Teju Cole on Nairobi: death and birdsong, death and poetry
[ by Charles Cameron — on the topic of Nairobi there’s the news — and then there’s Teju Cole ]
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Teju Cole, left, Kofi Awoonor, right -- photo credits Teju Cole & Peace FM Online respectively
We’re interested in creativity as well as natsec issues here at Zenpundit, so i thought it might be appropriate to see what a fine writer had to say about the hideous attack and siege of the Westgate mall in Nairobi — and perhaps more importantly, how he chooses to say it.
Teju Cole is a writer (“award winning” and rightly so) whose insightful and skilfully deployed tweets caught my attention some while back, and have only increased my admiration for him over time. I followed his twitterstream along with others while the events in Nairobi were playing out, and today read his New Yorker blog post covering much the same ground in greater detail.
What is striking to me about Cole’s approach — the approach of a fine writer, in Nairobi at the time, a friend and admirer of the Ghanaian poet Kofi Awoonor who died at the mall — is the care he takes to balance death with birdsong, death with poetry. In treating matters this way — and we can be sure he is every bit as deliberate in his use of 140 characters as he is in longer-form writings — he both gives a world of context to the small world of the mall event itself, and offers us hope to balance our despair and disgust.
Cole is reading from his novel Open City at the National Museum at the time the attack on the mall begins:
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
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Here, then, I have pulled together most of the tweets Cole posted in recent days for your consideration, in the order in which he posted them… Together, they offer us a very different way to encounter tragic events from those presented by journalists or analysts.
Shocking, sad news, just a mile away from me, but I'm safe. RT @nytimes: Gunmen Open Fire at Nairobi Mall http://t.co/yIbimD1t3i
— Teju Cole (@tejucole) September 21, 2013
Someone in the audience asked me about life's precariousness, around the time (but we didn't know) the attack was unfolding nearby.
— Teju Cole (@tejucole) September 21, 2013
I will praise this mutilated world. But not tonight.
— Teju Cole (@tejucole) September 21, 2013
Night. A siege. The houses open their yellow eyes one by one. Sick of the news, we watch deer on television.
— Teju Cole (@tejucole) September 21, 2013
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Nature has entered the picture: next up will be death — the death of his poet colleague and friend, described first obliquely in the poet’s own words:
Kutsiami the benevolent boatman; When I come to the river shore please ferry me across –Kofi Awoonor (1935-2013, died yesterday in Nairobi)
— Teju Cole (@tejucole) September 22, 2013
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