New York Times Magazine from 2015 until 2019, and is currently the Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard University.

The Writer-in-Residence program is made possible with generous support from the Andrea ’79 and Ken Robertson Writers House Innovation Fund.

Dan Roussel  
In 2017, you put on a performance piece called “Black Paper” for Performa 17.  What was the creation process for this, and did anything surprise you about the response to it?

Teju Cole  
The impetus for that piece came out of the dismay of the November 2016 elections. I asked myself what a rapid response would look like on an artistic level. Art usually takes a long time to figure out what it thinks of what's going on. And yet, at the same time, it's always possible to respond rapidly. So, I started to look for a form. One of the first things that came to me, in January 2017, was the title “Black Paper.” It was this idea that there’s information hidden inside what you're looking at. Then I started taking a bunch of photographs, and then I was invited by Performa 17.

In the summer of that year, I had a photography exhibition that included a large collage work called “Black Paper,” but I already knew that the project was something that would have an ongoing life. Then I did the performance. I'd never done a performance piece before. It was very visceral, very personal. I think some parts of it worked very well. I really, really liked the soundscape I made. I'm not a professional musician, but I made a 42 minute soundscape that, for me, really holds up as a piece of work. The physical body performance aspect was okay, for that moment. I got some good reviews, and some not so good reviews. Interestingly, the not-so-good reviews were in very small places. And the really good reviews were in the New York Times and places like that. As an artist myself, I know that it was a work in progress. I'm now taking some of those complex ideas and working on a book that is also called Black Paper.

I remain curious to see what can be generated out of political darkness, but I also want to engage in these meditations on the color black, on shadows, and so on.  

Dan Roussel  
So, coming up with the concept of “Black Paper” was a really pivotal moment for you.

Teju Cole  
It was, and it came out of a dream. I had a dream that just scrolled out the words, "black paper," and I seized on that.

Dan Roussel  
And you also mentioned the soundscape?

Teju Cole  
The performance had flashing images, my body on the stage responding, static for long stretches, but then responding like a performance of a dream. And then there was a soundtrack that I made with production software, and on which I performed several instruments and did loops and used many different musical styles. There was a lot of vocalization, and I used some found audio as well. It was super intense! It also confirmed for me the hunger and the need to always find a new form in which to do the work: to respect what the work required, not to phone it in, or do whatever it was I did the last time, but always to find the next thing.

Dan Roussel  
In one of your essays in Known and Strange Things, you write about your encounter with Vidia Naipaul. The essay lays a pretty critical eye on him. He's since passed, but how do you navigate that honest storytelling about people who are pretty influential in writing?

Teju Cole  
I don't really like the genre of, "Oh, I met somebody and this is my tell-all." In that piece, which did feel a little bit revealing of him, two things justify the telling for me. One is that the piece was also very revealing of myself, and exploring that vulnerability of meeting a literary master and trying to impress him. I wanted to write about that because it was uncomfortable to see myself in this way. But secondly, our encounter ended with a direct provocation from him, where he said, "Oh, you should write about meeting me. It'll be good for you." And I was like, "Oh, really?" So he was kind of egging it on a little bit. And as it turns out, he did read the piece. I can’t imagine he loved it, but he described it as "tough, but fair."

Dan Roussel  
As you mentioned, Patrick French wrote a biography of him that wasn't very favorable. And he said the "record would correct itself."

Teju Cole  
Yeah, he gave this guy total access, letters and everything. And he must have known that some of this stuff would make him look bad. And yet he let it be, and then, when the book came out, he was wounded by it. He was a tough old bird, Naipaul, he was not the nicest person. A brilliant writer, and very, very perceptive, and I think a lot of his writing was also a process of negotiating his relationship with his own cruelty, of recognizing that in himself and trying to understand what to make of it, without necessarily being repentant about it. We tend to have quite simple responses to people like that, these days. You know, so and so is a bad guy, he's "cancelled."

The judgments that we need to make when somebody is misogynist, or racist, or whatever, are obvious. What's less obvious: what are we supposed to do in the space that's been opened up inside an interaction with a particular person? And that's a real challenge, a writerly challenge. Nobody has to tell you that racism is bad. But interacting with, or assessing the emotional or intellectual content of somebody, or somebody's work—that takes real work. That takes some digging, and finding what is valuable in the work and what's not.

Dan Roussel  
And does that take a lot of practice, learning how to sift through?

Teju Cole  
It does. But I believe that part of the writerly role is to go to the place that other people don't want to go to. I think most people don't want to hang out with Vidia Naipaul.

Dan Roussel  
You are the Gore Vidal Professor of Creative Writing at Harvard. How did you come into that position? And what has the experience been like for you?

Teju Cole  
So I've been teaching at Harvard for a year. I came into the role based on the invitation of the English faculty, who were looking to expand the offerings in creative writing. I did not have some grand plan to become a professor at Harvard, or a photography critic at the New York Times Magazine. But when the opportunity comes along, you're answering two questions. You're saying, "Am I interested in this?" But you're also saying, "Am I prepared for this?" In both cases, I felt the answer was yes.

