Teju Cole’s new book, Blind Spot, is an engaging blend of lyricism and form, of prose and mixed media, of the lyric essay and travel photography. Published in 2017, this new collection by award-winning novelist and thought-provoking essayist transcends the boundaries we often place on writing, especially the strict idea that non-fiction must adhere to certain structures. Instead of following the traditional format of an essay or chapters of a novel, Cole turns the chronological on its head; he subverts the three-act structure and embraces the lyric essay form, moving through his adventures symbolically rather than linearly, returning to certain locations at different points throughout the collection. And he doesn’t stop there: he goes on to weave in a visual journey alongside the written, stimulating our senses beyond the already powerful written word by including over 150 of his original photographs taken from locations around the globe. Blind Spot captures the simple beauty around the world--memorializing ordinary scenes and rendering them suddenly reverent in photographs and short lyric captions. Each essay is paired with a photo, and vice versa, and Cole’s words remark and contemplate on the images, moving within the picture and broadening to the world beyond these single moments captured in his camera lens.
Darkness Is Not Empty
Blind Spot by Teju Cole
Review by Gillian Reimann & Amanda Caroll
Together, the lyric essays and photography form a unique structure; one that is both non-linear and non-traditional. The threads that tie each essay together and tell the story of each photo are symbolic in nature as Cole introduces and tackles themes of shifting perspectives, introspection and memories, the world through the lens of the camera and through the lens of the human mind. Cole often parallels images throughout the book, using similar pictures to comment on different aspects of life or society in the area he’s visiting.
In the section titled “Brazzaville,” Cole meditates: “There is that which drapes over, like a funeral sheath...I begin to see as I am carried along by my eyes, these two energies, which, with water as the third, together begin to constitute an interpretive program,” (22). The image that directly follows is a young boy holding onto a red pole as he stands in the water. Waves come crashing in behind him, but he clings tightly, his face obscured in shadow. Cole’s recurring meditation on threes and the fluidity of metaphors in Christianity and in the physical world are embodied in the boy as he “moves between metaphors,” and suddenly, “lowers his head, [and] his eyes disappear,” (22). In this image, the reader is transported into the waves with the boy, cleansed as he is by the water, holding onto that pole as tight as we can as we move between the metaphors with him and with Cole.
At the end of the book, after touring from mountains in Europe to streets in Asia, we return to Brazzaville: the boy in the waves, only this time his face is visible, and Cole states, “Darkness is not empty...But all of the sudden, with slightly altered settings, I could now see his face, his eyes. Darkness is not empty. It is information at rest...This boy is double-visioned. He is looking out, looking outward, but here, poised at the edge of the crisis, he is also looking inward, looking in,” (322). The reader is made to look to and from--at what we can see, what we can’t, and what we might, at first, miss.
As I read, I was struck by how critically, yet eloquently Cole phrased this final passage as a call for us all to look both outward and inward, to be conscious of ourselves but also others and the way we intersect with them. Cole’s parallelisms and dualities of self and society, belief and faith, nature and city are constants throughout the book, provoking thoughts and meditations on our own lives and places in the world. At this time in our social and political climate, Blind Spot comes as a refreshing reminder of the worlds outside our homes, wherever they may be, and offers unique perspectives we can use to to look beyond ourselves: to look beyond the social spheres, the economic spheres, the artificial constraints we place on ourselves, and instead see our common humanity, stark and simple, bound together across the globe in collective struggle and resilience. Despite the differences we perceive among one another in language or in photographs, Teju Cole’s Blind Spot urges us all to seek out the humanity that binds us all together.