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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. Whether you're listening on the radio, live-streaming, or on demand, I am grateful you are here. Thank you to everyone who came out last night for our first All Of It Listening Party live event in the Greene Space. Jon Batiste took us on a journey through his new album, World Music Radio. How did it go? Well, I'll let Jon tell you.

[applause]

Jon Batiste: Yes, man. Wow. Wow.

Alison Stewart: You'll hear some of my conversation with Jon Batiste and some of the music he performed live. We're doing that tomorrow on the show. Now, let's get today started with author Teju Cole.

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Teju Cole's new novel is like falling down a Google rabbit hole but in the best way possible. The narrative takes the reader on a tour of a Harvard art professor named Tunde, and his thoughts and musings on subjects like the providence of art to serial killers, to AI-generated faces. Cole has returned to fiction after a long break. His novel Open City is now considered a modern, classic New York novel. The latest is titled Tremor, and through the kaleidoscope of Tunde's brain, the reader is invited to consider the what and why of art history, violence, exploitation, and beauty.

Kirkus calls the novel a provocative and profound meditation on art and life in a world of terror. Teju Cole will be speaking on Thursday night at 7:00 at the Brooklyn Public Library at Grand Army Plaza, but first he joins me now to discuss Tremor. Welcome to the show.

Teju Cole: Thank you, Alison. Nice to be here.

Alison Stewart: You play around with form quite a bit in the novel. It is not a linear structure. Traditionally, when you break from a linear structure, from a traditional structure, how does that free you as an artist? What does that provide you creatively?

Teju Cole: In a way, it means that everything is there to play for. It means that you're challenging yourself not only to do something well but to actually discover what it means to do something well. This abandonment of old rules doesn't mean that you have no rules. You are figuring out new rules as you go along. There's something quite exhilarating about that because if it succeeds, something new has been brought into the world.

Alison Stewart: What does the title Tremor mean? What does it refer to?

Teju Cole: I think I'm drawn to titles that have double meanings, and in this case, the double meaning is pretty obvious. That there's a tremor that's a neurological phenomenon, an unsteadiness in the body, but tremor also has a seismic connotation. I think this feeling that vulnerabilities in our body are in some profound way connected to vulnerabilities in the earth was an idea I wanted to embed into this novel.

Alison Stewart: I'm going to read how the novel opens. The leaves are glossy and dark, and from the dying blooms rises a fragrance that might be Jasmine. He sets up the tripod and begins to focus the camera. He has pressed the shutter twice when an aggressive voice calls out from the house on the right. This isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened to him, but still he is startled. He takes on a friendly tone and says he is an artist just photographing a hedge. "You can't do that here." The voice says, "This is private property." The muscles of his back are tense. He folds the tripod, stows the camera in its bag, and walks away. What do we learn about Tunde from this passage?

Teju Cole: That he lives in a world that is not as secure as it might at first seem, but also that he has a kind of obliquity in the way that he approaches how he thinks about that world. What follows in the novel is not a cracked about-- Tunde is Black. He's living in this majority white town. It's not storming about racism is bad. Well, everybody already knows that. It's more a question of how do you get on with your day if this is something that can pounce out at you at any moment? I think that's what we learn about him is that he absorbs in his body the reality of who he is in the place where he is.

Alison Stewart: He returns to this hedge a few times in the book. Actually, towards the end, he goes back in the middle of the night and this time he says the threat of private property is part of the image that he's going to make and he's got specific exposures and how he wants to make this image. Why was this the book-end, this hedge, and this photo?

Teju Cole: Well, that's a great question. I think I end the book the way I do for artistic purposes that have a resonance with what journey we've been on in many different places through the book. I think I also wanted to say something about the possibility of freedom. I think there are two things that can be true at the same time. One is that we are profoundly constrained by sociological, by political forces around us based on various aspects of our identities.

The other thing is that we are more free than we know. There's actually profound freedom. For me, this is a character who is very determined not to give up the idea that he is free. He returns. He says, "I'm going to make this photo, I'm going to make it on my own terms, I'm not going to give up my search for what constitutes a meaningful life."