I don't know what comes next for me. I might be there for a while; I might go do something else; or while I'm there, I might be doing something that is challenging in a different way, and preparing, but I don't know for what. But the thing is to have your work be focused and serious, to have it be ready, so that when opportunity comes knocking, you're not scrambling. When the English faculty approached me and said, "Can you put together a dossier of your work?" I was able to do it rapidly. Even though I had not been job hunting. So, that's how that came about. I had taught at Bard College for many years, but I'd taken a break from teaching in order to write. When Harvard approached, it seemed like a good opportunity to wind down my photography column at the New York Times Magazine and go back into teaching.

Dan Roussel  
Does your role as professor ever conflict with your role as a writer?  How has teaching changed your relationship to writing?

Teju Cole  
Yes, it can potentially create a conflict. Sometimes part of what a teacher is doing is actually being a bit of a manager. You're working at an institution and following rules. Meanwhile as a writer, you're trying not to be too bound by other people's rules of how your thinking should go. Potentially, they could be in conflict but, for me, they're not. I've taught for a long time. And I know what I want to present in the classroom. And I also know how committed I am to my artistic freedom. What I'm actually finding, more and more, is that the things I'm teaching—the way I'm talking to my students, the thinking I'm doing with them, all of this is influencing the way I write. Articulating to them what is happening inside a prose work: that knowledge and information has come out of my writing, and own reading, even though, of course, I don't assign my writing to them. But the fact that I have been a writer, the fact that I'm an avid reader, these are feeding what I teach in class. But then what I teach in class—struggling to find the right language to describe what's happening in a work by Michael Ondaatje or by Anne Carson—putting that into words means that next time I sit at my desk to write, that articulation is still echoing in my head. In a work of prose, one of the fundamental questions we're asking is, "How does one sentence influence the next sentence?" Or, more simply, "What is the next sentence?" And so when I sit down to write, some of the things I've articulated in class help me figure out what the next sentence is. Questions of content, cadence, rhythm, and so on.

Dan Roussel  
Have students been receptive to your teaching? 

Teju Cole  
Yeah, the class is an exciting space for all of us. It's emotionally charged, but you walk away having learned something that will sit with you for a long time.

Dan Roussel  
And you're not just a professor and a creative; you're a novelist and memoirist, an essayist, a poet, a photographer, a curator, a critic. You have many different roles, and how do you manage them all? 

Teju Cole  
I've written a couple poems and hardly ever published any, so I'm not really a poet. I read a lot of poetry. And out of that reading, I’ve become a bit of a poetry critic. And I was an art major in undergrad. I have an Art and Art History degree, so I can draw and paint. My senior project in undergrad was actually sculpture; but in terms of regular practice, I'm not really a painter, I'm not really a sculptor. Now the reason I say this is that I really believe in freedom. But I also really believe in honing your craft. And I don't have the craft right now to declare myself a poet.

So the things that I do, being a curator, being a photographer, being a novelist, being an essayist; these are all crafts that I really work on, making sure that my skills are up to snuff. It's not just, to imagine the voice of someone who’s critical of me: "He wrote this novel, it did very well, and now he thinks he can just phone it in, and do anything." I'm not just gonna suddenly show up and be a choreographer. If I wanted to be a choreographer, I’ll go learn. I would really pour myself into it. I'd learn something about it, and learn something about what choreographers are doing now. I don't think, as photographer, it’s enough to say, “I'm going to take some pretty pictures.” No, I'm interested in what's happening in the world of photography. What is good work? What is interesting work?

Dan Roussel  
Do you feel like you're willing to expand into these different fields that you say you haven't honed the craft yet? Or are you content with what you really have worked on?

Teju Cole  
It's neither! For any given project, I ask myself, how does it want to manifest in the world? What skills do I need to help that happen? So, I spent a lot of time in Switzerland traveling around the country. And I pretty much answered the question for myself; that is, I don't want to write a book about Switzerland. I don't want to write stories about it. I don't want to do poems about it. I didn't want to write critically about their politics. What I want to do is respond to that landscape through photography. And so that's what I'm doing, and I'm working on a book about that, which will be out in March 2020. 

I go to Nigeria every year; I grew up there. I'm trying to base a new work on there. I've photographed a little bit, and I'm actually photographing there more. But I know that what I want to do is write prose about it. But I want the prose to be experimental. So then, that form is dictated by what the subject requires out of me. And maybe the next time around, I'll say, "I want to do something based in Boston" or something. Maybe the outlet for that will be a novel because maybe, photographically, it's not that interesting to me. Just finding what the stuff requires, like "I’m thinking a lot about my late grandmother, but how do I want to respond to that?" Maybe I'll do a series of paintings, but then I'll have to get back into that and see. So, the versatility is not a performance of “I can do everything.” It’s more about wanting to serve whatever the material is that's asking me to engage with it, and finding the proper form for that, and doing whatever I can to learn that proper form.

Dan Roussel  
Speaking of outlets, and figuring out how to process experiences into your art, how do you feel like your visual work has influenced your writing, and vice versa?

