Known and Strange Things

by Teju Cole

  How on earth did this happen to the reader in chief? What became of literature’s vaunted power to inspire empathy? (A power that we simultaneously disavow and perpetually cite.) Why was the candidate Obama, in word and in deed, so radically different from the president he became? In Andrei Tarkovsky’s eerie 1979 masterpiece, Stalker, the landscape called the Zona has the power to grant people’s deepest wishes, but it can also derange those who traverse it. I wonder if the presidency is like that: a psychoactive landscape that can madden whoever walks into it, be he inarticulate and incurious, or literary and cosmopolitan.

  According to a report in The New York Times, the targets of drone strikes are selected for death at weekly meetings in the White House; no name is added to the list without the president’s approval. Where land mines are indiscriminate, cheap, and brutal, drones are discriminate, expensive, and brutal. And yet they are insufficiently discriminate: the assassination of the Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud in Pakistan in 2009 succeeded only on the seventeenth attempt. The sixteen near misses of the preceding year killed between 280 and 410 other people. Literature fails us here. What makes certain Somali, Pakistani, Yemeni, and American people of so little account that, even after killing them, the United States disavows all knowledge of their deaths? How much furious despair is generated from so much collateral damage?

  Of late, riding the subway in Brooklyn, I have been having a waking dream, or rather a daytime nightmare, in which the subway car ahead of mine explodes. My fellow riders and I look at one another, then look again at the burning car ahead, certain of our deaths. The fire comes closer, and what I feel is bitterness and sorrow that it’s all ending so soon: no more books, no more love, no more jokes, no more Schubert, no more Black Star. All this spins through my mind on tranquil mornings as the D train trundles between Thirty-Sixth Street and Atlantic Avenue and bored commuters check their phones. They just want to get to work. I sit rigid in my seat, thinking, I don’t want to die, not here, not yet. I imagine those in northwest Pakistan or just outside Sana’a who go about their day thinking the same. The difference for some of them is that the plane is already hovering in the air, ready to strike.

  I know language is unreliable, that it is not a vending machine of the desires, but the law seems to be getting us nowhere. And so I take helpless refuge in literature again, rewriting the opening lines of seven well-known books:

  Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Pity. A signature strike leveled the florist’s.

  Call me Ishmael. I was a young man of military age. I was immolated at my wedding. My parents are inconsolable.

  Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead bearing a bowl of lather. A bomb whistled in. Blood on the walls. Fire from heaven.

  I am an invisible man. My name is unknown. My loves are a mystery. But an unmanned aerial vehicle from a secret location has come for me.

  Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was killed by a Predator drone.

  Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His torso was found, not his head.

  Mother died today. The program saves American lives.

  —

  I was in New York City on 9/11. Grief remains from that awful day, but not only grief. There is fear, too, a fear informed by the knowledge that whatever my worst nightmare is, there is someone out there embittered enough to carry it out. I know that something has to be done to secure the airports, waterways, infrastructure, and embassies of our country. I don’t like war; no one does. But I also know that the world is exceedingly complex, and that our enemies are not all imaginary. I am not naïve about the incessant and unseen (by most of us) military activity that undergirds our ability to read, go to concerts, earn a living, and criticize the government in relative safety. I am grateful to those whose bravery keeps us safe.

  This ominous, discomfiting, illegal, and immoral use of weaponized drones against defenseless strangers is done for our sakes. But more and more we are seeing a gap between the intention behind the president’s clandestine brand of justice and the real-world effect of those killings. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words against the Vietnam War in 1967 remain resonant today: “What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them?” We do know what they think: many of them have the normal human reaction to grief and injustice, and some of them take that reaction to a vengeful and murderous extreme. In the Arabian peninsula, East Africa, and Pakistan, thanks to the policies of Obama and Biden, we are acquiring more of the angriest young enemies money can buy. As a New York Times report put it, “Drones have replaced Guantánamo as the recruiting tool of choice for militants.”

