“The book of events is always open in the middle.”
A Chicago Sun-Times article from January 10th, 2024 is headlined: “Art Institute to defend its ownership of watercolor that New York authorities contend Nazis stole during Holocaust”
The piece in question is “Russian War Prisoner” by Egon Schiele (not currently on display). Prosecutors allege that pierce is the rightful property of the family of Fritz Grünbaum, a cabaret star who was killed in the Holocaust. The museum insists his sister-in-law was the rightful owner, who sold the painting. The artwork is valued at $1.25 million.
During a chapter of Teju Cole’s Tremor, the narrator Tunde shares the history of a painting, “Landscape with Burning City”. It is currently housed at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. It was owned by Franz Koenings in Germany in the 1930s. He took out a loan and used the painting as collateral. The painting was later sold to Adolf Hitler’s second in command, Hermann Goering. And then…?????...and then it ended up at the MFA.
Says their website: “The MFA awaits communication from the interested parties regarding their attempts to reach a neutral resolution of the ownership of the painting.”
Tremor, in about 240 pages, reaffirms that winners write history. The narrator, an artist, says he “makes” a picture but that other people “take” pictures. Creation vs. extraction.
Tunde adds, “Our education…has encouraged us to think of art as something requiring great care. We know not to touch objects in museums. We are all obsessed with preservation and we revere scholarship and curation. But we have not been concurrently taught to value the life-worlds of others, their autonomy, their ancestral rights.” He says this is particularly true of art originating in Africa. The MFA is awaiting correspondence about the Dutch painting in a willingness to return it. There is no such willingness for the art extracted from Benin.
“In the West a love of the “authentic” means that art collectors prefer their African objects to be alienated so that only what has been extracted from its context becomes real.”
The book of events is always open in the middle.
Protests of war in Iran, an earthquake in Haiti, many world events appear in the pages of Tremor. There is a relationship on the brink, it could fall through the earth or it could be saved. There are only brief glimpses of this relationship given throughout the book, and yet so much of everything the narrator tells us of his past and this country’s past, comes into play in his own relationship.
There are daily, forgettable tragedies that dot the “I”s of everyone around us. Like friends or colleagues suffering through cancer treatment. “We want to think we can avoid suddenness, we want to think that we can prepare ourselves for suddenness. Then the ground opens up. Life is not only more terrible than we know it is more terrible than we can know.”
There is the story of Samuel Little, who killed 93 women between 1970 and 2005. A serial killer that the students in Tunde’s class are shocked to have never heard of.
AI-created photographs, from a “generative adversarial network.” Tunde scrolls through portraits created by this network, noticing no Black people. An algorithm always has to be written by someone, and white people don’t notice Black absence in their algorithms, “don’t notice Black absence in their museums and schools, in their restaurants, in the movies they watch, the books they read, the scholars they cite.”
As always, the world of Cole is rich with cultural and artistic references. The Goldberg Variations, the Searchers, Italo Calvino, Luc Thuymans, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Ingmar Bergman.
There is lots of music: Tracy Chapman, Chaka Khan, Frank Ocean, Burna Boy, Ry Cooder, Thelonius Monk, Ali Farka Toure.
But it’s not just background music or pure pop-escapism. “Often when [Tunde] is entertained by music he is also displeased by having been entertained, as though he had forgotten something or gotten something wrong, as though he has let someone down.” Music, rather, can be a shield, “an acoustic amulet averting evil from him.”
“Life is hopeless but it is not serious. We have to have danced while we could and, later, to have danced again in the telling.”
What does it mean to read this book while an active genocide is happening, which people in my social media bubble seem to care a lot more for than those outside of it?
Tunde talks about friends wanting to go support an Afghanistan restaurant when the United States invaded that country. I saw something about a Palestinian Film Festival coming to Chicago in the spring. Of course I made a note about it, but why had I never bothered to pay attention to it before? And will I again in the future if we ever get to a point of ceasefire and relative peace?
Having recently read Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved, there is a section where German readers respond to the author’s description of life in a concentration camp. The book was published in Italy shortly after World War II, but not in German until after 1960.
So I wonder, should the Israel/Palestine conflict come to an end soon, even momentarily, should a book be written and published in the next few years, and not made available to readers in the United States until the year 2040, what kind of reaction might I have? How would I respond? What have I done to prevent a genocide or help save these people? The way we always thought we would imagine saving victims of concentration camps in the 1940s?
There is not much I can offer. A few tweets. A few books read. Sharing support of the Palestinian-Americans marching through the Orland Grasslands on Thanksgiving Day. An art gallery in Andersonville. Trying to talk with family and being ignored, and not trying hard enough to talk with family.
Going out to karaoke, celebrating holidays and my birthday. Googling “active genocides” as if a genocide can be passive. Feeling empathetic but also helpless and that we might as well just go on living as normal. As if this weren’t happening.
Just keep taking the bus to work, taking out the trash, watering the plants, doing the dishes. Going to the record store. Biking around the park, watching the geese on the frozen lake, sometimes breaking through the patches of thin ice. Watching the squirrels, beckoned, crawl on a little girl while her mother takes a video on her phone.
The perpetual extinguishing of lives we were never supposed to pay attention to.
“As for “the most prolific serial killer”: what would that even mean in a country built on genocide?”
The multitude of voices, the quotidian lives that Cole is so interested in exploring, take on their own voices, in a few paragraphs each, an entire chapter devoted to alternating first-person narratives. Like picking up a phone and dialing a number at random. People talk about their lives, their work, family, sex, love, traffic, art, school, fashion, money, religion, music, womanhood, storms, darkness.
Having recently celebrated MLK Day (a holiday itself under attack from the right), folks point out that his daughter is an active Twitter member. This history isn’t long ago. Likewise, Cole examines John Coltrane’s family genealogy and how his great-grandparents were owned by other people. Coltrane’s sax, sounds still fresh. Slavery, still a fresh open wound. Art ownership, still a debate (for some). The wheels on the bus go round and round.
Dr. King wrote about love. He wrote about love and struggle.
Levi, time and again, explains that his duty is to storytelling, to not let the Holocaust become one of those things written off because it was so long ago, from another time.
Cole’s narrators ask a lot of questions. It’s a style I’ve emulated in my own writing. Narrators and protagonists should never have all the answers. All narrators and protagonists are all alike, each unreliable in their own way.
The ever-gnawing question at the narrator (and potentially Cole), reliable or otherwise: “How is one to live in a way that does not cannibalize the lives of others, that does not reduce them to mascots, objects of fascination, mere terms in the logic of a dominant culture?”
How does one live with all the tremors of the universe? All the hate and war and genocide?
Did Cole expect Tremor to be called timely? Is a novel about genocide ever not timely?
The book of events is always open in the middle.