“We Bleed in Public”: Teju Cole on Novel Writing, Poetry, and Political Discourse

On Saturday, author, photographer, and Presidential Scholar Teju Cole spoke with Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Common Jennifer Acker ’00 as part of a series of talks for LitFest. In their discussion, Cole talked about novel writing, mixing prose with photography, his love of Emily Dickinson, and turning to literature in times of political turmoil.

After a brief introduction by President Michael Elliott, Cole opened by reading two excerpts from his 2024 novel “Tremor.” He said his “approach to novel making is not plot-driven, but it is very interested in patterning.” Cole recalled that when his 2011 book “Open City” was published, people did not know what to make of it for the first two months. It was only after a couple of high-profile reviews praised his work that there was a consensus that “Open City” was a novel.

“I [had] to write another book where people are going to say, ‘Is this a novel?’” Cole said. “I really believe in the novel as an innovative form. I like that our English word for this is novel, new.”

Cole believes that the novel as an art form became less structurally experimental when it was marketized in the 19th century, a boundary he attempts to push in “Tremor.” The novel has no continuous plot, no consistent narrator, and shifts constantly across the eight chapters. Cole also experimented with using both third- and first-person narration, trying to do something that was “not immediately comparable to any of the novels” he had read. Still, he said being innovative should not be equivalent to being unreadable. He trusted that readers would be able to easily shift from one style of narration to another because they shift from first person to third just when they think to themselves.

“While we’re doing all of this [narration-shifting], we don’t think we’re doing something innovative in a literary way. It’s that we’re just comfortable with these many different cameras that help us to look at ourselves,” Cole explained.

The main character of “Tremor,” Tunde, shares many biographical details with Cole himself — Nigerian-American, Harvard professor, photographer, etc. Cole said that these parallels between him and Tunde can lead readers to assume that some “intimate” or “unpleasant” things in the novel are actually about him. However, he said he does not care what people believe is fiction or real: “This is what novelists do. We bleed in public.”

Cole said that the “firm armature of the inherently real” — these biographical parallels — is what helps him dive deeper into the fictional worlds he creates. He understood why people feel drawn to stories that are unlike their own, but he pushed for writers to find something interesting about their own lives.

Though it may now seem like it was inevitable that he became a novelist, Cole never expected to be a writer or do anything in the arts. He said that his Nigerian parents presented three available professions to him: doctor, lawyer, and engineer. In Nigeria, students specialized and stopped taking certain subjects in high school, and while he excelled in his English classes, Cole chose to focus on geography instead. In college, he was a pre-med student and art major, so he took no literature courses.

“Harvard will hire literally anyone,” Cole joked, referencing how he teaches English without having any formal education in the subject.

Cole went to medical school, but two years in, he dropped out. He was depressed, and though he wanted to be a doctor, he did not want to be a medical student. Cole said it took years for him to be okay with the fact that he dropped out.

“What’s wrong with me? Am I lazy?” Cole remembered thinking. “Later, I just learned to be gentle with myself … It was a part of my path.”

In his 20s, Cole spent a summer reading “The Catcher in the Rye,” “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” and “The Old Man and the Sea.” These books moved him. He remembered gasping out loud while reading “The Old Man and the Sea” in a cafe and realizing that “the book is not simply something that exists, it’s something that’s made, that an author carefully prepares the effects [of] so that they can act on you.” He wanted to do that, too. He said that any type of writing excites him as long as he can “feel a mind moving.”

Around this time, Cole also started getting into photography. He had no formal training but studied other photographers’ work to train his eye and develop his personal style. He eventually settled on photographs that found “epiphany in the everyday.”

Cole has experimented with mixing photography and prose since his first novel, published in 2007, “Every Day Is for the Thief.” He said that in that case, because the photographs were to enhance fictional prose, he took photographs that were not his personal style and were more photojournalistic. Later, Cole started writing short stories to accompany photographs (The Common published his first essay in this style, which he later expanded upon in his 2017 book “Blind Spot.”)

Cole has enjoyed exploring different forms of artistic expression, but the one area he will not foray into is poetry. He said he probably reads poetry more than anything else, but because he loves it so much, he is “intimidated” to publish it. Any poetry he writes is for himself, Cole said. However, he said that poetry has a huge impact on his art.

“Reading poetry affects the kind of photography I make. Reading poetry affects the kind of prose I write,” he said.

Cole was giddy when describing his love of Dickinson and visiting the Dickinson homestead this weekend. He described her as “more deeply strange, more deeply gifted” than most people give her credit for. He is currently writing a piece on the poet and read every one of her nearly 1,800 poems over the course of six weeks. He warned the audience that “we have been at the mercy of anthologists” and that he felt “rage” that he had not been exposed to more of her work.

Later on, when an audience member asked what Dickinson poem he would recommend, Cole proceeded to recite a deep cut entirely from memory, stunning the audience:

I fit for them —

I seek the Dark

Till I am thorough fit.

The labor is a sober one

With this sufficient sweet

That abstinence of mine produce

A purer food for them, if I succeed,

If not I had

The transport of the Aim —

At the end of the talk, when asked about how literature and photography capture political turmoil, Cole said that he often seeks literature from the past to help him understand current events. He talked about the current hostage exchange between Israel and Hamas and said that he has been reflecting on the importance of having a body to grieve over. Cole turned to Book 24 of Homer’s Iliad to understand the modern issue more. In the section, the Trojan king Priam goes to his enemy, Achilles’, ship, risking his life to ask for his dead son’s body. Even though his son is no longer alive, Priam wants to recover the body so that he can grieve and honor him. After he appeals to Achilles, they weep together over the ones they have lost, and Achilles gives Hector to Priam.

“It doesn’t give us a political solution for now — what it tells us is that we cannot forget the human element. And I think [this is the role] of the poet, the role of the writer, the role of the artist,” Cole said. “We are not the first to face a crisis. Let us take refuge in what has been written for us and on our behalf.”

Attendees of the talk were touched by Cole’s message.

“I was really beyond moved by his invocation of Homer in relation to the hostages being transferred back and forth,” Provost and Dean of the Faculty Martha Umphrey said. “I thought it was a beautiful talk, one of the most erudite talks I’ve heard in many years.”