Absent Tidings

A passing boat leaves a wake in its absence. Seen from above, when the water is not rough, the boat appears to unzip the surface of the sea. Waves roll out from the outline of the once-there hull. After a while, the waves become wavelets and fold back into the sea. The water wicks away whatever wash the propellors have left behind. The foregone trail of the boat dissolves as the sea settles into vacancy.  

In a 1991 photo by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, taken in the wake of the death of his partner Ross from HIV-AIDS, two white pillows lie concaved at the head of an unmade, empty bed. The pillows do not embrace but nestle in alongside one another. The lower corner of the pillow on the left lounges over the other on the right, like a loose arm tossed over a lover in slumber. The pillow on the right slopes off the far edge of the bed, gently pushed to the side by its plumper companion. Where two heads once lay now lie two indents. The hollows in the pillows appear carved, as though in marble. The folds in the white top sheet are held in relief like a 3D topographical map. The pillows, whether in hours, days, or weeks, would have plumped themselves back up. The sheets would have been changed, the bed remade. But for now, this photo keeps absence present.  

Teju Cole works in the wake. He writes and photographs to figure out how loss occupies life and art. When we mourn, do we let go or hold on? Are break-ups gotten over, mended, forgotten, or just left behind? Can a memory lapse be recalled? Or does it – a puncture or a bruise, perhaps, rather than a lapse – reappear elsewhere in the strangest of places? How are colonial plunders, displacements, and violence to be reckoned with? What sort of expiation would come from reparation? Despite appearing to be in great need of them, the narrators of Cole’s Every Day is for the Thief (2007), Open City (2011), and his latest work Tremor (2023) decline to adopt, and even disdain, many of the stories we tell to explain (away) and repair losses; they exist exclusively in the wake. 

Tremor begins at a loss, or rather, losses: the forty-something-year-old Tunde tries to photograph a hedge whose blooms are fading. A neighbour yells at him, he cannot take photos here for this is private property. Tunde packs up his camera and departs, the sought-after shot untaken. This opening scene evokes the photo of a hedge that begins Blind Spot (2017), an assembly of short texts and 150 colour photos written and taken by Cole. The fledging hedge in that photo is trellised by a chain-link fence that borders a driveway in a town in upstate New York. The hedge does not look well. It appears to grow sparser towards the ground. Living comes to look an awful lot like dying. Alongside the photo is a reference to Chris Marker’s 1983 documentary film, Sans Soleil:  

Spring is the season, Cole writes, when ‘shadows grow’. It is that most fragile moment ‘when the sleep begins to leave your eyes’.  

Cole comes to feel for moments lost to view after he temporarily lost his vision. In an essay also called ‘Blind Spot’ in Known and Strange Things (2016), Cole recalls staying up late to read the final pages of Virginia Woolf’s diaries, which were darkened with ‘the loss of her London home in war, her terrible nervousness about the ongoing air raids, the unexpected death of Joyce’, yet also ablaze with her radiant attention to life. He woke up with a ‘veil right across the visual field of my left eye’. Cole, who has since been diagnosed with the absurdly literal ‘Big Blind Spot Syndrome’, still intermittently experiences losses of vision – as does Tunde in Tremor.   

In another parallel with his author (the current Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard University), Tunde is a professor at an unnamed New England College. When he returns to his office the Monday following his foiled attempt to photograph the hedge, he finds a black trimmed envelope on his desk. It is the death notice of a colleague. Tunde keeps the card, not because he knew the deceased, but because he has taken to collecting the notices, hearing in their formulaic formality an echo of discontinued public mourning rituals. The following weekend, he and Sadako, his wife, drive up to Maine to shop for antiques. He finds a ci wara of the Bambara People. He buys or ‘rescues’ it after pondering what origin story would authenticate the ci wara and how it has wound up for sale not just in the United States, but on a homestead that was burnt to the ground by the Abenaki people some four centuries earlier. A few paragraphs later, the thus-far third-person narration tilts into addressing a ‘you’ who turns out to be a recently deceased friend. Jolting as they may be, none of these is the animating loss, the tremor, that purportedly sets the work in motion: what Tunde calls ‘some obscure but persistent sourness’ in his and Sadako’s relationship occasions their separation. Tremor maps the aftershocks.  

