by Teju Cole
I was stunned into momentary confusion, as if I had just been told something that wasn’t possible. I’m so sorry, I said. He tilted his head, and we kept walking down the hallway. I asked if he had been able to take some time off from school. No, he said, I’ve just continued right through. I placed my hand on his shoulder, for a moment, and said again how sorry I was, and he thanked me. He seemed vaguely embarrassed, having to deal with my belated shock at what, for him, was far more personal but also much older news. Our keys clinked, and he entered apartment twenty-one, and I twenty-two. I closed the door behind me, and heard his close, too. I didn’t switch on the light. A woman had died in the room next to mine, she had died on the other side of the wall I was leaning against, and I had known nothing of it. I had known nothing in the weeks when her husband mourned, nothing when I had nodded to him in greeting with headphones in my ears, or when I had folded clothes in the laundry room while he used the washer. I hadn’t known him well enough to routinely ask how Carla was, and I had not noticed not seeing her around. That was the worst of it. I had noticed neither her absence nor the change—there must have been a change—in his spirit. It was not possible, even then, to go knock on his door and embrace him, or to speak with him at length. It would have been false intimacy.
I finally switched the light on and moved into my apartment. I imagined Seth tussling with his French and Spanish homework, conjugating verbs, laboring on translations, memorizing vocabulary lists, doing composition exercises. As I put away my groceries, I tried to remember when, exactly, it was that he had knocked on my door to ask if I played guitar. Eventually I satisfied myself that it was before, and not after, his wife’s death. I felt a certain sense of relief at this, which was taken over almost immediately by shame. But even that feeling subsided; much too quickly, now that I think of it.
TWO
I was on the phone with Nadège, a few nights later, when I heard noises from far off, noises that were hardly audible to begin with, but that within a few seconds drew closer and became louder. A single voice, a woman’s voice, shouted, and a crowd responded. After this had happened a few times, I could identify the crowd as mostly or entirely female. Several whistles pierced the air, but it was not a festive sound; that much I could tell even before I opened my window and looked out. It was something more serious. There were drums, and as the crowd approached, the drums took on an increasingly martial tone (my mind went to a hunting party flushing rabbits out of their holes). It was late, well past ten. Several of my neighbors across the street had leaned out of their windows; we all craned our necks toward Amsterdam Avenue. The voice leading the crowd became even louder, but the words did not resolve into meaning, and most of the crowd, marching toward us, remained obscured by darkness. Then, as the crowd, all of them young women, passed under the streetlamps, their chanting became clearer. We have the power, we have the might, the solitary voice called. The answer came: The streets are ours, take back the night.
The crowd, several dozen strong but tightly packed, passed under my window. From several floors above, I watched them, as their faces came in and out of the spotlights of the streetlamps. Women’s bodies, women’s lives, we will not be terrorized. I shut the window. It was only a little bit cooler outside than it was in the apartment. Earlier that evening, I had gone walking in Riverside Park, from 116th Street down to the Nineties and back. It wasn’t cold yet, and the entire time I was out in the park—as I watched the dogs and their owners, all of whom seemed to have converged on the same paths as I had, an endless stream of pit bulls, Jack Russells, Alsatians, Weimaraners, mutts—I wondered why it was still so warm in the middle of November.
Coming up the hill to my place, just as I crossed the corner of 121st, I saw my friend. He lived only a few blocks away, and had been out shopping for groceries. I hailed him, and we spoke briefly. He was a young professor in the Earth Sciences Department, four years into the uncertain seven-year journey to tenure. His interests were broader than his professional specialty suggested, and this was part of the basis for our friendship: he had strong opinions about books and films, opinions that often went against mine, and he had lived for two years in Paris, where he’d acquired a taste for fashionable philosophers like Badiou and Serres. In addition, he was an avid chess player, and an affectionate father to a nine-year-old girl who mostly lived with her mother on Staten Island. We both regretted that the demands of work kept us from spending as much time together as we would have liked.
