• TEJU COLE

The following is an excerpt; the full story can be found in Granta 124: Travel

It is one thing to guess at the danger that is Lagos, quite another to experience it first-hand. Whenever I land at Murtala Muhammed International Airport – I go back once or twice each year – I feel that an actuary calculating my life-insurance premiums would have to temporarily charge me more. What I feel each time I enter the country is not a panic, exactly; it is rather a sense of fragility, of being more susceptible to accidents and incidents, as though some invisible veil of protection had been withdrawn, and fate, with all its hoarded hostility, could strike at any time. When I’m in the US, I argue with those who think Lagos is too dangerous a place to visit. I tell them I grew up there and wandered its streets for seventeen years, and nothing untoward happened to me. I point out that this is a city of 21 million people who wake up, brush their teeth, go to work, deal with hassles, sit in traffic, come home at night to eat dinner with their children and watch soap operas before going to bed and starting it all again the next day. There’s modern infrastructure, there’s entertainment, there’s boredom; it isn’t a battlefield. People in Lagos live normal lives in ordinary circumstances, just as people do in London and San Francisco and Jakarta.

I’m less defensive about Lagos when I’m actually there. After a few days back home, I begin to accumulate irritations and fears, and find that I am not alone in doing this. The city makes everyone tense and grouchy. One night, over beers and suya at a lounge in Ikoyi, my friends trade stories of close calls in the city. Some of them have been robbed, or have faced police brutality, or been forced, as I recently have, to pay a bribe. I commiserate with them, aware that most of them have no choice but to live there. I’m only a visitor, exposed to less of Lagos than they are, and I wonder at their tolerance for these numerous aggravations. How do they deal with it? Someone mentions the joys of family, and shows us pictures of his toddler and infant. Another says that vacations are key. ‘I’m going to Italy soon for shopping and to spend time in a spa. That’s what keeps me sane. I can’t be in Lagos and have no upcoming vacations.’ The others murmur their approval, though it’s clear that not all could afford such a lavish stress-reduction programme. In the stories that are being told, we are all on one side of a contest, and Lagos, our adversary, the place we love to hate, is on the other.

My cousin Doyin and I leave the group around 8 p.m. Ikoyi is on the southern end of the city, not far from Victoria Island and about twenty miles from Ojodu, where my parents live. Fifteen years ago, Ojodu was still a sleepy and mostly forested northern suburb, but such has been the city’s growth that now, not only is it fully enfolded in the city’s life, it has in fact become one of the most congested neighbourhoods in all of Lagos, thick with sawmills, abattoirs, trailer parks and bus depots for the travellers to the north and east of Nigeria. The traffic in Ojodu can be a torment, but this is a Sunday, and the hour is late by Nigerian standards. We expect to be home within forty-five minutes. We clear most of Ikorodu Road, one of the main north–south arteries, easily, but things slow down at Ojota, where there is a major bus stop, and we come to a standstill. The windows of the jeep are rolled up, and we have the air conditioner going and the radio playing. While Doyin drives, I work on a small laptop with a mobile modem plugged into it. A street trader taps on the window on the driver’s side. These boys are sometimes aggressive with their sales pitches, and we ignore this one. But he knocks more urgently and when I look up I see that he’s waving a pistol. My momentary confusion is not dispelled by his pointing at my computer. His face is contorted with rage, and he’s shouting. In the sealed interior of the jeep we can make out his words, ‘I will shoot you! Wind down. I will shoot you!’

Even after I realize that we are being robbed, that bullets can shatter glass, that being locked in is no help in this situation, I still feel a vague resentment at having to hand the laptop over. It’s mine. It contains my work, a week of writing, a month or more of photography, personal information. I have hesitated only a few seconds but feel as though I have just woken from a trance: briefly, I imagined myself with a bullet in my thigh, imagined myself bleeding out in traffic in Ojota. Even after I realize that we are being robbed, that bullets can shatter glass, that being locked in is no help in this situation, I still feel a vague resentment at having to hand the laptop over. It’s mine.We turn the radio off and open the window. The gunman is small, thin-faced. We are surrounded by other cars but he doesn’t stop shouting, as though something in him, and not he himself, were pushing the voice out of his chest. I don’t even have the time to close my Facebook page or unplug the Internet modem. I close the laptop and hand it over to him. ‘Your phones, your phones! Give me your phones!’ Doyin hands his BlackBerry over. I have to dig in my bag for the Nokia handset I use when I’m in Nigeria, my hands shaking the entire time. The man doesn’t stop shouting. I’ve never had a loaded gun pointed at me before. Who is this man? What horrors of deprivation have pushed him to this extreme? His glare is so hard, so callous, that I am certain he doesn’t see us, that he sees only whatever it is he imagines we represent.

In the unreal minutes after he leaves, I have the sensation of having drifted into an allegory of class warfare. We are still sitting at the same spot ten minutes later and we haven’t stopped trembling. There are cars to the left and to the right, ahead and behind, but no one around us seems to have noticed anything. Finally the traffic eases, and we drive on towards Ojodu. I feel side-swiped, tired and violated in some basic existential way. I think again of my imaginary actuary, and how justified she might feel at this moment. Just two minutes’ drive from where we were robbed, we see a group of heavily armed mobile police. Doyin and I look at each other and laugh. To report the crime to them would be a waste of time.

