February 2022 - Thinking with Teju Cole: On Black Paper
According to the University of Chicago Press, “the Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Family Lectures bring to campus individuals who are making fundamental contributions to the arts, humanities, and humanistic social sciences.” Out of these lectures arrive a series of books. The 2021 edition is Teju Cole’s Black Paper.
I first heard Teju Cole talking about Black Paper, perhaps in a less specific sense than the shape that his present book has taken, as “something he was writing” on the podcast Magic Hour. At that time, he was ostensibly discussing the release of his book Blind Spot (a book which caught my eye years ago in a Barnes and Noble, before I knew that I enjoyed photographs, essays, and photobooks) and it made a profound impression on me even then. I have read all of Cole’s novels and books except for a few of his recent photobooks (e.g., Golden Apple of the Sun). The press and his literary agents, and perhaps (judging from Black Paper), he himself likes Open City best. I like Open City, but I maintain a certain fondness for Everyday is for the Thief. Be that as it may, I was particularly interested in Black Paper, because I had been following Cole’s writing on the New York Times On Photography segment, which was excellent as well as some of his other pieces that were responding to the socio-political dynamics of the period, such as the Blackness of the Panther, and other essays. Black Paper, given its title and the topics that Cole was wading into, I hoped would be a unique foray into the properly political realm.
Black Paper does this, and it does not do this. It is certainly worth reading, and worth thinking with.
The book is made up of a series of essays that are only very loosely connected thematically – meditations on death, on photography (and the news media), on the act of writing itself, on art history, on pressing contemporary issues (racism, imperialism, nationalism), and travel. Certainly, there are more (e.g., fascism, which is broached through reference to Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, but as a an issue it remains synonymous with “evil” and not really analyzed (211)).
One of the things I have always admired about Cole is both how he manages to, for me at least, be easy to read (the writing clips along), but also for the way he threads the needle between a style of stream of consciousness and controlled narrative. He often fragments his prose, but clearly does so with intention. In my view, this allows some interesting insight into his own thought process. This makes his discussions of Caravaggio for instance at the start of the book, all the more interesting as he contemplates the man, his art, as well as the places and people he meets as he travels in Caravaggio’s footsteps to view his paintings, or not (thwarted). Cole’s clear appreciation for the aesthetic experience of reading and writing, which extends to photography as well, has been something I have always found inspiration in. It is an embrace of a certain level of fluidity, while maintaining clarity. And there is a further enjoyment for me here – when so much of what I read in academic books, articles, essays, and more is so deeply formulaic, i.e., predetermined (e.g. 160 page sociology monographs written, or at least edited in the same style), Cole is a real breath of fresh air for me. Of course, Cole’s influences are clear – Orhan Pamuk and Gabriel García Márquez come to mind, whose work I also enjoy for its certain kind of freedom of prose, but Ray Bradbury even comes to my mind more immediately. Perhaps that is quite an odd comparison. I can sit down and read Bradbury’s speculative, cautionary fictions in an untiresome way in the same way that I can read Cole.
Beyond the stylistic though, Cole, is one of the few authors who openly attempts to diagnose the webs of complexity and meaning around the issues of colonialism and Empire, of race (less so class), and does so in ways that are both personal and measured. In this book, he discusses race in America, Israel-Palestine, the US-Mexico border, war, and more. He also always finds his way into these topics in innovative ways, most often through personal anecdotes, paintings, films, and photographs. Whenever I read him, I am always happy to find a new artist or intellectual that was unfamiliar to me to which I can begin to research (e.g., Santu Mofokeng, Tomoki Imai).
Ultimately, I read Black Paper as Cole’s attempt at an engagement with contemporary social issues that is deeply intellectual, yet accessible. It deals in questions of the historical structuration and tendencies of society, while remaining humanistic. It is, more than any of Cole’s other books, a clear attempt at a form of cultural survey and a portrait of our times. For these reasons the book, and Cole’s work more broadly, are useful and necessary.
In as far as Cole has now become a key agent, a kind of tastemaker, a leader of a certain kind of thoughtful socio-political commentary, his work demands attention. And I continue to find it worth my time in ways that so much else is not. However, Cole is also quite clever in his delivery, and always thoughtful in the titles he gives his works. And I think that with the title Black Paper, he is, at least in part, signaling to the reader that perhaps he knows that his writing is not a substitute for thorough social analysis. In this regard, essays (which make up the contents of this book) share something in common with photographs – they are fragmented. And because of this, they can constitute a critical commentary on the state of contemporary consciousness.
In my interpretation, Cole reinvents the term Black Paper from the lineage of silhouette (p. 118). As Cole describes, early French photographic pioneer Auguste Eduoart invented, or at least popularized this word. Edouart was a leading portraitist of his era, specifically because of his “shadowgraphs.”
sil·hou·ette
/ˌsilo͞oˈet/
noun
the dark shape and outline of someone or something visible against a lighter background, especially in dim light.
verb
2. cast or show (someone or something) as a dark shape and outline against a lighter background.
The silhouette intrigues. It demarcates an invitation into the multiple shades, hues, and tones of blackness, or darkness, and in Cole’s writing, into questions about evil, death, and despair. Black Paper is not an answer to Imperialism, to racism, or to fascism, but if these are its proper subject matters, then they are a kind of response – they mark a mode and territory of investigation that I think can be applicable to a wide range of people and fields. Like the silhouette, it implores investigation of the issue(s) at hand because it provides an outline, a structure for interpretation. I think this is the proper mode in which to read Black Paper, and I think this goes just as well for Known and Strange Things and Blind Spot. In fact, I would consider these as a kind of trio due to their similarities - the way that these books reference one another through the same events, trips, and topics. And with that said, I am excited to see where Cole will go next. I hope that this book functions for Cole and readers, in a similar way to how he describes the functioning of a good photograph it “solicits a kind of listening” and “occasions further investigations (107).