  Assassinations should never have happened in our name. But now we see that they endanger us physically, endanger our democracy, and endanger our Constitution. I believe that when President Obama personally selects the next name to add to his “kill list,” he does it because he is convinced that he is protecting the country. I trust that he makes the selections with great seriousness, bringing his rich sense of the lives of others to bear on his decisions. And yet we have been drawn into a war without end, and into cruelties that persist in the psychic atmosphere like ritual pollution.

  Madmen and Specialists

  RELIGION IS CLOSE to theater; much of its power comes from the effects of staging and framing. And in a play about a preacher, theater easily becomes religion. The performance of Wole Soyinka’s 1964 farce The Trials of Brother Jero, which I saw recently in Lagos, was not dissimilar to my experience at a Pentecostal church about two weeks later. The Trials of Brother Jero centers on a prophet, one of the many freelance Christian clerics of dubious authority that have proliferated in Nigeria. Charlatans are not charlatans all the way through: if they didn’t believe at least a little in what they were selling, it would be difficult for them to persuade others. “In fact, there are eggs and there are eggs,” Brother Jero proclaims in his first soliloquy of the play. “Same thing with prophets. I was born a prophet.”

  This element of make-believe is true of both prophets and actors, and so in a play like Brother Jero the point is doubled: both acting and religion have an imprecise relationship with the truth. The performance I saw was at a beautiful independent theater called Terra Kulture, on Victoria Island, an upscale neighborhood of the city. Brother Jero—“Velvet-hearted Jeroboam, Immaculate Jero, Articulate Hero of Christ’s Crusade”—was played with slinky, mellifluous deviousness by Patrick Diabuah as equal parts Hamlet and Wile E. Coyote. The play was fast, funny, wordy, and physical, and it sent up deception for the two-way street that it was: an eyes-half-open transaction between the deceiver and the deceived. “Go and practice your fraudulences on another person of greater gullibility,” says one of Jero’s marks shortly before he, too, is flattered—drawn in with sweet words and gleefully defrauded.

  Nigeria, too, is in a season of drama, and words are flying freely. In Rivers State, in the oil-rich Niger Delta, there is a power struggle. This struggle is entirely within the People’s Democratic Party, which is the party of President Goodluck Jonathan, and it centers on the forthcoming elections, which the president is interested in contesting. The first lady, Dame Patience Jonathan, is from Rivers State, and she has been vocal on one side of the dispute, acting as the president’s proxy. The governor of Rivers State, Rotimi Amaechi, widely liked and seen as an insurgent within the party, is on the other side. President Jonathan has been condemned by Nigerians for being ineffectual, for having a make-believe presidency that promises much and delivers little, but the Dame (as she is called) has been even more a figure of fun. Her command of English is unsteady: she once addressed a gathering of widows as “my fellow-widows.” A cause for more sustained resentment has been her ostentatious personal style in what is still a desperately poor country.

  In early July, a maneuver by the Dame’s supporters to impeach the speaker of the Rivers State House of Assembly devolved into mayhem. In the ensu
ing brawl, one member of the House, Chidi Lloyd, attacked another, Michael Chinda, with a ceremonial mace, breaking his skull and critically wounding him in full view of television cameras. In the wake of this attack, Dame Patience made a conciliatory statement in which she described Governor Amaechi as her “son” (the difference in their age is seven years). Newspaper commentators found her appeal hypocritical, since she’d been widely credited with a major role in the state’s crisis. After all, she had recently been in Rivers State on an eleven-day visit, with the full security apparatus of the presidency. Her visit was so disruptive and intimidating that the governor had been pinned down in his lodge, unable to move around his capital city, Port Harcourt. And in the House of Assembly there was a group of members so fanatically loyal to her that one of them, Evans Bipi, had declared to the press, “Why must [Governor Amaechi] be insulting my mother, my Jesus Christ on earth?”

