‘I feel little alienation in museums, full though they are of other people’s ancestors.’
—Teju Cole
Pulling at a thread last week, I found something I hadn’t thought to look for with regard to Teju Cole’s brilliant novel Tremor, which I had just posted my thoughts about. I’d made a comment about wishing the novel’s embedded museum lecture was available somewhere I could link to, but that passage had reminded me of a coincidental (I thought) synergy between two things I had read in 2019 that I could link to: 1) Cole’s 2016 essay collection, Known and Strange Things — specifically the opening essay, ‘Black Body’ (originally published in The New Yorker, 2014, as linked); and 2) the March 2019 obituary of a globally renowned, Nigeria-born art curator named Okwui Enwezor (NYT Gift Link). (‘Black Body’ is a direct response to James Baldwin’s essay ‘Stranger in the Village,’ which is collected in Notes of a Native Son). Both of these pieces touch on ‘worldliness,’ Eurocentrism in the world of art and antiquities, and who gets to be considered an artist — what gets to be considered art. I know very little about the Art World, but there’s a much larger point being made.
Those links are the main event today, and if you stop here and go read them, you will have my full support!
Here’s the side note about what I found in digging them up:
While it was pure happenstance that I’d read the Cole essay so close to Enwezor’s obituary (I’m that person who loves to read obits of interesting people I’ve never heard of), the two pieces seemed to me at the time to be in some sort of unintended dialogue with each other, so I went back to read them with the idea of pairing them here. I was struck again by the overlaps and it dawned on me for the first time that Cole and Enwezor might very well have known each other, given their personal and professional histories. (Duh!) So I went to Google and typed in “okwui enwezor and teju cole,” and found that not only did they know each other, but apparently in the murk of 2021 I missed a whole essay collection from Cole, Black Paper, which contains an elegy for his two art world mentor-friends who died in close proximity, Enwezor and Bisi Silva. (I believe it’s this piece, only given a different title in the book.)
Among the many words I mentioned having written and cut about Tremor were these: There’s the sense that the whole book was written for the sake of a lost friend, by the living one trying to figure out how to make sense of life, tenuous as it is. I’m sure there are Cole readers who knew about this friendship and spotted what seems to be Enwezor’s spirit in Tremor, but that realization made the book even more poignant for me, for whatever reason, and I wanted to share it along with the intended links. Even though it might not really mean anything to you until you READ THE BOOK! 😉
Collapse and Delight 