But half a mile from home, while we are still on the highway, the engine of the jeep stalls. Unable to start it again, we have to push it the rest of the way, with the unspoken fear that another gunman might show up. By the time we get to the house, my parents are frantic, demanding to know why we are so late and why we didn’t call. When we tell them what has happened, my mother begins to weep. My other cousins are eager to tell stories of those they know who recently faced similar scenarios and were less lucky than we were: the friend who hesitated and was shot at but not hit, the co-worker who was hit and spent three months in hospital.

The city is a sea that can swallow you at any time, a monster that can lash out without warning, a hell of variables and uncertainties. What the solution should be is not clear. Would it be to refrain from using a laptop in traffic, or to avoid carrying a smartphone, or to have a loaded gun at the ready at all times?

Image by Lemi Ghariokwu

By Margherita Stancati

Pick up a “best of the year” book list and the chances are it will include Teju Cole’s debut novel, “Open City.”

The intimate story of a Nigerian-German psychiatrist living in New York, Open City has earned Mr. Cole comparisons to the likes of J.M. Coetzee, Henry James and Gustave Flaubert.

Still, in conversation with India Real Time, Mr. Cole says the magic of photography is unmatched by other art forms.

The Nigerian-American author, who is also a street photographer and an art historian, will be speaking at the Jaipur Literature Festival on Sunday and Monday in sessions centered around fiction and non-fiction writing on Africa.

Edited excerpts:

WSJ: What expectations do you have of your Indian audience?

TC: I grew up in Nigeria and I’ve been living in the U.S. for the past couple of decades, so those are my two homes and those are the two places where my protagonist spent the most time. So in a way it’s this American book and it’s this African book that is written by this African guy who is also an American guy – so what’s the connection to India?

I find that Indian audiences are sophisticated, they have a very robust sense of world literature. I think that some of my best audience encounters and some of my best readers will be in India.

Maybe in part because of the shared post-colonial experience but also in part because of the effort that readers, for example in India, make to negotiate themselves beyond a post-colonial identity, which I think they have in common with readers from Nigeria. They look at the world in a more complicated way.

It’s also that Anglophone experience, which we are no longer content to be at the margins of. So it’s been a nice surprise to find that some of my most ardent readers are from India but also Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

WSJ: What reader do you have in mind when you write?

TC: How do I put it? When I write I have a sort of secret kinship of readers in all countries who don’t know each other but each of whom, when they read my book, feels at home in it. So I write for those readers. It’s almost a sense of writing for a specific person but it’s a specific person who I don’t know. But when the person picks up the book they know it’s for them because it overlaps so much with their own modes of apprehending the world.

It’s not necessarily the Anglophone thing: It’s a certain layered way of relating to culture. People who are at home in multiple cultures, for instance, are my readers, and people who have a certain fluid relationship with the so-called high-culture and vernacular culture, not one or the other, it’s those kind of people.

WSJ: How does photography compare to writing, in your experience?

TC: It’s quite an emotional thing for me in the sense that some days I wake up and all I really want to be is a photographer and I find literature frustrating and not precise or exact or obscure or suggestive enough, and that only photography can capture that for me.

And other days I wake up and I feel much milder about literature, I feel that, ‘OK, literature is a good thing.’ My emotions go from one pole to another.

WSJ: Of the two, which gives you greater satisfaction?

TC: I probably get a deeper satisfaction of having taken a very good photograph than of having written something very good, a very good story. Maybe it’s because the element of magic is so present in a good photograph – luck and magic, but also hard work and being ready and all that.

In the case of literature, so much of what’s on the page is you really making an effort to put it there. So people can give you the credit for what you’ve written down and praise you for writing that sentence.

But in the case of photography, although it also takes a lot of preparation and work, it can give the illusion of chance, of magic: How did you make it happen? How did you happen to be there? And maybe that’s a reaction I’m much more at home with.

WSJ: What’s the last picture you took?

TC: The last decent picture I took was a little barber shop in Panjim, Goa. But you never really know until several weeks afterwards whether it’s a really good photo or not. I can send it to you.

WSJ: Yes, please.

TC:

WSJ: And the last book you read?

TC: “The Cat’s Table” by Michael Ondaatje, which I really liked.

WSJ: What tip would you give to first-time writers?

TC: Keep writing, just write it! The most common thing I find is very brilliant, acute, young people who want to become writers but they are not writing. You know, they really badly want to write a book but they are not writing it. The only advice I can give them is to just write it, get to the end of it. And, you know, if it’s not good enough write another one.

Id like to meet fewer people who say “Oh, I want to write a book, here are 10 pages I’ve written,” and more “Oh, I want to write a book, here are 300 pages I’ve written.”

WSJ: Why go to literary festivals?

TC: What’s amazing about a literary festival is that you turn up to a city that you’ve never been to before, sometimes a town, and if it’s a well-organized festival there’s an auditorium full of people, many of whom have actually read your book.

If they like the book, it’s exciting for them and it’s exciting for you because you meet new readers.

If I read an excerpt of the book and then I discuss it in a panel, it’s also great to see new people who are excited about picking it up and reading it, so you are also generating a new audience.

You are out there advocating for your work, in a sense advocating for your vision of the world in a very direct way. And I guess that so far I find that quite enjoyable. You know, I am participating in the life of my book.

You can follow Margherita and India Real Time on Twitter @margheritamvs and@indiarealtime.

 

>via: http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2012/01/20/teju-cole-on-why-photography-beats-literature/