My friend was especially passionate about jazz. Most of the names and styles that he so delighted in meant little to me (there are apparently any number of great jazz musicians from the sixties and seventies with the last name Jones). But I could sense, even from my ignorant distance, the sophistication of his ear. He often said that he would sit down at a piano someday and show me how jazz worked, and that when I finally understood blue notes and swung notes, the heavens would part and my life would be transformed. I more than half-believed him, and would even occasionally worry about why I seemed not to have a strong emotional connection with this most American of musical styles. Too often, it merely sounded sweet to me, cloying even, and I especially disliked it as background music. As my friend and I talked, a homeless man sang just across the street from us, and we caught his voice in the snatches as the wind came over in gusts.
These pleasant thoughts were interrupted by a presentiment of the conversation I would have that evening with Nadège. And how odd it was, hours later, to hear her strained voice, in counterpoint with the protesters down below. She had moved to San Francisco a few weeks before, and we had said we would make an effort to work things out at the distance, but we’d said the words without meaning them.
I tried to imagine her in that crowd, but no image came to mind, nor could I picture her face as it would be if she’d been in the room with me. The voices of the protesters soon faded, as the marchers drifted off with their flags and whistles toward Morningside Park. The heart-altering thump of their martial drum went on, and then that faded too, and I could hear only her diminished voice at the other end of the line. It was painful, this breaking apart, but it surprised neither of us.
THE FOLLOWING EVENING, ON THE 1 TRAIN, I SAW A CRIPPLE dragging his broken leg behind him as he moved from car to car. He adjusted his voice to a reedier tone to make his body seem more frail. I disliked his act and refused to give him money. A few minutes later, when I got on the platform, I saw a blind man. His long white stick ended in a tennis ball, and he swept it in a limited arc in front of him and to his side, and when he came close to falling (so it seemed to me) off the edge of the platform, I went up to him and asked if I could help. Oh no, he said, oh no, I’m just waiting for my train, thank you. I left him and walked the length of the platform, toward the exit. I was confused to see, just at that moment, another blind man, who also carried a long white stick with a tennis ball at its end, and who, ahead of me, climbed the stairs out into the light.
I got the idea that some of the things I was seeing around me were under the aegis of Obatala, the demiurge charged by Olodumare with the formation of humans from clay. Obatala did well at the task until he started drinking. As he drank more and more, he became inebriated, and began to fashion damaged human beings. The Yoruba believe that in this drunken state he made dwarfs, cripples, people missing limbs, and those burdened with debilitating illness. Olodumare had to reclaim the role he had delegated and finish the creation of humankind himself and, as a result, people who suffer from physical infirmities identify themselves as worshippers of Obatala. This is an interesting relationship with a god, one not of affection or praise but of antagonism. They worship Obatala in accusation; it is he who has made them as they are. They wear white, which is his color, and the color of the palm wine he got drunk on.
It had been months since I had last been to a movie. At around ten, I entered a bookshop, one of the famous chains, to kill some time before the film began, and as I went in I remembered a book I had wanted to
look at for a long time: a book of historical biography by one of my patients. I found it quickly—The Monster of New Amsterdam—and settled in among the quieter stacks to read it. V., an assistant professor at New York University and a member of the Delaware tribe, had based the book on her doctoral dissertation at Columbia. It was the first comprehensive study of Cornelis Van Tienhoven. Van Tienhoven had been notorious as a seventeenth-century schout of New Amsterdam, officially empowered to enforce the law among the Dutch colonists of Manhattan Island. He had arrived in 1633, as a secretary for the Dutch East India Company, but as he climbed up the social ladder, he became known for his many brutal acts, notable among them a raid he led to murder Canarsie Indians on Long Island, after which he had brought back the victims’ heads on pikes. In another raid, Van Tienhoven had been at the head of a party of men that murdered over a hundred innocent members of the Hackensack tribe. V.’s book made for grim reading. It was full of violent events, and in the endnotes were reprinted the relevant seventeenth-century records. These were written in calm and pious language that presented mass murder as little more than the regrettable side effect of colonizing the land. In its patient recounting of these crimes, The Monster of New Amsterdam was like those biographies of Pol Pot, Hitler, or Stalin that almost always did well on the bestseller lists. A sticker on the cover of the copy I was holding indicated that it had been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The blurbs on the flyleaf, written by leading American historians, were fulsome, praising the book for shedding light on a forgotten chapter in colonial history. From time to time during the previous couple of years, reading the newspaper, I had seen some aspect of this critical acclaim, and for this reason, I had heard V.’s name and had some sense of her professional success before she ever became my patient.