  Loudest among the voices of protest raised against the Dame was Wole Soyinka’s. He took her to task for imposing herself on the people and for acting like a “parallel head of state.” Soyinka called a press conference in Lagos and built his case against the president and his wife around an extended and unexpected metaphor: the twelfth-century persecution and murder of Thomas à Becket by the agents of Henry II. Speaking about the way a king might tacitly condone crimes and, thus, making pointed reference to the way Governor Amaechi was being stripped of power in Rivers State, Soyinka asked, “Are we not moving towards absolute monarchism? There are many worrying historical parallels.” A written statement he gave to the press had a more ad hominem quality, ending with the line “You can extract a hippopotamus from the swamps, but you cannot take the swamp out of a hippopotamus.” This was generally interpreted as an ungentle poke at the Dame, a woman of considerable size, and even some of Soyinka’s supporters squirmed at the analogy.

  Political activity has always been as central to Soyinka’s work as theater has. He was uncensorable right from the start. He was imprisoned for twenty-two months in the late sixties, during Nigeria’s civil war, for his attempt to negotiate a peace between the Federal and Biafran sides. He spent much of that time in solitary confinement, an experience that he wrote about in a memoir, The Man Died. In 1994 he fled Nigeria when the military regime of General Sani Abacha threatened his life. His passport had been seized, so he went across the land border into the Republic of Benin, and from there he made his way into exile in the United States. He agitated for a return to democratic rule and was charged with treason in absentia, in 1997. But he returned home after General Abacha died in 1998, and he lives in Nigeria now.

  He remains one of the country’s most fearless defenders of human rights, speaking out on issues from the Boko Haram insurgency to the aggressive legislation curtailing the rights of gays and lesbians. He is famous and respected, and perhaps better known to the ordinary Nigerian for his political activity than for the linguistically intricate and thematically complex plays—among them Death and the King’s Horseman and Madmen and Specialists—that won him the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1986.

  Word of Soyinka’s July press conference reached the Dame, and she was not amused. Three days later, she issued a statement in which she called Soyinka “an embarrassment” to Nigeria. And it was this unexpected turning of the tables, this swerve into the theater of the absurd, that I wished to ask Soyinka about. I got my chance a few days later, when I visited him in Abeokuta, about an hour north of Lagos, in his bucolic home at the edge of the woods. The house was cool, shadowed, and quiet. It had none of the ostentation that one expects from a Nigerian “big man”—no security fence or luxury cars or marble floors. Instead, there was indigo-dyed handwoven aso-oke cloth on the windows, and there were phalanxes of African sculpture, both Yoruba and otherwise, standing in watchful groups around the living room. It was a reassuring place, a suitable lair for a man whose name, soyinka, literally means “the daemons surround me.” I was reminded of another one of the epithets for him: “child of the forest.” He lived up to this designation as well, often going out hunting and bearing in himself a more congenial relationship with traditional religious belief than most Nigerians, converts to Islam or Christianity, would entertain. Soyinka is a devotee of Ogun—the god of iron and “the first symbol of the alliance of disparities”—and his Myth, Literature and the African World is a learned exploration of the links between epic theater, Yoruba ritual, aesthetics, and ethics.

  My visit was about a week after his seventy-ninth birthday. He looked vigorous, effortlessly handsome. His famous Afro and beard, both a vivid white, looked less like signs of age than like evidence of some unending efflorescence. “So, what does it feel like to be an embarrassment?” His eyes closed with mirth.

  “It is not only the end of farce. It is the end of all the genres.” Then, still laughing, but with more fight in his voice, he added, “She was unelected—and it is irrelevant if she’s a man or a woman—she is a mere appendage of power. If there’s someone she doesn’t find embarrassing, there must be something wrong with that person.”

  What It Is

  EBOLA: “The ISIS of biological agents?”

  —CNN, October 2014

  IS EBOLA THE ISIS of biological agents? Is Ebola the Boko Haram of AIDS? Is Ebola the al-Shabaab of dengue fever? Some say Ebola is the Milošević of West Nile virus. Others say Ebola is the Ku Klux Klan of paper cuts. It’s obvious that Ebola is the MH370 of MH17. But at some point the question must be asked whether Ebola isn’t also the Narendra Modi of sleeping sickness. And I don’t mean to offend anyone’s sensitivities, but there’s more and more reason to believe that Ebola is the Sani Abacha of having some trouble peeing. At first there was, understandably, the suspicion that Ebola was the Hitler of apartheid, but now it has become abundantly clear that Ebola is actually the George W. Bush of being forced to listen to someone’s podcast. It’s that serious. The World Health Organization calls it the Putin of Stalin. In layperson’s terms, that’s like saying it’s the Stalin of U2. Now we are seeing the idea thrown around that it could be the Black Hand of the Black Death, not to mention the Red Peril of the Red Plague. If you don’t want to go that far, you have to at least admit that Ebola is the Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb of Stage IV brain cancer. At this point, it’s very possible that Ebola could become airborne and turn into the Tea Party of extreme climate events. Throughout the country of Africa, Ebola is the Abu Ghraib of think pieces. Look, I’m not the politically correct type, so I’m just going to put this out there: Ebola is the neo-Nazism of niggling knee injuries. The kind of threat it poses to the American way of life essentially makes it the North Korea of peanut allergies. I’m not going to lie to you, and I don’t care what color you are, you could be red, green, blue, purple, whatever; you need to understand that Ebola (the Obama of Osama, but don’t quote me) is literally the “some of my best friends are black” of #NotAllMen. But the burning question no one has raised yet is whether Ebola is the Newsweek of halitosis. We’ll go to the phones in a moment and get your take on this. But first let me open the discussion up to our panel and ask whether Ebola is merely the Fox News of explosive incontinence, or whether the situation is much worse than that and Ebola is, in fact, the CNN of CNN.

  Kofi Awoonor

  ON SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2013, the Ghanaian poet Kofi Awoonor was shot dead at Nairobi’s Westgate mall by terrorists. He was one of dozens of innocent victims of a massacre, for which the Somali group al-Shabaab claimed responsibility. I was about a mile away during the attack, giving a reading at the National Museum. During the reading, as word of the attack filtered in, people answered their phones and checked their messages, but, onstage and oblivious, I continued taking questions from the audience, including one about “the precariousness of life in Africa.”

  The massacre did not end neatly. It became a siege that lasted days. In my hotel room, about half a mile from the mall, I was woken in the mornings that followed by the sounds of gunfire, heavy artillery, attack helicopters,
and military planes. In counterpoint to these frightening sounds were others: incessant birdsong outside my window, the laughter of children from the daycare next door. In grief and shock, I read Awoonor’s poems, and watched a column of black smoke rise from the mall in the distance. The poems’ uncanny prophetic force became inescapable. A section of “Hymn to My Dumb Earth” reads:

  What has not happened before?

  An animal has caught me,

  it has me in its claws

  Someone, someone, save

  Save me, someone,

  for I die.

  Just three days earlier, on Thursday, I’d sent an email from Nairobi to a friend in New York. “Kofi Awoonor, Mongane Wally Serote, and Kwame Dawes are here at the Storymoja Hay Festival. These are senior African boys!” He wrote back: “That’s wonderful. It’s important they be a full fledged part of all conversations, youth movements and Internet notwithstanding.” I sat next to Awoonor at the press conference that opened the festival that day, excited to meet the man behind the books. Awoonor was a jovial man, dark-skinned and fine-featured, wearing a batakari, a striped tunic, which gave him a regal air. Coming in late, he had joked, “I apologize. When you said four P.M., I thought you meant four P.M. African time, which is five P.M.”