Perhaps Afro-Swedish artist Makode Aj Linde did us a clumsy favor in the creation of the “Hottentot Venus” cake that premiered in April 2012 at a party for the Swedish minister of culture. An online video of the cake, a grotesque golliwog caricature of an African woman designed to be cut at its genitals, sparked outrage—and even calls for the minister’s resignation.
The video gives us a view of the party-goers, presumably Swedish art patrons and government officials, as they swallow the inherent repulsion the art installation raises in an effort to be “in” on the artsy joke. It seems a window into that mysterious, sinister process by which people end up consenting to be oppressors, unlearning a natural instinct to be appalled at cruelty to a human “other.” We watch those caught on film make the unconscious trade-off: They squash human instinct to be on the joke’s inside, to belong to a privileged class. Ultimately Linde’s aims seem confused—he himself claims his piece means to be some sort of comment on female genital mutilation in Africa. But his parody of racism turns the sad joke back onto the artist-jokester.
In its far more self-aware way, Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole’s first novel, Open City, leads the reader to the kinds of questions a more adroit artist might have been aiming for in the creation of the monstrous cake: Who gets let in on the joke in a global culture founded on legacies of massacre? Whose joke is it? Should we laugh at the horror to reject it? Or should we, like Open City’s main character Julius, survey it all with clinical remove, disassociate ourselves from our own complicity, lose touch with essential parts of ourselves in the process?
Teju Cole means modern-day New York as the “open city” in the title of his first novel. NYC is the very city that American readers still turning to fiction for answers to the questions of 9/11 have come to anticipate almost by reflex in the books they choose, particularly in the wake of well-known 9/11 novels like Column McCann’s Let the Great World Spin and Johnathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
In Open City, narrator Julius keeps a detached scientific eye on the world. A young Nigerian-American psychiatrist in residency at a hospital in Harlem, he listens all day to the tortured personal stories of the clinically insane. He has developed ways of viewing suffering at a remove: He takes a good hard look at human pain, then neatly divides it into its categories and files it into compartments. He applies this clinical, precise way of seeing to everything and everyone he encounters. His gaze also makes him—or allows him to—miss critical insights into his own past.
In his down time from the hospital, Julius indulges a serious walking habit, and this book moves like the brisk walk of a meticulous observer. Julius seems to carefully notice everyone he meets over the course of his 272-page journey. Readers find no anonymous strangers here. We’re pulled deeply into the stories of the homeless people Julius passes on the street, the clerks he chats up at stores, the people sharing his car on the subway.
Uncompromisingly global in its span, Open City defies categorization as a typical “immigrant novel.” It should rather be seen as a proclamation of our age’s disintegration of borders, as so many of its characters move back and forth between global souths and global norths, across oceans and back. The characters, including Julius, also move fluidly between tongues, grasping at French, Yoruba, German, English or Arabic in search of the most efficient and vital ways to connect.
In its transcendence of national, cultural and social boundaries, this book fills a real void in the landscape of American letters. In Open City, Teju Cole makes the kinds of borderless connections between lives in different parts of the world that many of us have long been craving to see reflected in our literature: The city of his novel is blown wide open as our world these days is blown wide open. These characters are citizens of the world, not nations, and they contend with multiple allegiances to multiple identities. This has increasingly become our reality these days, and at last an American novel captures that.
Growing up in Nigeria, Julius, son of a German mother and Nigerian father, often found himself viewed by others as a mixed-race son of privilege, though he himself cares little for this identification. He feels uneasy, in fact, with most terms of identity imposed on him by others, equally uncomfortable when other black men in New York call him “brother.”
Many closest connections are elderly. Julius seems able to relate better to people at the end of their lives than to those who have not yet stopped to stare at death from the precipice—the “one-way border,” as Cole lyrically names it. But Julius also seems to seek from elderly strangers the familial connections from which he’s been severed. At one point, Julius drops all his goings-on to take a flight from New York to Brussels, where he spends a few weeks in a vague, half-hearted search for his maternal grandmother, called oma—the estranged mother of the German mother who is estranged from Julius himself.
This plot twist in some ways strikes a reader as a random and never quite fully justified diversion. To be fair, the trip to Belgium does introduce us to more fascinating strangers for Julius’s precise eye, and to a new cultural and historical context for Cole’s musings. But this sort of leap in the story’s movement jars the reverie of the novel’s extended dream. At times Cole convinces us that the beauty of his insights, laid out perfectly and poetically, compensate for such narrative interruptions.