Alison Stewart: My guest is Teju Cole. We're talking about his new novel, Tremor. You share many things in common with Tunde, our protagonist.

Teju Cole: Yes.

Alison Stewart: You teach from Nigeria. Where does Tunde diverge from you in the way that he responds to events and people?

Teju Cole: Oh, that's such a great question. I think I'll give a candid answer to it.

Alison Stewart: Please.

Teju Cole: Which is that in writing the novel, I didn't want Tunde to diverge too far from me in the way he responded to the world and to people. The fiction of it is that I put him in all kinds of situations that never happened to me. The what if is about what if I was in this situation? How would I respond? What would my thinking be? How would my politics show up? Where would I say, "I don't even want to deal with politics here," and so on?

It's the first time I've written a character-- I have written characters that are close biographically to me, but they react differently from how I would react in situations. I've made them angrier, I have made them less interesting in certain ways, more interesting in certain ways, obsessed with different things, unable to-- I had a character who could not understand jazz.

[laughter]

That was hard to write for me. In this case, I am putting him in situations that are not drawn from my life, but I am making him think in ways that are very close to the bone for me, at least as my life was during the time when the novel is set, which is late 2019.

Alison Stewart: You teach creative writing at Harvard. What guidance do you give your students when they're interested in creating a character that resembles them?

Teju Cole: Oh, writing is hard to teach. We assign good books for them to read and then we let the class be an open space for discussion about what's working, what's not working. I often say to the students when I've read a story, I say, "Well, this is all very well written and all, but I need to see some blood in the sink." In other words, I need to see that splash of red on the white porcelain.

It's all about digging deeper and maybe going to some slightly or even majorly uncomfortable places. It's not about using swear words. It's not about using exclamation marks. It's not about big melodrama. It's about writing the thing where you might think, "You know what? If my mom read this, she would not feel completely comfortable and my grandmother, if she were alive would be completely scandalized." It's about pushing for those places of unease.

Alison Stewart: In one of the first scenes in the book, Tunde discovers an African mask at an antique shop. How do you pronounce it? It's C--

Teju Cole: Ci wara.

Alison Stewart: Ci wara. Thank you. People if they go Google that now you'll recognize a ci wara. Even though he suspects it might be made just for tourists, but he's compelled to take it and to buy it. Why is that important for Tunde to buy the mask?

Teju Cole: I think the thought he's circulating through at that moment is, how do we assign value to that kind of thing? Something made by people from far away. African masks at Auction, at Sotheby's, at Christie's can be ferociously expensive. Then you have other masks, also African masks also made by Africans that you can get quite cheaply. What accounts for that difference in value? I think he's thinking through the ideas we've inherited about what by the other is of value.

We like their art. We like their customs. We even like their raw materials, but we don't want them to come across the border for example, or we don't let them travel freely. We don't give them visas. This is a book that is somehow concerned with how do we refrain from cannibalizing the lives of others? How do we keep from turning other people into mere footnotes in our own lives, in our own societies?

Alison Stewart: The book goes on and Tunde goes on to give some lectures, particularly about the providence of art and specifically about the Benin Bronzes which are works that were stolen from the kingdom of Benin which is now in present-day Nigeria. The bronzes I think many people know are in museums around the world. The Met in New York, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston where Tunde is lecturing. What is frustrating to him and maybe to you as well around the discussions about repatriation that have gone on for the years that these were pieces of people's culture not to be taken, they were stolen.

Teju Cole: That's right.

Alison Stewart: What's frustrating to him? What is it about it?

Teju Cole: Oh what's frustrating about that? Well, because I think it's one of those historical situations, where people always say history's complex, and then every now and again you come across something that is cut and dried and you think come on. [chuckles] Everybody admits that this punitive raid, this massacre that happened in the kingdom of Benin was a huge crime, as was the taking away of all the material and artistic glory of that kingdom scattering out in museums.

