Reporting from the Gaza Strip in 2006, the critic and essayist John Berger powerfully summed up the prevailing sentiment among suffering Palestinians: “How is it I am still alive? I’ll tell you I’m alive because there’s a temporary shortage of death. This is said with a grin, which is on the far side of a longing for normalcy, for an ordinary life.”
The Nigerian-American writer and photographer Teju Cole has written about Berger’s influence on his work, and his own novels seem touchingly attuned to the deaths that punctuate our longing for normality, to the phantom absences in ordinary lives. In Open City, one of the characters, a young Native American historian, is emotionally wrecked by the details of the horrors inflicted by white settlers on her ancestors and ends up succumbing to a depressive episode. In Every Day Is for the Thief, the Nigerian-American narrator left Lagos at 17, sometime after his father’s death. He returns a decade or so later as a prodigal son of sorts, to conduct “an inquiry into what it was I longed for all those times I longed for home”.
