Tremor: Teju Cole’s trembling reflections on blackness in the history of art

During my visits to these museums and art galleries, I was drawn in by the gentle rhythm of Teju Cole’s novel, Tremor (Faber & Faber). To me, this novel performs the function of a talisman in the colonial archive. The Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe writes about the power of the talisman in the archive as it is an object that gives those who carry it a feeling of being protected or being the ‘co-owner of time’ in events from the past. As such, the state wields power over the relics and artefacts in the museums and it induces a collective amnesia about its own histories of racial and colonial violence.

Yet, archives can never be fully under the control of the state. This is because relics also aid recollection; they are shared memories, co-owned by those subjects upon whom colonial and racial violence is perpetrated. For Mbembe, the talisman functions to soften the anger, shame, guilt or resentment that histories of colonial violence tend to incite. Though strictly speaking, Teju Cole’s book is not a talisman (at least not in the historical sense) but it works as an antidote for colonised subjects, those of us charting the slippery marble floors, ecumenical columns and cathedral-style arches of museums and galleries to find ourselves subsumed by a surge of existential nausea.

Where something stands, something else will stand by it

Tremor is a follow-up of Teju Cole’s two other evocative novels — Everyday is For the Thief (2007) and Open City (2011) — both about a peripatetic young black man in New York City and his return to Lagos after fifteen years of exile in the United States. It is an auto-fiction that traces the life of Tunde, a Nigerian professor of photography at Harvard. It is a powerful work about the black experience, in which Tunde reflects on race, the history of Western art, transatlantic slavery and settler colonial genocide, among other things.

With his appreciation for art and world-music, his extensive travels to Paris, Bamako, Basel, London and Lagos for conferences, museum visits and concerts, and the collective and embodied experience of listening to Ali Farka Touré live in London — in everything Tunde does he resembles Teju Cole, who currently resides in Harvard, Massachusetts, as the Gore Vidal Professor of Creative Writing.

Teju Cole also pays tribute to the Nigerian literary giant Chinua Achebe by mentioning an Igbo proverb from his essay, ‘Morning Yet on Creation Day’ — ‘Wherever something stands, something else will stand by it.’ Reflecting on the metaphysics of ‘spirit-double’ in the Igbo cosmology, one cannot help but think of the historical conversation between Achebe and the African-American writer James Baldwin at a conference on ‘Defining African Aesthetics’ in 1980, Florida. It was a fateful encounter of two African writers who were spirit doubles. As Baldwin spoke about chattel slavery and the history of violence against black people in America, his microphone was interrupted by a gruff white male voice telling him, “You gonna have to cut it out Mr. Baldwin. We can’t stand for this kind of going-on.”

The shocked audience gasps audibly. After a few seconds of silence, Baldwin stands up and responds: “Mr. Baldwin is nevertheless going to finish his statement. And I will tell you now, whoever you are, that if you assassinate me in the next two minutes, I’m telling you this: it no longer matters what you think. The doctrine of white supremacy on which the Western world is based has had its hour — has had its day! It’s over!” The audience cheers him on and indeed we see that where something stands, something else will stand by it.

A psychic tremor

In the opening chapter, Tunde is similarly interrupted as he is setting up his camera on a tripod to capture an image of jasmine blossoms in a neighbourhood in Maine. An aggressive voice menacingly calls out to him to warn him about private property. He is acutely aware of the implication of ‘private property’ in America, reflecting on the historical excesses of J.M.W. Turner’s painting, The Slave Ship, originally titled Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying (1840) and its depiction of the horrors of chattel slavery, and the legal discourse that allowed white-settlers to massacre enslaved Africans and collect the insurance for the loss of human cargo.

He is not unfamiliar with such incidents of racism, or aggression and yet the realisation startles him each time that as a black subject, his right to pursue beauty and aesthetics often arouse anger and suspicion. It is the very same conundrum that Achebe and Baldwin are trying to get their head around in the conference on defining African aesthetics as they talk about beauty, morality and the duty of African writers.

At a recent book launch, Teju Cole read an excerpt from the book in which Tunde reflects on a bottle of purple ink lying on his desk: “A purple haunted in its lower registers by indigo. The African violet is where the name comes from ... not the violet of bishops, clergymen or university professors but the violet of the darkest African skin.” A violet that etymologically evokes the tenderness of a violin and yet remains haunted by a hint of violence. The violet in Mark Rothko’s paintings, a violet so deep that it could drown the eye, a violet so base that it could raise the dead. The violet taken from his grandmother’s wardrobe.

In the final pages, Tunde goes back and sets up his camera to photograph the rotting jasmine blossoms, but he has an attack of vertigo, a psychic tremor perhaps reminiscent of the Haitian Revolution, following the haunting incident about the catastrophic earthquake at Port-au-Prince. Perhaps, this is why the novel comes to be titled Tremor, as a set of trembling reflections on blackness in the history of art.