Teju Cole Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time

"In Black Paper, Teju Cole meditates on what it means to keep our humanity--and witness the humanity of others--in a time of darkness. "Darkness," Cole writes, "is not empty." Through art, politics, travel, and memoir, he returns us to the wisdom latent in shadows, and sets the darkness echoing. The opening essay sets the mood for the book, as Cole travels to southern Italy and Sicily to view a series of Caravaggio paintings. He ponders the suffering that Caravaggio ("a murderer, a slaveholder, a terror, and a pest") both dealt out and experienced, and the disquieting echoes of that suffering in the abandoned boats of migrants arriving on nearby shores. This collection also gathers several of Cole's recent columns on photography for the New York Times Magazine and offers a suite of elegies to lost friends who show him--and us--ways of mourning in times of death"--
A profound book of essays from a celebrated master of the form. Darkness is not empty, writes Teju Cole in Black Paper, a book that meditates on what it means to sustain our humanity and witness the humanity of others in a time of darkness. One of the most celebrated essayists of his generation, Cole here plays variations on the essay form, modeling ways to attend to experience not just to take in but to think critically about what we sense and what we dont. Wide-ranging but thematically unified, the essays address ethical questions about what it means to be human and what it means to bear witness, recognizing how our individual present is informed by a collective past. Coles writings in Black Paper approach the fractured moment of our history through a constellation of interrelated concerns: confrontation with unsettling art, elegies both public and private, the defense of writing in a time of political upheaval, the role of the color black in the visual arts, the use of shadow in photography, and the links between literature and activism. Throughout, Cole gives us intriguing new ways of thinking about blackness and its numerous connotations. As he describes the carbon-copy process in his epilogue: Writing on the top white sheet would transfer the carbon from the black paper onto the bottom white sheet. Black transported the meaning.