Teju Cole – AWBA Winner in Fiction

Teju Cole is a novelist, essayist, and photographer. He is currently the Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard and a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine. He is the 2024 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winner in fiction for his book Tremor.

Excerpt from Tremor

How is one to live without owning others? Who is this world for? White people taught us that the world could be dominated by means of religion and warfare collected for the sake of pleasure and scholarship, possessed through travel, and owned by anyone willing to claim and defend that ownership. How is one to live in a way that does not cannibalize the lives of others, that does not reduce them to mascots, objects of fascination, mere terms in the logic of a dominant culture? The more expansive his interests in the world the more urgent these questions become. “Travel photography,” “travel writing”: they have become dead terms and he can’t make them live. Walking through the Medina Koura in the center of Bamako with the camera in his hand he wonders what photographs of such a place can even be. He often tells his students that there is no such thing as a good photograph, not if such a judgment is based merely on how pretty an image is. It matters, he tells them, who made the photograph and what afterlife it has beyond the moment in which it was made. Sometimes the students object. Is he saying that a white person can never photograph in Africa? Isn’t it the right of the artist to make art, to obey the inner creative urges from which any worthwhile art emerges? He turns the question around to them: who taught you that your rights are more important than other people’s rights? The excuses made for the display of African bodies are familiar to him. Those excuses are sometimes blunt and unconvincing and sometimes seductive. One well-known white photographer makes mockingly exploitative work but in presenting it always appends a statement that the work is intended to “overturn stereotypes.” Everywhere in contemporary photography is the same old vampirism but now it is smart enough to come with good wall text.

Subscribe to Cleveland Scene newsletters.