Everybody freely admits that what happened was wrong, and unlike many other historical wrongs, we actually have the artifacts on hand. It's so uncomplicated. Give him back. The frustration for him as for me, is that then it becomes this long drawn-out conversation. "Well, we're not sure, are they going to be taken care of?" [laughs]

Alison Stewart: That's so interesting because someone says, If we return them, will these people know how to care for them? Will they know what to do with them?"

Teju Cole: It's a very common point of view.

Alison Stewart: It's really patronizing. [chuckles]

Teju Cole: It is but it's a very common point of view because when people don't want to do the right thing, they can always figure out what to say. Then in the aftermath after the right thing has finally painfully been done, everyone claims that they were on the side of doing the right thing all along.

Alison Stewart: There's a moment when it turns on Tunde though because he takes the photograph of a vendor in Paris without the vendor's consent and the man gets very angry. You write, "He was furious not only because a photo might endanger him but because he had been given nothing in exchange. Tunde hadn't bought anything, he hadn't asked for permission, hadn't paid for the right, hadn't even considered doing so. Here was a stranger who simply looked past him and taken something the way the wealthy take what belongs to others, and they act surprised when they are challenged, taking. That's what those who are well-off do. They take, and take, and take." Why doesn't Tunde ask for permission?

Teju Cole: I think for me that is one instance of blood in the sink. This is the main character. We're quite close to his consciousness. Maybe we even approve of a lot of the way he thinks about things and tries to move through the world, but there are always this lacuna. There are these blind spots where we do trample on others inadvertently or sometimes intentionally but through cowardice or through laziness, and those things always have to be thought through.

In that situation, he's prioritizing the making of art and not necessarily thinking about how does this other human being feel. Again coming back to this question how do we live without trampling others, because we are constantly trampling others, constantly.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Teju Cole. The name of the novel is Tremor. He'll be speaking at the Brooklyn Public Library in Grand Army Plaza on Thursday at 7:00 PM. Tunde thinks about so many different things. You've picked a passage to read for us.

Teju Cole: Yes, I have. I just wanted to say for the event on Thursday I'm going to be in conversation with Emily Raboteau who's a wonderful writer, and I'm really looking forward to thinking with her about the present and the future. This passage is from the first third of the novel, and I would set it up, I'll just read it.

Alison Stewart: Okay.

Teju Cole: "He switches off the lamp in the living room and heads upstairs. The storm had been intense but brief. There is an impression of clarity now of newly washed air. The silent house is his in the dark. He passes the glass door of the landing through which he sees the black sky, far away, visible as the faintest red blush in the sky is Mars. Moving across the Gale crater at this very moment, the rover Curiosity sends pictures home. It is studying climate and geology on the Martian plane, searching for evidence of water.

Many of the pictures Curiosity sends arrive in a vignette format set within a dark circle as though inside a black cardboard frame. The circular images of ridges and rocks of petrified weather events and a gentle curved horizon are multiple views of the vitreous interior of an eye. The photographs are mostly black and white but some of them are rendered in color. Fine dust and a low-pressure atmosphere mean that the daytime sky on Mars would be red to human eyes. Then the Martian day ends and the light of the setting sun travels a greater distance before it is refracted through this alien to us atmosphere. The sunsets there are blue."

Alison Stewart: That's Teju Cole reading from his new novel Tremor. Then our protagonist has not just lofty thoughts and lofty observations. He's got a life. He's got a marriage. A marriage that he needs to attend to his wife. Describing his wife and him, you describe, "She's analytical and somewhat tempestuous. He is improvisatory, and when it suits him inexpressive." I laughed out loud at that line. [laughter] When it suits him inexpressive. What's the state of their marriage when we meet them?

Teju Cole: I think it's a good marriage. They've been together for something like 16 years, and yet for me, I wanted to draw this portrait of real people who are not either moving around imperfect serenity or it's this completely toxic thing where they're on the verge of breaking up. It's maybe a picture of what it's like to live with somebody over a couple of decades. There are complexities and the state of their marriage is always figuring out how to live together. I've been married about as long to somebody who's very different from Sadako, and yet I was interested in this thing of what does it mean to deal with those periodic moments of conflict that show up. That's the state of it. It is the texture of the ordinary without melodrama.