Loss sets almost all of Cole’s work going. Every Day is for the Thief (2007), his first work of fiction, opens with an epigraph from Maria Benet’s poetry collection, Mapmaker of Absences (2005):  

Memory, she says, is ‘the mapmaker of absences, tracing / vanishing steps – the fugitive friend, a burden.’ The unnamed narrator of Every Day is for the Thief returns home to Lagos after many years living in New York. He finds himself estranged from the city. Many Black Diaspora writers – from Aimé Césaire in Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939) to Dany Laferrière in L’énigme du retour (2009) – have found nostos wanting in its power to bring the interminable loss of exile to an end. By calling memory, that absent-minded activity, a fugitive friend and a burden, Cole begins the work not with an eye to closing the rift, but with a highly circumspect appreciation of the ease and potency with which a loss of home can be creatively re-sourced.  He is one for whom, to adapt Freud, every locating of home is in fact a relocation.  

The narrator of Open City (2011), Julius, a Nigerian psychiatrist completing a fellowship in New York, sets out seemingly unburdened: ‘And so when I began to go on evening walks last fall, I found Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set out into the city.’ This opening line alludes to the first line of W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (1995): ‘In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work.’ (In the original German, the narrator does not wish to ‘dispel’ the emptiness but die ausbreitende Leere entkommen zu können – ‘to escape from or sidestep or get around this spread-out emptiness’.) Despite eliding any mention of emptiness, much of what Julius then encounters, or misses, or re-encounters over the course of his wanderings are the original losses of his life. Julius’s father died when he was a teenager. Numb from grief, he forced himself on Moji one night at a party when they were both teenagers, an incident he apparently had forgotten until she confronts him many years later. He and his German mother were torn apart by their unspeakable grief. She was born in Berlin in 1945. In the course of the novel, Julius goes to Brussels ostensibly to seek out news of her mother, his grandmother. Or perhaps he goes to escape New York, the scene of his all-too recent break up. As Pieter Vermeulen has observed, whether Julius is flâneur, fugueur or fugitive, he cleaves to his losses. 

Melancholic mourning, lilting listlessness, active acedia, ‘reluctant cosmopolitanism’, ‘lassitude picaresque’ – these are some of the oxymoronic phrases that have been used to describe the course Cole takes in the wake. Tunde, Julius, and the narrator of Every Day is for the Thief are restless. They do not dwell, unlike many other characters in grief narratives in contemporary autofiction – such as Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Annie Ernaux’s Une Femme, and Karl Ove Knausgård’s A Death in the Family – who continually run up (and up) against outstanding losses as they try to come to terms with the death of a mother or the end of a marriage. Instead, Cole’s figures roam about cities and their own interior landscapes. Their daily doings, their textual divagations, and their attempts at diversion often trace the outline of a loss.  

A chapter early on in Tremor is a case in point. It begins with Tunde’s opening a workshop by asking the students what has been preoccupying them lately; proceeds with a teaching assistant’s mentioning Samuel Little, a black man and America’s most prolific serial killer whose drawings of the women he has killed are, to Tunde’s eye, ‘full of life’; swirls as Tunde questions what this disturbing idea means for memory and the ethics of photography; sidles off into recollections; turns to the second-person address wherein Tunde is brought to tears by being unable to remember the face of ‘you his beloved friend of nearly two decades’, who is now dead; and then concludes with some seemingly idle thoughts about the vignetted images sent back to Earth from the Mars Rover Curiosity. Along the way, he bypasses the rift between him and Sadako only to end up at curiosity: a passage which might seem a fickle return to life were it not for the fact that Emily Brown, his astronomer colleague and friend, has recently been diagnosed with cancer. Is Tunde then just experiencing, sidelong, the disorganised overload of grief, which, for one reason or another, he does not meet head on?   

Psychoanalysis, which could well be defined as the enquiry into the ways in which we misplace losses, would answer such a question in the affirmative, having long tried to trace and even right the course of this kind of fretted energy. Julius in Open City reads Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917). In the essay, Freud distinguishes Mourning – a re-animating return to the world following the loss of an object – from Melancholia, a ‘painful dejection’ and ongoing inability to love or to take an interest in the world, which is onset by a lack of conscious comprehension of what has been lost. Freud, and later psychoanalysts like Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion, and Jean Laplanche, would go on to develop and complicate the work of mourning as well as the presumption that melancholia is invariably dispiriting.  

Julius makes no move to consider his own experience in light of Freud’s distinction. Nor does he explicitly dispute it. Instead, he considers the incomplete mourning of New York after 9/11 and sees in one of his own patients ‘that faraway look of those who had somehow gotten locked inside their sadness’. That Julius disassociates himself from the seemingly all-too relevant Freudian account of mourning and melancholia opens out a space for the reader to see him as either one who has, like his patient, unfortunately locked himself into (or out of) losses he does not comprehend, or as someone trying to reconceive of losses outside of the reparative or cathartic scripts of psychoanalysis.  

