To Own and Be Owned
A review of 'Tremor' by Teju Cole — a cerebral novel without much plot to pursue.
To write a quietly powerful book must require a different sort of talent — unmatched restraint, persistent patience, and careful editing. Then again, does anyone set out to write a quietly powerful work rather than a loud scream-of-a-story, especially when it’s one about lifetimes of cultures destroyed and lives devalued?
Teju Cole’s Tremor (2023) is a cerebral novel that surprises and challenges — sometimes quietly, sometimes loudly. It is a fragmented story about stolen and alienated colonial objects, the power of music and friendship, and the “extraordinary span of human experience”.
Meet Tunde, a photography teacher at a New England college, who is often startled by instances of casual racism but has mostly learned to deal with them; whose marriage with Sadako is strained; who had left Lagos for the US when he was seventeen; who is visiting Mali; who loves music and philosophy; who talks to ‘you’ — a close friend who has been dead at least three years.
The novel unravels — and gets more crowded with voices — after Tunde encounters “an assortment of wooden masks and sculptures, three of them recognizably African” at an antique shop in Maine. He is drawn to “an elegant antelope headdress with a soaring pair of horns, a ci wara.”
“Ci wara, credited by Bambara people with having brought agriculture to humanity, is danced in its male and female forms as headdresses for young men during sowing and harvesting festivals.”
Tunde reflects,
“Whatever its story it had found its way to the coast of New England. It was in a shop among the unrelated treasures white people had collected by fair means or foul from across the globe.”
Tunde meets the ci wara’s ‘double’ in Bamako, Mali — a brass one that is “not as elegant as the wooden one he bought in Maine” and “nowhere near its size”. He buys it and says,
“There is no doubt they’ve been made for the tourist trade and that is what he most likes about them because now the exchange seems transparent and fair.”
This is as much I can tell you about the plot of the novel, of which there isn’t much to pursue.
It’s the kind of work that you have to sit with — let the performance of it move you; let the theory of it engage you; let its interconnected motifs make you work to find meanings and methods.
Let it ask the question —
“How is one to live without owning others? Who is this world for? White people taught us that the world could be dominated by means of religion and warfare, collected for the sake of pleasure and scholarship, possessed through travel, and owned by anyone willing to claim and defend that ownership.”
Let the story capture you in its music and dance, its photography, its voices, its multiple returns, its recurring doubles —
“This is a city of doubles, a pluripotential city of echoing selves and settings, as though it were a poem each line of which wishes to be read twice.”
Written with earnestness and defiance, Cole’s novel sits somewhere (uncomfortably) between Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book-length essay Between The World and Me (2015) and Caleb Azumah Nelson’s novel Open Water (2021), but with an experimental narrative style — “the narration is never neutral” — that is its own, and that may not be everyone’s cup of tea.
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