Known and Strange Things Quotes

“What do I believe in? Imagination, gardens, science, poetry, love, and a variety of nonviolent consolations. I suspect that in this aggregate all this isn't enough, but that's where I am for now.”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

“There is an expectation that we can talk about sins but no one must be identified as a sinner: newspapers love to describe words or deeds as “racially charged” even in those cases when it would be more honest to say “racist”; we agree that there is rampant misogyny, but misogynists are nowhere to be found; homophobia is a problem, but no one is homophobic. One cumulative effect of this policed language is that when someone dares to point out something as obvious as white privilege, it is seen as unduly provocative. Marginalized voices in America have fewer and fewer avenues to speak plainly about what they suffer; the effect of this enforced civility is that those voices are falsified or blocked entirely from the discourse.”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

“The music you travel with helps you to create your own internal weather.”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

“American racism has many moving parts, and has had enough centuries in which to evolve an impressive camouflage. It can hoard its malice in great stillness for a long time, all the while pretending to look the other way. Like misogyny, it is atmospheric. You don’t see it at first. But understanding comes.”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

“NOT ALL VIOLENCE is hot. There’s cold violence, too, which takes its time and finally gets its way. Children going to school and coming home are exposed to it. Fathers and mothers listen to politicians on television calling for their extermination. Grandmothers have no expectation that even their aged bodies are safe: any young man may lay a hand on them with no consequence. The police could arrive at night and drag a family out into the street. Putting a people into deep uncertainty about the fundamentals of life, over years and decades, is a form of cold violence.”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

“I am a novelist, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point.”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

“Google tried to do everything. It proved itself the deepest and fastest of the search engines. It stomped the competition in email. It made a decent showing in image hosting, and a good one in chat. It stumbled on social, but utterly owned maps. It swallowed libraries whole and sent tremors across the copyright laws. It knows where you are right now, and what you’re doing, and what you’ll probably do next. It added an indelible, funny, loose-limbed, and exact verb into the vocabulary: to google. No one “bings” or “yahoos” anything. And it finishes your sen … All of a sudden, one day, a few years ago, there was Google Image Search. Words typed into the search box could deliver pages of images arrayed in a grid. I remember the first time I saw this, and what I felt: fear. I knew then that the monster had taken over. I confessed it, too. “I’m afraid of Google,” I said recently to an employee of the company. “I’m not afraid of Google,” he replied. “Google has a committee that meets over privacy issues before we release any product. I’m afraid of Facebook, of what Facebook can do with what Google has found. We are in a new age of cyberbullying.” I agreed with him about Facebook, but remained unreassured about Google." (from "Known and Strange Things" by Teju Cole)”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

“This fantasy about the disposability of black life is a constant in American history.”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

“Our host drifted away, and Vidia and I continued chatting about this and that. Swift judgments came down. The simplicity in Hemingway was “bogus” and nothing, Vidia said, like his own. Things Fall Apart was a fine book, but Achebe’s refusal to write about his decades in America was disappointing. Heart of Darkness was good, but structurally a failure. I asked him about the biography by Patrick French, The World Is What It Is, which he had authorized. He stiffened. That book, which was extraordinarily well written, was also shocking in the extent to which it revealed a nasty, petty, and insecure man. “One gives away so much in trust,” Vidia said. “One expects a certain discretion. It’s painful, it’s painful. But that’s quite all right. Others will be written. The record will be corrected.” He sounded like a boy being brave after gashing his thumb. The”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

“Heart of Darkness was written when rapacious extraction of African resources by European adventure was gospel truth—as it still is. The book helped create the questions that occupy us till this day. What does it mean to write about others? Who are these others? More pressingly, who are the articulate “we”? In Heart of Darkness, the natives—the niggers, as they are called in the book, the word falling each time like a lance—speak only twice, once to express enthusiasm for cannibalism, then, later, to bring the barely articulate report “Mistah Kurtz, he dead.” Otherwise, these niggers, these savages, are little more than shadows and violence, either pressed into dumb service on the boat, or launching dumb, grieved, uncomprehending, and deadly attacks on it from the shore. Not only is this primitive, subhuman Africa incoherent to any African, it is incoherent to any right-thinking non-African, too. A hundred years ago, it was taken as the commonplace truth; it wasn’t outside the mainstream of European opinions about Africans. But we have all moved on. Those things are in the past,”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

“This fantasy about the disposability of black life is a constant in American history. It takes a while to understand that this disposability continues. It takes whites a while to understand it; it takes non-black people of color a while to understand it; and it takes some blacks, whether they’ve always lived in the United States or are latecomers like myself, weaned elsewhere on other struggles, a while to understand”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

“Through the act of writing, I was able to find out what I knew about these things, what I was able to know, and where the limits of knowing lay.”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