Cole has often left readers nonplussed because although he registers the lapses of, and even harm done by, Tunde’s and Julius’ responses to loss, he neither intervenes to set these characters right nor offers the reader some illuminating insight into the lacunae. Instead, Cole lets his characters ‘melancholise’, a term Jonathan Flatley adopts from Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy to describe how modernist writers from Baudelaire to W. E. B. Dubois remap their affective terrains by relinquishing reparative scripts and the fantasy of some primordial wholeness; instead they find a porous potential in the losses themselves. Walter Benjamin’s ‘left-wing melancholy’ and Baudelaire’s stanza from ‘The Swan’ (‘Paris changes! But naught in my melancholy / Has stirred! New palaces, scaffolding, blocks of stone / Old quarters, all become for me an allegory, / And my dear memories are heavier than rocks’), exemplify, for Flatley, how melancholia – that seemingly unbearably subjective even solipsistic phenomenon – can afford access to the ways modernity structures our experience of loss. Less committed, Cole not only doubts whether melancholia is or can be made so advantageous, but also impugns his character’s bids for melancholic freedom because such efforts can prove as fantastical and limiting as the renounced reparative scripts themselves. He lets his characters melancholise to trace what they cannot reconfigure and what lies beyond their ken.  

Another one of Julius’ references sheds light on this equivocal method: the essay ‘The Rhetoric of Blindness’ by Paul de Man, the literary critic who made unsettling doubt his cornerstone. Julius reads the essay as arguing that insight obscures or blots out certain elements that blindness conversely reveals. Julius gives as an example the Enlightenment, which, he thinks, opened the world to rational comprehension while casting into shadow theological belief. This reading bolsters the great suspicion with which he views introspection, psychiatric auscultation, and psychoanalytic therapy – all that purports to bring bad, hidden, unconscious, or dislocated things to light. Julius instead subscribes to the notion that certain psychological experiences such as loss are only truly visible when they are left in the dark.  

Julius’ gloss of de Man is, tellingly, not quite right. de Man suggests that to arrive at an insight, certain writers have needed to work blindly, and their method contradicts their resulting perception. From a certain point of view, Julius’ misreading might then make for yet another defective defence against the imperfect yet possibly good-enough means available to him to sound his life. From another, Cole appears to be asking a reader to see what comes from letting Julius work blindly or even mistakenly. What comes then at the end of all three works of fiction are strained attempts to preserve these narrators’ absence of mind.  

In the penultimate chapter of Everyday is for the Thief, the narrator departs Lagos for New York. He has a fever and vomits profusely, yet ‘the word “home”’ still sits in his ‘mouth like foreign food.’ In New York he sips tea and up surges not more vomit but a Proustian involuntary memory of the day he lost his bearings in Lagos. He recalls winding up in a narrow street where coffins are made. He considers taking a photo (interspersed throughout the novel are photographs Cole himself has taken). He decides against it on the dubious grounds that to do so would be to ‘bind to film what is intended only for the memory, what is meant only for a sidelong glance followed by forgetting’. Instead, he dutifully offers a circumscribed appreciation of the carpenters and the women who bear witness to death as they make the coffins and prepare the bodies for burial. Heedful remembrance seems to be an appropriate, although palled, final resting place for a narrator held fast between the untenable effort to reacquaint himself with what was once his home and a commitment to Theodor Adorno’s admonition that it is ‘part of morality not to be at home in one’s home’.  

The repose is nonetheless broken by a photograph, which is either the book’s last word or an image beyond the narrator’s telling. The photograph – the only one in the book where the subjects look at the camera – shows two children on a boat coming towards the photographer. One wears a long white robe and stands on the prow. The other, a shirtless boy, stands at the stern. He has one foot on the gunwale.  His left arm reaches out towards the photographer, whether in greeting or admonition, it is not clear. As the boat comes hauntingly on, the stays of memory, voluntary or involuntary, and forgetting appear frail. Even if memory is the mapmaker of absences, the narrator cannot leave his lost home for dead.  

