REVIEW OF TREMOR Teju Cole

By TOM WELLS

Tremor by Teju Cole

 

It may say "A Novel" on the cover, but "Tremor" by Nigerian-born, American-educated, Harvard-employed creative writing professor Teju Cole comes off as a series of essays about myriad topics, including musical and visual arts, spousal relations, casual racism, and horrific Western brutality toward indigenous peoples, all wrapped around 24 snapshots of Nigerian life, appropriately related by the professional and academic photographer Tunde.

 

In a written style not unlike the hypnotic drone of a chant, Cole weaves between the achingly personal and the cataclysmically historical. One of the standout conceits of the book is Tunde's observations on the Turner painting "The Slave Ship," a work the artist originally titled "Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On." Neither title speaks to the pure evil of the incident, which took place 59 years before Turner's painting was first shown at the Royal Academy in 1840. In 1781, the captain of the British ship Zong, on which drinking water had run low, ordered 132 chained slaves—not just the dead and dying--to be thrown into the sea in order to collect insurance money that would not have been forthcoming if they had died of thirst and related maladies.

 

For those of us unfamiliar with the Zong incident, the news of its occurrence is deeply shocking. Yet Tunde/Cole's telling of it is done with such dispassion that the reader reacts more out of historical interest than visceral horror. This tone of academic calm that pervades the various story lines, including the Nigerian "snapshots," acts like a verbal tranquilizer, blunting the reader's emotional response and underscoring "the stubborn gap between what he is able to think and what he is able to do." As Tunde/Cole writes about serial killer Samuel Little, who confessed to 93 murders, "All that the story teaches is that human suffering is a useless mystery," especially when considering that Little became "the most prolific serial career" in an America built on First Nations genocide.

 

If atrocity is abstract and historical, then happiness is personal and fleeting. Nothing illustrates this juxtaposition more than the story of the husband of Tunde's friend Lucas. The husband is on a break from a business trip in Haiti when he invites a young man on a picnic. He described the hours with the boy as some of the happiest of his life. "That's what he and the boy were in the middle of, a happiest day, when they felt a rolling motion underneath them. Looking up they saw in the distance the city from which now a great cloud of dust was rising." The city was Port-au-Prince, the earthquake magnitude was 7.0 and the death toll would exceed 200,000.

 

It is left for Tunde's partner Sadako to give balance to the riot of observations this book contains when she is given a voice in the final pages and describes a gathering at their house. "Bowls are passed around with heaps of white rice on which gumbo is served and it's as though people don't realize how hungry they are until they begin to eat. Drinks are expected at parties but real food isn't.  But we love to feed people. What a gift to get to do this in community.  How great is what surrounds us, how insubstantial what preoccupies us. I make eye contact with my love, the one who keeps me from losing my head, the one I keep from losing his footing."

 

***½ raised to **** after JFDI meeting