Material #23: Tremor
I am half-way through reading Teju Cole’s new(ish) book Tremor.
Cole is a photographer and a writer, though those neat buckets don’t really describe the way he works.
Cole’s writing, for me, epitomizes language as navigation. He puts language to work to navigate, negotiate, tussle in the ever-generative space between the physical world and the world of the mind, and in the space between collective histories and individual experience, action and responsibility.
I looked up Cole’s photography webpage to add it above: and when I arrived at that page, boom - there was a reference right up front to Calvino’s Invisible Cities, which has provided endless inspiration to me (and which also helped shape the It’s Material logo). The reference comes from Cole’s essay Far Away from Here. It reads:
“I like Italo Calvino’s idea of ‘continuous cities,’ as described in ‘Invisible Cities.’ He suggests that there is actually just one big, continuous city that does not begin or end: ‘Only the name of the airport changes.’ What is then interesting is to find, in that continuity, the less-obvious differences of texture: the signs, the markings, the assemblages, the things hiding in plain sight in each cityscape or landscape.
‘Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?’ But to have merely thought of here would not have revealed its subtle peculiarities, the peculiarities that are not written in guidebooks. Only direct observation can reveal those. The way streetlights and traffic signs vary, the most common fonts, the slight variations in building codes, the fleeting culture of ads (different in each place, even when the company is a multinational), the noticeable shift in the range of hues that people wear in a given city, the visual melody of infrastructure as it interacts with terrain.”
Cole’s first novel, Open City, accompanied me on a series of walks I took through New York City during maternity leave with my second son. During pauses to breast-feed on benches I’d observe the world around me and read segments of the book, which itself is structured around meandering walks in NYC.
I digress though. “Material” in its various forms, has already appeared several times in Tremor, and I’m only on page 99. Here are two examples.
The narrator (close to Cole himself though not him) has long listened to the music of Mali and dreamed of being there. In the novel he visits for the first time.
“The city is hot. The shops have on them names like Coulibaly, Kanté, Touré, Traoré, Keita, names familiar to him, names he has known through the years as the names of musicians, football players, scholars, artists, names redolent of another world with which he feels intimate but from which he has always been distant; and here they are in their ordinary contexts on shop signs and billboards, the material reality of the dream he’s been having for almost three decades.”
A little further on, Cole contrasts an encounter with Turner’s painting Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon coming on) with M. NourbeSe Philip’s book-length poem Zong! about the same horrific event. Philip’s poem uses language from a court case in which the owners of the ship Zong claimed the insurers should cover the cost of their lost ‘cargo’ of enslaved people.
“By using the words of that already foul legal text, by shearing some of those words, by going on a rampage inside that locked word store, Philip wails out the lives of the people massacred on the Zong. Like Turner she paints a picture of a creaking ship beset by heaving waves. But out of that ragged material she has made something far more personal and holy. We get a sense of actual persons destroyed. We are spattered by history’s bitter spray.”
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Through 2024, It’s Material is sharing one use of the word “material” each week, on Tuesdays.