{"id":28124,"date":"2013-09-26T19:17:58","date_gmt":"2013-09-26T19:17:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=28124"},"modified":"2013-09-26T19:25:02","modified_gmt":"2013-09-26T19:25:02","slug":"teju-cole-on-nairobi-death-and-birdsong-death-and-poetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=28124","title":{"rendered":"Teju Cole on Nairobi: death and birdsong, death and poetry"},"content":{"rendered":"

[ by Charles Cameron<\/strong> — 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<\/p><\/div>**<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Teju Cole<\/strong> is a writer<\/a> (“award winning” and rightly so) whose insightful and skilfully deployed tweets<\/a> 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<\/em> blog post covering much the same ground in greater detail.<\/p>\n

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<\/strong><\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Cole is reading from his novel Open City<\/a> at the National Museum at the time the attack on the mall begins: <\/p>\n

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<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

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Shocking, sad news, just a mile away from me, but I'm safe. RT @nytimes<\/a>: Gunmen Open Fire at Nairobi Mall http:\/\/t.co\/yIbimD1t3i<\/a><\/p>\n

— Teju Cole (@tejucole) September 21, 2013<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n