When I began treating her for depression at the beginning of last year, I was surprised by her shy manner and slight frame. She was a little older than I, but appeared much younger, and she was at work on her next project, which as she explained it, was a broader study of the encounters between the northeastern native groups—the Delaware and Iroquois in particular—and European settlers in the seventeenth century. V.’s depression was partly due to the emotional toll of these studies, which she once described as looking out across a river on a day of heavy rain, so that she couldn’t be sure whether the activity on the opposite bank had anything to do with her, or whether, in fact, there was any activity there at all. Her biography of Van Tienhoven, pitched though it was to a general readership, came with all the scholarly apparatus and with much of the emotional distance typical of an academic study. But it was clear, too, from talking to her that the horrors Native Americans had had to endure at the hands of the white settlers, the horrors, in her view, that they continued to suffer, affected her on a profound personal level.
I can’t pretend it isn’t about my life, she said to me once, it is my life. It’s a difficult thing to live in a country that has erased your past. She fell silent, and the sensation created by her words—I remember experiencing it as a subtle shift in the air pressure of the room—deepened in the silence, so that all we could hear was the going and coming outside my office door. She had closed her eyes for a moment, as though she had fallen asleep. But then she continued, her shut eyelids now trembling: There are almost no Native Americans in New York City, and very few in all of the Northeast. It isn’t right that people are not terrified by this because this is a terrifying thing that happened to a vast population. And it’s not in the past, it is still with us today; at least, it’s still with me. She stopped, and then she opened her eyes, and as I recalled all this sitting on the carpet between those tall shelves at the bookshop, I could picture V.’s curiously serene face that afternoon, on which the only physical signs of distress were her tear-filled eyes. I got up and went to the counter, and paid for the book. I knew I would not have time to read all of it, but I wanted to think more about what she had written, and I also hoped that the book might, in those moments when it left the strict historical record and betrayed some subjective analysis, give me further insight into her pyschological state.
After paying, I walked the four blocks to the movie theater on what, I recall, was a warm night. I had my recurrent worry about how warm it had been all season long. Although I did not enjoy the cold seasons at their most intense, I had come to agree that there was a rightness about them, that there was a natural order in such things. The absence of this order, the absence of cold when it ought to be cold, was something I now sensed as a sudden discomfort. The idea that the weather was changing noticeably bothered me, even if there was as yet no evidence that this warm fall in particular wasn’t due to a perfectly normal variation in patterns that stretched across centuries. There had been a natural little ice age in the Low Countries in the sixteenth century, and so, why not a little warm age in our own time, independent of human causes? But I was no longer the global-warming skeptic I had been some years before, even if I still couldn’t tolerate the tendency some had of jumping to conclusions based on anecdotal evidence: global warming was a fact, but that did not mean it was the explanation for why a given day was warm. It was careless thinking to draw the link too easily, an invasion of fashionable politics into what should be the ironclad precincts of science.
Still, the way my thoughts returned to the fact that it was the middle of November and I hadn’t yet had occasion to wear my coat made me wonder if, already, I was one of those people, the overinterpreters. This was part of my suspicion that there was a mood in the society that pushed people more toward snap judgments and unexamined opinions, an antiscientific mood; to the old problem of mass innumeracy, it seemed to me, was being added a more general inability to assess evidence. This made brisk business for those whose specialty was in the promising of immediate solutions: politicians, or priests of the various religions. It worked particularly well for those who wished to rally people around a cause. The cause itself, whatever it was, hardly mattered. Partisanship was all.