The end of Open City is comparatively more developed. It is also darker. Julius mistakenly stumbles out upon a fire escape after a concert. He feels that he is one whose ‘entire being was caught up in a blind spot’. It is as though, he relates in a sentence where the ‘it’ becomes increasingly indeterminate, he ‘had come so close to something that it had fallen out of focus, or fallen so far away from it that it had faded away’. He walks down to the Hudson, passing along the way the apartment where his former teacher and friend, Dr Saito, had recently died. As is his way, he does not dwell on that loss but instead goes on a boat trip, which takes him around the Statue of Liberty. Remarking that the statue’s crown had remained closed since ‘late 2001’, he recalls that as a working lighthouse it ‘fatally disorientated birds’, the carcasses of which were sent to the Smithsonian and other scientific institutions in the late nineteenth century by one Colonel Tassin. According to Julius, Tassin also began to write detailed reports on each death: the species of bird, the hour of their death, and the prevailing weather conditions. Wind and visibility did affect the count; however, ‘the sense persisted that something more troubling was at work’. For, and here the novel concludes, on October 13, 1888, 175 wrens were collected, ‘although the night just past hadn’t been particularly windy or dark.’  

The morbid detachment with which Julius considers the birds’ deaths is troubling, even egregious, in post-9/11 New York. But the sense of trouble, at least for him, seemingly lies elsewhere. To return to Julius’ gloss on de Man, perhaps the problem lies with an empirical assessor of losses who cannot rationally explain the phenomenon and who shows that we have lost the ability to take the auspices. For could not these dead ‘fowls of heaven’ be a sign that the land ‘shall mourn, and everyone that dwelleth therein shall languish’ (Hosea 4:3)? Is collecting and dissecting tagged corpses of the king of all birds (as wrens were formerly known) all that is left to us? Yet the trouble might not presage what is yet to come, but what has already come to pass. For it is not the wind or the darkness or even some divine retribution that kills the birds. They are misled by the supposedly guiding light of the Statue of Liberty. Taken at his most cynical, Julius concludes that his patients, New York post 9/11, and many others are all engaged in an inauspicious and ultimately futile tallying of losses. Futile because, as Freud puts it in The Ego and the Id, ‘the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object cathexes.’  

No inkling is given as to whether Julius is really crying out for help or comfort, either of which may or may not be readily available, or whether he is complaining about dubious tales of remission.  Complaint was a medieval and early modern poetic form voicing powerlessness in response to erotic, religious or political grievances. Dilatory and excessive, complaining was both an expression of suffering (plangere, from which we derive ‘-plaint’, means to beat one’s breast) and the finding of fault, or the registration of dissatisfaction. With all the irresolute force of the mode, yet in a chillingly understated manner, Julius complains that modern stories leave us emptied of woe.  

Unlike these two untoward endings, Tremor comes to an end with the estranged Tunde and Sadako making up.  It is not exactly clear how they do so. They do not do (more) couple’s therapy. There are no long conversations about the hurt Tunde has done. They simply get together again. Perhaps, it all comes down to his name: Tunde means ‘back again’ or ‘has returned’ in Yoruba. On a winter evening, after a party, Tunde leaves Sadako tidying up and goes back to photograph that hedge. Unhurried and keen to capture something of the proprietary menace that saw him off the first time, he takes several photos. He varies the exposure time and gets the one he wants, one where he is at the right distance from the hedge and can still feature the windows of the house behind it. Then, for the first time ever, he suffers an attack of vertigo. He does not speculate on its cause or any potential link between having recovered everything missing at the novel’s beginning and the sensation that either he or the world is whirling. Instead, he takes assurance from relating his symptoms to Sadako. Reciprocal grounding is a key feature of their relationship. Earlier, she texted him, ‘You keep me from losing my head.’ He texted back, ‘Without you, I would lose my footing.’ Having regained his footing, he begins to drift off. Sadako places the flat of her wrist on his. ‘I listen,’ he relays, ‘for the soft beat of blood through the skin. I listen as best as I can in the dimming stillness. I slow my breathing and soon I hear nothing.’  

The tremor has stilled and this couple has come to beat in sync, but the union may well be hollow – Tunde can hear neither himself nor her. Audible in the quiet are the concerned or caring or interested questions that he does not put to her, although maybe they go without saying. The amortising ending, however, lets Tunde off easy, for it is an all-consuming understatement: everything amounts to nothing. Such a forced recourse to nothing, however delicately equipoised it may be, betrays Cole’s anxiety over how and whether stories so tenaciously resistant to closure must, nevertheless, draw to a close. All his novels end at night, with characters staving off, unable to, or just about to sleep, which in Tremor seems almost a deliverance. They end, that is, where his narrators’ consciousnesses end, offering Cole an easy out: losses can be aligned with, or resigned to, a suspension of narration. Maybe losses do just give way, but whether that makes for a way-on or a breach or yet another loss is a question Cole’s novels leave no room to answer.