Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Neo Africanus - In Teju Cole's World

having taken a bit more time, now, in reading akin's excellent piece on cole, i offer the following criticism. the problem is not that cole confuses himself with julius, the protagonist, but that akin refuses to take julius as a character created by cole. in the exchanges with farouk and especially dr maillotte, julius records her remark that people like farouk are angry and resentful. that voice, the voice of a certain form of contemporary racism, is one that naipaul adopted from an early point, and which informs the worst of his racist novels like Bend in the River. however, julius doesn't accept dr maillotte's judgment; he creates a sympathetic dialectic between the two possible positions that might be adopted toward the activism of farouk and khalil, and osama bin laden, and that of the disengaged, privileged class from which the belgian rulers and aristocracy emerged, like baron empain and leopold 1, 2, 3, etc. the voice that uses terms like angry and resentful is not julius's, and when he is  mugged late in the novel he hides from others the fact that his attackers were young men of color.
he never posits an automatic black mentality grounded in resentment, or resistance, but cannot prevent others from perceiving him as they will, i.e., as the african, the black man, etc.
i don't see him at all, at all, in the role of the creole/mulatto/metis type. he creates a unique, high culture personnage for himself, but also turns to the term "brother" when the occasion arises, even if he is uncomfortable in what assumptions that implies. an example is when he meets farouk, calls him brother, and asks himself why he did it.
anyway, i want to emphasize (to akin especially) how much racial identity, which akin sees julius as dodging, is consistently applied to him by others. all the time. that's what cole created, not julius, and he does this so as to highlight both the inevitability of a racial consciousness under those circumstances, as well as the possibility of someone who is a black man embracing a certain range of texts and cultural objects that don't fall into a neat racial or class bundle. he is uniquely gifted, we can say, but only along certain lines: classical music, but of a certain style and period. no beethoven please, but mahler, and the baroque, to the full hilt. ironically including the coffee cantata, to skate back, over and over, to the edges of race. a supreme example of this is when we learn that julius's credit card is city bank, when we just learned the history of city bank's involvement in the slave trade.
that is where the real politics of this novel are located: in the indictment of those in history responsible for the holocausts visited on those undeserving of such blows and traumas; from his patient V and her histories of native americans to the jews to the african slaves.
at the same time, julius seems not to be able to come to terms with his own complicity. cole tells us that when we learn of V's death, after julius denied her access to his phone while he was in europe, and while his newly prescribed medications for her depression seem to have failed to prevent her suicide.
there would be no resonance with this if julius had not "heard" mr. f's praise for him. he doesn't disparage those words; and isn't going to bask in an easy posture of smugness in having come to his level of accomplishment. in fact, he doesn't go the whole route in his profession by choosing an academic career.
he offers the figure of someone who is flawed, who can't quite dodge those flaws, the memory of a woman he took advantage of when he was 14 and she, 15, was drunk. but he also listens to others, cares for others, and displays sensitivity both to them and to cultural works that speak especially to him. to reduce this to "individuality" rather than a broader racial identity would seem to enforce a certain conformity on the possibilities of black characters: either for or against the revolution. but he is watching the skies for someone else, caught in the melancholy of life, of mahler's music, of brewster's images, and especially of loss in a multiplicity of registers that strongly evoke what freud meant by that term, melancholy, a form of internalizing suffering without the capacity to work it through, like mourning, and so to be cured of the loss. julius is too silent to work through his melancholy, which is why the musical moment to which he most responds is the last of the Lied von der erde called the der abschied, the departure. or, i'd say, death. maybe he wears its mantle, too, like the birds whose auspices are read, like the livers of the sacrificed, to help us read the signs of harbingers of death.
why i want to know is, why isn't he talking to his mother?
ken

On 10/3/13 9:01 AM, Amatoritsero Ede wrote:

Of the many encounters in which Julius, the protagonist of Open City – Teju Cole's elegantly disarming novel – finds himself, two strike me as constituting the pulse of the subtle cultural politics animating the novel. In the first, the young psychiatrist is about to post a letter when the post office clerk, Terry, struck by his choice of stamp, says, "Say, brother, where are you from? 'Cause, see, I could tell you were from the Motherland. And you brothers have something that is vital, you understand me. You have something that is vital for the health of those of us raised on this side of the ocean. Let me tell you something: I am raising my daughters as Africans."  further reading at:
http://www.mtls.ca/issue16/writings/essay/akin-adesokan/


Amatoritsero

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--   kenneth w. harrow   faculty excellence advocate  professor of english  michigan state university  department of english  619 red cedar road  room C-614 wells hall  east lansing, mi 48824  ph. 517 803 8839  harrow@msu.edu