Teju Cole  
I used to say they had nothing in common with each other. And now I realize that they have everything in common with each other. They're both expressions of the same spirit. And that spirit is one that seeks to testify to the multiplicity of the world. It’s a spirit that is very interested in conveying complexity via apparent simplicity. My photos are very quiet. The implicit question in them is: "Why is this interesting?" I think a lot of my writing is like that as well: sort of densely descriptive, very slow paced. A lot of my work seeks to be more contemplative and less antic—the work seeks to be politically engaged, but in a very cool way. With the volume not turned up loud but set to "medium," because I don't want to shout.

Dan Roussel  
And do you think you've found the balance between your visuals and your writing yet, when you bring them together? Or is there an ideal marriage for you?

Teju Cole  
I think I've found a balance, but it's a dynamic balance. So the balance that worked for the last project has to be re-confronted for the next project, and a new balance has to be found.

Calvin Evans  
More specifically about Blind Spot, what was the process like of marrying those photographs with those essays? Would you take photographs and think of something to write? Or write before the photograph?

Teju Cole  
Marrying is a good term for it, because a lot of it was just matchmaking. I had a whole bank of images, a whole bank of notes and embryonic writings. Then I started to think about this idea of blindness. 

So, for instance, when I go to Lebanon, I have a bunch of thoughts there that connect to this project. Meanwhile, I also shoot several rolls of film. But I'm not just picking my best pictures from Lebanon and then picking my best stories from Lebanon and yoking them together. I have a picture and I ask if I have something that's worth connecting to it. No matter how good the picture is, if it doesn't work with a narrative, it doesn't go into the project, and vice versa: a narrative without an appropriate picture wouldn’t make it into the book. Lots of interesting things happened in Lebanon, but if I did not have a good image, no use to me. So it ended up being a coherent work, in a certain sense, containing some images that were actually rather quiet and would not hold their own on a wall. But that was not the point: to have a kind of organic rhythm. So matchmaking is how I connect things.

Calvin Evans  
How do you feel that taking photographs affects your memory of a place? What is your relationship with photography?

Teju Cole  
A photograph intensifies my memory of the photograph of the place. However, the photograph of the place is a mere aspect of the place. And therefore, in that highly limited way, a photograph intensifies my memory of the place. It intensifies my memory of the photograph, intensifies my memory of the act of photographing, it intensifies my memory of the moment in which the photograph happened. And if there are enough of these strung together, it actually makes the place richer, more memorable. But of course, what then falls away are all the moments that were not photographed. I lose those details very quickly. If you don't photograph it, or if you don't immediately write down notes about it, you'll forget. But if you write down notes about it, you'll remember what you wrote down. Whatever you did not write down, you'll forget that. It's funny.

Calvin Evans  
Out of all the places you've traveled to, which would you say was the most impactful?

Teju Cole  
So I'm Nigerian and American. So those are the two countries of my life, in a sense. But I've now had the opportunity to visit 43 countries in my travels. The three I think about most are probably Switzerland, Brazil and Lebanon. For all three opposite reasons, like a three-cornered hat. They're all very different from each other. But they were the most vivid to my heart. Lebanon, I only went once. Brazil and Switzerland, I keep returning to.

Calvin Evans  
Would you want to go back to Lebanon?

Teju Cole  
I think so but I'm uncertain. I was there in conditions that made it really convenient to be there. For three weeks, and it was very, very interesting. And now that that cohort of people I was there with has moved on, and now that the political situation is in upheaval, I don't know.

Dan Roussel  
Do you feel like there's one piece of art or writing that has impacted you in a way that nothing else ever has?

Teju Cole  
I think it was the first time I saw 8 1/2, by Fellini. I'm very open to influence and I have lots of artwork that I love, and many that I love very deeply. So this could be one out of ten possible examples. But when I saw 8 1/2 by Fellini, it happened at an interesting point in my life. I was already my mid 20s. And I thought I already knew what my favorite films were. That list had been solid for ten years: Kieslowski, Malle, Tarkovsky. I saw this Fellini film, and for three days afterwards, I could not think of anything else. I felt like I had been brushed with liquid gold. My life was utterly transformed. All the choices made in that film—the music, the way people moved on the screen, the lilting dance, and the particular approach of the narrative, joining this to that, to that, to that—it was like a comedy, or a tragic comedy in a way. It ended up being very influential on the structural approach I took to writing Open City which is also very associative. We talk about “free association,” but I’m as interested in the mechanics of the “association” as I am in the “free.” Open City moves through the point of view of one protagonist moving through a city, one person's life. Fellini's 8 1/2 reintroduced me to the sheer pleasure of a complete and powerful work. It's great when you find something like that that just recharges your sensibilities, and changes whatever it is you go on to do. We're always searching for that experience, and it doesn't happen often. The older you get, the less it happens. So it's always very special.

Teju Cole ​is a novelist, photographer, critic, curator, and the author of five books. He was the photography critic of the New York Times Magazine from 2015 until 2019. He is currently the Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard.