Known and Strange Things

by Teju Cole

  Two Weeks

  SURELY IT’S A trick of time. But the facts are what they are: I last visited Edinburgh eighteen years ago. This time round, I’m here to give readings at the book festival. It goes well. After, we have dinner at an Indian place with a friend whose new book is just about to come out. I enjoy her excitement about it; we talk about Virginia Woolf, and about how Woolf dealt with reviews of her work (badly, from which we both take some comfort). I’ve time only for a little tourism. At the National Gallery of Scotland, I’m drawn in by Titian, Rubens, and—a good surprise—a large altarpiece by Hugo van der Goes, moodiest of the Flemish primitives.

  When we leave Edinburgh, the light at Waverley railway station, dappled and bright in the early morning sun, is like a photographer’s paradise. But on this occasion, it’s wasted on me: I can’t get into photographing mode. On the train to London, a couple—he a tattooed middle-aged man in an England jersey, she Chinese, and much younger—sit near us. The man insults the “Scotch money” in his wallet. One senses he isn’t joking.

  At King’s Cross, the fine shock of suddenly seeing Wole Soyinka as he’s crossing the street. With his white hair and quick gait, he’s like an apparition. Shortly after, we check in to the Roi des Belges, an art installation in the form of a one-room hotel in the shape of a boat. It is perched on the roof of the Queen Elizabeth Hall. I’ve been invited by Artangel, a London-based arts organization, to stay in the boat for four days, one of a yearlong rotating cast of musicians, writers, artists, and idealists, all of whom are meant to produce some work in response to the installation and the view.

  The boat is ugly from a distance—a jumble of styles—but it’s also startlingly well designed and comfortable. What is most astonishing, though, is the view it affords. In one sweeping glance I take in the London Eye, Big Ben, Waterloo Bridge, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the Shard. Looking at the tiny people going about their business in the distance, I find it hard not to feel like a despot. Late at night, one or two voices drift up from the Southbank, echoes left over from the day.

  WEDNESDAY

  We wake up on the boat. The sky is white, wide. In bed I read Heart of Darkness. The Roi des Belges is named after the boat captained by Joseph Conrad when he was in the Congo in 1890. I toy with the idea that my essay for Artangel will begin with the words “What the fuck am I doing here?”

  The view improves my mood. This is in the morning hour when everything is lit up but is as yet without shadow, as though each object, each building and structure, were its own source of light. Unless you live with such a spectacular view, you forget a certain peculiarity of weather: how small it is. I notice a squall over St. Paul’s at the same moment that there is blue sky over the Houses of Parliament. Things happen quickly, and they happen all the time.

  THURSDAY

  I visit the Wallace Collection, which I find I don’t especially like—with the exception of one stunning Velázquez—then it’s on to Tate Britain for the exhibition Another London, a half century of photography about the city between 1930 and 1980. Disappointingly, there’s no color photography in the show, but the photos that are there, some familiar, others rare, are very good. Strangely—I don’t know why this should be strange, but it’s strange—the best pictures are by exactly the photographers one would expect to have the best pictures: Robert Frank, Inge Morath, Henri Cartier-Bresson. I decide that, allowing for variations of style, it comes down to their impeccable sense of rhythm. I note sadly that the dates given for Martine Franck (whose images in the show are very fine, too) are 1938–2012. She died a few weeks ago; she was alive when the exhibition began. About death, as usual, one can only resort to the cliché: it is final.

  It is an intense four days. I feel guilty about all the people I don’t have time to see, my cousins especially. In Bloomsbury, I have drinks at my publishers Faber & Faber (Auden and Eliot frowning from their respective photographs in the entryway); I give a reading and book signing at the London Review Bookshop (readings are all different, this one was especially sober and intense); I meet various friends.

  FRIDAY

  The novelist T and her husband have joined us for dessert. We suddenly realize that the man standing next to us is Tom Stoppard. Shortly after, some cooks at the outdoor market decide I look like Mos Def and, bizarrely, begin to clap.

  I give a whole day over to writing the first draft of my essay. Rather than do another critique of Heart of Darkness, I decide to tell a more complicated story, the main strand of which is a recollection of an encounter with V. S. Naipaul. Writing such pieces feels like a descent. Writing as diving: an exhilaration, a compression, a depression. I get it done, and a recordist arrives to do a podcast of it.

  SATURDAY

  And, too soon, London ends. The taxi ride from the Southbank to Paddington Station is a march-past of empire: the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace and its enormous grounds. There are many statues of great men, including Abraham Lincoln. I notice for the first time the Memorial Gates at Hyde Park Corner. The gates carry the names of Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Africa. “Africa”! You experience yourself in the particular, and are everywhere received as a broad generality.

  SUNDAY

  I’m in Brooklyn for just a single desultory, interregnal day. I do laundry, iron my shirts, and ignore my mail.

  MONDAY

  Then it’s off to Moscow, Idaho, for the Hemingway Festival. I arrive around midnight, after an uncomfortable, longer-than-transatlantic flight. This is big-sky country, where the Pacific Northwest abuts the mountain region. The air is cold. I’m deranged by jet lag: exhausted but unable to sleep.

  It is strange—this is my diary, and since only you and I are reading it, I can be confessional—it is strange to arrive in a town I had never even heard of, as the guest of honor at an event that is a highlight of the local calendar, to be met at the airport by enthusiastic strangers, to be deposited at a hotel. I open the curtains to a new view: the forlorn red neon of a twenty-four-hour pharmacy, the gloomy report of light from the dark asphalt of the parking lot. I half-suspect that, like Ryder in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, I have been invited here for no other reason than to undertake a series of cryptic errands across an unfamiliar landscape. I am so tired that, at moments, I find myself laughing helplessly. In the hotel restaurant early the next morning, I overhear snatches of conversation: “Saw one grouse. Hardly any turkeys this year.” And, a little later, another man’s voice: “…Caravaggio’s secular paintings.”

  ···

  SATURDAY

  What I realize, during our five-hour wait at the King Hussein border crossing between Jordan and the West Bank, is that there is a fine art to wasting people’s time. Everyone in our group of writers and artists invited to the Palestine Festival of Literature has the correct visas, correct passports, and letters of support from the British Council. But the point of this border is to make it difficult, mostly for Palestinians attempting to return home. There are forms to fill, and hours of sitting around. A young official emerges, walks toward one of the waiting groups, and hands out one or two stamped passports, or asks for more information, then vanishes for another twenty minutes. What should have been a two-hour journey from Amman to Ramallah takes seven. But we get there in the late afternoon. A beautiful town, in spite of its history of conflict. A resident tells us that, compared to other West Bank towns, it is a bit of a bubble.

  SUNDAY

  Nigerians are fond of titles, and to conventional ones like “Mr.,” “Dr.,” or “Alhaji” (a Muslim who has been to Mecca), we have added many others: “Engineer,” “Architect,” “Evangelist.” A more recent one is “JP”—Jerusalem Pilgrim—which denotes someone who has gone on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. As I split off from my friends and follow a group of people I don’t know around the Old City—there’s the Via Dolorosa, there’s the Church of the Holy Sepulchre—it occurs that, without quite intending to, I’ve become a JP. There is, of course, also the m
atter of faith, which I do not have.

  Our group of writers is here to give readings and workshops. More important, I hope to better understand things I’ve only known by rumor. Earlier in the day, we came through the Qalandia checkpoint on foot. There was a crowd of people from the West Bank, let in at a trickle. There was the great wall, still under construction, but already extensive at the Jerusalem sector. And there was the guard ordering some members of our group to delete from their cameras the photos they had taken of the checkpoint.

  MONDAY

  How does one write about this place? Every sentence is open to dispute. Every place name objected to by someone. Every barely stated fact seems familiar already, at once tiresome and necessary. Whatever is written is examined not only for what it includes but for what it leaves out: Have we acknowledged the horror of the Holocaust? The perfidy of the Palestinian Authority? The callousness of Hamas? Under these conditions, the dispossessed—I will leave aside all caveats and plainly state that the Palestinians are the dispossessed—have to spend their entire lives negotiating what should not be matters for negotiation at all: freedom of movement, the right to self-determination, equal protection under the law.

  The Augusta Victoria Hospital, on Mount Scopus, is one of the better hospitals available to Palestinians. It is easy for those in East Jerusalem to get to. For those living in the West Bank, a permit is needed, and usually one isn’t issued unless there’s urgent need: for radiation therapy, for instance, or dialysis. Dr. Tawfiq Nasser, who runs the hospital, tells us about a man from Gaza who had the wrong ID and thus for eight years couldn’t see his son, whose ID was similarly restrictive. The man was diagnosed with cancer and finally got a permit to enter Jerusalem. He went to see his son in the West Bank, spent three weeks with him, came back to the hospital for one week of chemotherapy, and returned to Gaza and died.

  TUESDAY

  This is a pilgrimage after all, but in reverse. We find erasures and disheartening truths at every stop, evidence everywhere of who or what God abandoned. Our guide points out villages and towns that either are currently being encroached on by new settlements or were simply razed or depopulated in 1948 or in 1967 and renamed, rebuilt, and absorbed into Israel. We arrive in Hebron, the burial place of Abraham and the other patriarchs, a once beautiful city now strangled by aggressive new settlements (built in contravention of international law). The presence of the army, protecting these settlements, reminds me of what Lagos was like on mornings after coups: scowling men with heavy weapons and a wary manner. Parts of the city center are empty, ghostly, save for the soldiers. There are streets in which all doors and windows have been welded shut. How does this thing end? I see some Palestinian children playing in a side street. Their innocent game of blindfold, a block away from patrolling soldiers, suddenly seems sinister.

  WEDNESDAY

  The next morning we drive through beautiful country: Galilee and, briefly, the occupied Golan Heights. We stop at what is now the Bar’am National Park, which was established on what used to be the Maronite Christian village of Kfar Bir’im. The inhabitants of Kfar Bir’im were ordered to leave in 1949, and the Israeli Air Force destroyed the village in 1953, leaving only the church standing. The stony ruins of the village are still there. Now, more than sixty years later, some of the villagers come to the park for a daily sit-in. This has been going on for eleven months. They hope we will tell the world they want to return home.

  I climb up a stone structure next to the church. Galilee: my inner JP remembers this is the landscape in which many of the events in the Gospels unfolded. I see two white doves nesting. A beautiful boy of about eight, whose wavy brown hair falls to his shoulders, looks, I think, like the young boy Jesus must have. Every mile of the journey dips into the vocabulary of parable: sheep, lakes, cliffs, vineyards, donkeys. I am lost in thought. Then I hear a cock’s crow.

  The Island

  A CLEAR DAY IN the early 1980s, for example. A man drives past the harbor of the city in which he lives. He sees docked boats, restaurants, children at play, the island sleeping in the distance. Without quite meaning to, he remembers that the island is a prison. And then, as he is a man of some imagination, he imagines something worse: that people are tortured there. It has been going on for a while.

  Years pass. The rough sea of the crossing makes it feel far. The swells are huge. The ferry could sink like a stone. Our tour guide, used to it, sleeps on the journey. Soon, in less than half an hour, the ferry arrives. The prison is now a museum. There was and is a pitiful garden along a wall.

  Obscene. That is the word, a word of contested etymology, that she must hold on to as a talisman. She chooses to believe that obscene means off-stage. To save our humanity, certain things that we may want to see (may want to see because we are human!) must remain off-stage.*1

  A sunny afternoon, 1977. The torturers have arranged for some of the prisoners to be photographed. They lead them to an arid patch of land (away from their own tiny garden within the walls) and give them shovels. The press is told: This is a garden. A photographer takes a picture and captions it “ ’n Gevangene werksaam in die tuin,” “A prisoner working in the garden.” The prisoner is not working. He stands erect, faces forward. He wears a floppy hat and dark glasses (when they let him go thirteen years later, he will be unable to shed tears: the limestone quarry will have ruined his eyes). He is a contained fury.

  On the island, the tour guide mentions names. Each falls like a stroke of the cane. Sobukwe, Sisulu, Mbeki, Kathrada. The names raise memory’s welts. On the other side of the island—the island that is surprisingly big, surprisingly wild—the waves break their heads against the rocks repeatedly, trying to forget. From time to time we see ruined ships.

  Twenty-seven years later, the prisoner looks at the photograph. “I remember that day. The authorities brought these people to prove that we were still alive.” Ambushed by memory, the prisoner becomes angry again. He begins to denounce one of the visitors from that day. A handler intervenes: “Khulu [Great One], you know you can’t talk like that.” He won’t be corrected. “No, we must be honest about these things.” The god of his youth is in his voice.

  Blacks are allowed in the Company’s gardens now. You can see them with their families on a warm day. Things have changed (but fewer are the blacks in the fine restaurants on Long Street, two blocks over; things are unchanged). Near the gardens is the Slave Lodge. In the heart of the gardens is the monumental statue of Rhodes, his arm raised toward the rest of the continent: CECIL JOHN RHODES, 1853–1902. YOUR HINTERLAND IS HERE. His gesture reads, through history’s lens, like a Nazi salute.

  White supremacy has its uses. Because of its great care and its thoughtful strategy, because of the tireless way it hoards its hatred, it is good at making heroes. Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Desmond Tutu: What would our lives have meant without theirs? No wheel moves without friction. Without the obscenity of white supremacy to resist, they might have been mere happy family men. Nevertheless:

  Whoever was tortured, stays tortured. Torture is ineradicably burned into him, even when no clinically objective traces can be detected.*2

  The island migrates to other places and the torturers diversify. But the island is never far away. Occasionally, it leaps into the mind of a woman as she goes through her day during the twenty-first century. A man, somewhere, is jolted awake in the middle of the night by things he knows are true. If the island’s physical distance is a little greater now, its moral distance is not.

  Many many years later, the prisoner finally dies. The torturers take a moment to praise him (to praise themselves). Then they return to work.

  * * *

  *1 J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, 2003.

  *2 Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, 1980.

  Reconciliation

  …DOWN DE VILLIERS GRAAFF MOTORWAY and talking about other things when my friend says, “Can you guess what this building is?
”

  It is my first day in the city. The building’s looming presence tells me what I didn’t know I knew. “They tortured people here?”

  REPORT FOR FEBRUARY 1987

  MISSING PEOPLE

  Mrs. R was referred to us by the attorney acting on her behalf. Her husband was taken from their house in Old Crossroads by the “witdoekes” in June last year and they allegedly handed him over to a particular warrant officer and held him at Gugulethu Police Station. This police station (and all the others in the area) has no record of him ever being held there. The security police have no trace of him in detention. He has disappeared. It is difficult to know what to say to a wife in this position.*1

  An alien visitor to our media environment this week might notice two things.

  One: torturers and their assistants expressing how profoundly they forgive themselves. They love television, and they love newspapers, and their memories of what they did in the 1980s, what crimes they participated in or supported, are foggy. In fact, often, there is nothing to forgive. Everyone was on the side of the angels.