Alison Stewart: Yes, it's an important part of the story and us understanding Tunde because he could be all in his head and all of his observations and his intellectual nature but he lives a real life and I think that's really helpful and in navigating the story. He is interested in a lot of odd things. We learn about a serial killer named Samuel Little. My producer and I were talking about how we spent a lot of time googling to make sure, is this person real? Did this really happen? What is your relationship with searching on the internet?

Teju Cole: I think first of all, a lot of it is just not from the internet to begin with. A lot of stuff is in books. I spend a lot of time in books and also I suppose my own intellectual experience which I am as amazing as it seems to me. I'm rapidly approaching 50. I've been thinking about things for a while now but yes, the internet is also there.

Alison Stewart: Do you collect information? I think when I'm saying the internet, I mean a place where you can collect information, be that the internet or books or?

Teju Cole: Yes. I think it's just always been my whole life just an avid interest in the world. When I became a writer, I wanted to write the kinds of books where the people in my books are interested in the world. The world is interesting. I don't like things being reduced to cliche or being made overly flat. Over the course of any given day, I have a million thoughts, and I think this is part of why my literary heroes are the great high modernists Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, whom I seldom mention in my work, but whose influence is often palpable.

It is the flow of thought. We see this and we see that, and we connect this to that, and we are interested in this. I don't think they're always highfalutin type of thoughts either, it is just the high and the low stitching everything together. It's the fact that he is dancing to this African music and at the same time he is thinking about archives and history and myth. The outsides of our lives look so plain sometimes, but behind our foreheads, inside each of our skulls is this vast universe of memories, apprehensions, learning, emotions, attractions, hostilities, hopes, dreams. It's all there inside each person's head. That's the real miracle of life. I think that is what literature aspires often to convey.

Alison Stewart: What would you recommend someone read from Virginia Woolf or Joyce?

Teju Cole: Oh, go for the classics. For Joyce, I have read several times in the last few years his great long story, The Dead, which seems to me inexhaustible. I would recommend that but I would also recommend something like Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man very close to consciousness. I know if you say, Ulysses, people are going to be intimidated by that. Read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and see more than 100 years ago what the flow of thought looks like. It feels so immediate.

Virginia Woolf, again it's this starry glimmer of classics. Mrs Dalloway for sure, but I really love Woolf's Diaries. We come so close to the person that she was and that stream of thought. I don't think I would've liked to meet her as a person because I'm pretty sure she was this well, snobby upper-class British woman. She would not have had a lot of time for me. When you're reading somebody like that, what they're able to do with language and with thinking, we meet each other at a point that is beyond identity. In spite of ourselves, in spite of our weaknesses, we're able to meet where the work is happening. I'd recommend those two.

Alison Stewart: I love what you just said because we have a conversation on this show a lot about separating the art from the artist. As you said, Virginia Woolf might not have had time for you but that idea of meeting past the point of identity that we can do with art.

Teju Cole: Yes. Not even so much as separation as recognizing the art and having enough self-respect to engage with the art out of that recognition. Then if the artist is nice, good. "Hello, let's have a drink." If the artist is not nice, "Well, be off with you, let me return to the art." When the artist is a great person, a nice person, a thoughtful person, it's a plus. The fact that Chinua Achebe was a humane and considerate human being, it's a great plus, and Things Fall Apart remains an immortal classic. The fact that [unintelligible 00:26:03] was a deeply unpleasant person in encounter with him, it's too bad for him and yet what is good in his work is still good in his work.

Alison Stewart: My guest has been Teju Cole. The name of the novel is Tremor. He'll be speaking at the Brooklyn Public Library in Grand Army Plaza with?

Teju Cole: Emily Raboteau.

Alison Stewart: Thursday night at 7:00 PM. Thank you so much for being with us, and have a great reading. Have a great conversation on Thursday.

Teju Cole: Thank you so much, Alison. This was a pleasure. Thank you.

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