“Photography is inescapably a memorial art. It selects, out of the flow of time, a moment to be preserved, with the moments before and after falling away like sheer cliffs.”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

“Rural landscapes can give the double illusion of being eternal and newly born. Cities, on the other hand, are marked with specific architecture from specific dates, and this architecture, built by long-vanished others for their own uses, is the shell that we, like hermit crabs, climb into.”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

“How on earth did this happen to the reader in chief? What became of literature’s vaunted power to inspire empathy? (A power that we simultaneously disavow and perpetually cite.)”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

“They knew, on a gut level, that it wasn’t the white and black dichotomy that was being challenged, but the idea that to be American is to be white or black. Who knew what could follow on from this murky Kenyan-Indonesian-Hawaiian-Kansan mélange? They were right to be frantic. Obama had challenged the assumption that a person had to be from somewhere familiar, had to be from one place, and he had successfully smuggled that question into the center of American life.”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

“But the history of most blacks in this country—the history of slavery, Reconstruction, systematic disenfranchisement, and the civil rights movement—was not my history. My history was one of emigration, adaptation, and a different flavor of exile. I was only a latter-day sharer in the sorrow and the glory of the African American experience.”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

“Black presidents were no novelty for me. About half my life, the half I lived in Nigeria, had been spent under their rule, and, in my mind, the color of the president was neither here nor there. But this was America. Race mattered. Not the facts: that Obama was not actually descended from slaves, that he was raised in a white household. The facts could be elided easily enough. Race was what mattered, race and the uses for which it was available; societal convention gave priority to his black roots over his white ones.”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

“I began to run across Lenox Avenue, toward Adam Clayton Powell, and was almost hit by a speeding cab. The driver screeched to a halt and rolled down his window. He grinned and extended his hand. “We did it!” he said, “I don’t know how, but we did it!”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

“Authorship, after all, is not only what is created but also what is selected.”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

“clever, the falsely attractive.” He knows us too well. There is of course nothing wrong with a photograph of your pug. But when you take that photograph without imagination and then put a “1977” filter on it—your pug wasn’t born in 1977—you are reaching for an invented past that has no relevance to the subject at hand. You make the image “better” in an empty way, thus making it worse.”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

“These images pose a challenge to another bias in mainstream culture: that to make something darker is to make it more dubious. There have been instances when a black face was darkened on the cover of a magazine or in a political ad to cast a literal pall of suspicion over it, just as there have been times when a black face was lightened after a photo shoot with the apparent goal of making it more appealing.”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

“Under Young’s lenses, they become darker yet and serve as the brooding centers of these overwhelmingly beautiful films. Black skin, full of unexpected gradations of blue, purple, or ocher, sets a tone for the narrative: Adenike lost in thought on her wedding day, King on an evening telephone call to his wife or in discussion in a jail cell with other civil rights leaders. In a larger culture that tends to value black people for their abilities to jump, dance, or otherwise entertain, these moments of inwardness open up a different space of encounter.”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

“One of Glissant’s main projects was an exploration of the word “opacity.” Glissant defined it as a right to not have to be understood on others’ terms, a right to be misunderstood if need be. The argument was rooted in linguistic considerations: it was a stance against certain expectations of transparency embedded in the French language. Glissant sought to defend the opacity, obscurity, and inscrutability of Caribbean blacks and other marginalized peoples. External pressures insisted on everything being illuminated, simplified, and explained. Glissant’s response: no. And this gentle refusal, this suggestion that there is another way, a deeper way, holds true for DeCarava, too.”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

“Objects, sometimes more powerfully than faces, remind us of what was and no longer is; stillness, in photography, can be more affecting than action. This is in part because of the respectful distance that a photograph of objects can create between the one who looks, far from the place of trouble, and the one whose trouble those objects signify. But it is also because objects are reservoirs of specific personal experience, filled with the hours of some person’s life.”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

“One of Muholi’s long-term projects, called Faces and Phases, focuses on the portraiture of black lesbian and transgender people, most of them in South Africa. Like her West African forebears, she shows people as they wish to be seen.”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

“Something changed when Africans began to take photographs of one another: you can see it in the way they look at the camera, in the poses, the attitude. The difference between the images taken by colonialists or white adventurers and those made for the sitter’s personal use is especially striking in photographs of women. In the former, women are being looked at against their will, captive to a controlling gaze. In the latter, they look at themselves as in a mirror, an activity that always involves seriousness, levity, and an element of wonder.”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

“It was another set of lives, another set of fates rising to the surface for a moment before falling into history.”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays

“To be black is to bear the brunt of selective enforcement of the law, and to inhabit a psychic unsteadiness in which there is no guarantee of personal safety. You are a black body first, before you are a kid walking down the street or a Harvard professor who has misplaced his keys.”
― Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things: Essays