The crowd at the ticket counter of the movie theater was atypical, but this is what I had expected, given the late hour of the film, the fact that it was set in Africa, and the absence of marquee Hollywood names. The ticket buyers were young, many of them black, and dressed in hip clothes. There were some Asians, too, Latinos, immigrant New Yorkers, New Yorkers of indeterminate ethnic background. The last film I’d seen at the same theater, months earlier, had had an audience consisting almost entirely of white-haired white people; many fewer of those were now in attendance. In the great cave of the theater, I sat alone. No, not alone, exactly: in the company of a hundred others, but all strangers to me. The lights went down, and as I slouched in a plush seat, as the film began, I noticed someone else in my row, at its far end: an old man, asleep, his head thrown back and his mouth open, so that he looked more dead than sleeping. He did not stir even when the film began.
The jaunty credit sequence featured music from the right time period, but not from the right part of Africa: what had Mali to do with Kenya? But I had come prepared to like some things about the film, and I expected that some other things would annoy me. Another film I had watched the previous year, about the crimes of large pharmaceutical companies in East Africa, had left me feeling frustrated, not because of its plot, which was plausible, but because of the film’s fidelity to the convention of the good white man in Africa. Africa was always waiting, a substrate for the white man’s will, a backdrop for his activities. And so, sitting to experience this film, The Last King of Scotland, I was prepared to be angry again. I was primed to see a white man, a nobody in his own country, who thought, as usual, that the salvation of Africa was up to him. The king the title referred to was Idi Amin Dada, dictator of Uganda in the 1970s. Decorating himself with spurious titles was only the least grim of his many hobbies.
I knew Idi Amin well, so to speak, because he’d been an indelible part of my childhood mythology. I remembered the many hours I had spent at my cousins’ watchin
g a film called The Rise and Fall of Idi Amin. In that film, no detail was spared to present the callousness, insanity, and sheer excitement of the man. I was seven or eight at the time, and those images of people being shot and stuffed into car trunks, or decapitated and stored in freezers, stayed with me. The images were genuinely shocking because, unlike the blood-spattered American war movies we also enjoyed during those long school vacations, the victims in Rise and Fall looked like our fathers and uncles, with their safari suits, afros, and shiny foreheads. The cities in which this mayhem played out looked like our own city, and the bullet-riddled cars were the same models as the ones we saw around us. But we enjoyed the shock of it, its powerful and stylized realism and each time we had nothing to do, we watched the film again.
The Last King of Scotland mostly avoided such gory imagery. Its story was concentrated, instead, on the relationship between Idi Amin and the briefly innocent Scottish doctor, Nicholas Garrigan, whom he pressed into service as his personal physician. This was the story of a man in whom the classic traits of dictatorship had taken the most extreme form. With his extroverted madness—parts anger, fear, insecurity, quicksilver charm—Idi Amin murdered some 300,000 Ugandans during his rule, expelled the large community of Ugandan-Indians, destroyed the country’s economy, and earned himself a reputation as one of the most grotesque stains on Africa’s recent history.
While watching the film, I recalled an uncomfortable meeting I’d had one evening, in an opulent house in a suburb of Madison a few years before. I was a medical student at the time, and our host, an Indian surgeon, had invited me and a number of my classmates to his house. After we had eaten, Dr. Gupta ushered us into one of his three lavish living rooms, and went round pouring champagne into our glasses. He and his family, he told us, had been expelled from their homes and lands by Idi Amin. I am successful now, he said, America has made a life possible for me and for my wife and children. My daughter is doing graduate studies in engineering at MIT, and our youngest is at Yale. But, if I may speak frankly, I’m still angry. We lost so much, we were robbed at knifepoint, and when I think about Africans—and I know that we are not supposed to say such things in America—when I think about Africans, I want to spit.