Teju Cole: "The situation we professors and students are experiencing at Harvard is desperate."

BarcelonaIt's been almost fifteen years since Teju Cole (Kalamazoo, Michigan, 1975) published Open city –in Catalan in Quaderns Crema, translated by Xavier Pàmies–, an introspective and subtle novel about a boy who walks through contemporary New York and describes it with exquisite prose that is at the same time critical of the traces of racism and colonialism that can still be found in Cole1. Harvard, has visited Barcelona to present a new book, Black paper (Acantilado, 2025; Spanish translation by Miguel Temprano García). This collection of essays offers an intelligent and erudite tour of some of his many cultural interests: he devotes inspired pages to illuminating the painting of Caravaggio or to vindicating the shadows present in the paintings of Kerry James Marshall; he recalls his youthful interest in animals by asking whether black panthers exist or are an invention; he pays homage to one of his grandmothers; he remembers Edward Said, author ofOrientalism and defender of the Palestinian cause; he also explains how, since arriving in the United States from Nigeria at almost 18 years old, he began to define himself as "African".

He wrote the essays of Black paper between 2015 and 2018. In the Spanish edition, the book is subtitled "Writing in times of darkness"Have we gotten worse?

— I could write several more essays about the disturbing present we live in.

Would one dedicate oneself to the Harvard University, who is having a hard time due to the Trump administration's restrictions on grants and denial of visas to foreign students?

— Without a doubt. I would write it even if it had nothing to do with Harvard. The situation we're experiencing in the United States can't last forever. The problem is that right now we're in the tunnel. I can't predict how we'll emerge, but I think it's a good sign that Harvard is standing up to the attack. It's important not to compromise with the headquarters approaches...

I see that you avoid mentioning the president's name.

— He's a very dangerous man. Right now, he embodies fascism, and you can't agree with fascism in any way or on any aspect. You wouldn't compromise with any of Mussolini's proposals, would you? Well, you wouldn't with him either. Fascism is all about manipulation.

Is what happens at Harvard greater than what reaches us?

— There's a spiritual battleground, one that goes beyond the president, in what's happening. We've reached a moment in history where we must be mindful of our conscience. Harvard may be mortally wounded, but it's in times of crisis that decisiveness is necessary.

How does this affect a creative writing teacher like you?

— The situation facing Harvard faculty and students is desperate. Everything that's happening is punishing students, faculty, and the institution. Staffing has been severely affected. For now, Harvard is spending more money on lawyers than on professors, unfortunately.

A point of connection between our present and that of Black paper It's that, at one time or another, the same person ruled the White House.

— He spends his days pretending to create news, but he acts according to the same old logic. It's crazy. He intends to ban citizens from Black and Muslim countries from entering the United States. If you come from places like Haiti, Sudan, and Afghanistan, you're not welcome. He paints this as new, but he already tried to implement it during his first term.

In one of your essays, you recall the life of Mami, one of your Nigerian grandmothers. She wanted to be buried in the robe she wore on the pilgrimage to Mecca when she was 68. Was it difficult to write about her?

— I don't really like writing about my family. I'm a public figure, and I want to respect the privacy of others. I'm not, by any means, a self-referential author, but I'm interested in conveying profound experiences. In the case of my grandmother, I focused on my reactions and feelings after her death.

When she died, you were in Italy. On the day of her funeral, you remembered her from your New York apartment in a peculiar way.

— It was my way of honoring her and keeping her in mind. It was a midsummer night and it was incredibly hot in Brooklyn, but I needed to wrap myself, head to toe, in the white cotton blanket she had sent me from Nigeria years before.

Although there are biographical pretexts to write some of the texts of Black paper, they help him connect with ideas as powerful as the construction of African identity.

— I was born in Kalamazoo, a small town in Michigan, but after a few months I was taken to Nigeria and spent seventeen years there. It wasn't until I returned to the United States that I began to become African. I had lived in an environment where the majority of people were Black. The color of our skin wasn't a topic of conversation. The main identity question I asked myself had to do with the fact that I was Yoruba.

And in the United States?

— In the United States, it was different. No one knew what Lagos was or had any idea about Nigeria beyond the fact that it was part of Africa. The otherness I embodied was African, but there are many Africas that have nothing to do with each other. In the United States, I had to learn the discourse of Blackness... Especially from the moment I started publishing novels.

If I ask you about it, it is because it is a topic that appears in several of the essays in this book, and you analyze it from very different perspectives. Open city It was a less obvious matter.

— I remember readers telling me that you had to read 40 pages to deduce that the protagonist of the novel was black! When you read Mrs. Dalloway Don't go any further, trying to figure out if she's a white lady. What's normal? What surprises us? Perhaps it's important, for someone from a culture that isn't considered the majority culture, to write as if their view could be normal.

The protagonist of Open city He is a cultured psychiatrist who writes more influenced by the modernism of James Joyce than by the commitment of James Baldwin.

— His aspiration is to be normal, not having to constantly show that he's black. Mine, maybe, too.

In another of the book's essays, he analyzes the painting of Kerry James Marshall, known for his portraits of Black men and women in everyday situations.

— Many groups demand to feel represented in art, and Kerry James Marshall, for example, satisfies the aspirations of a segment of Black viewers in this regard. Feeling represented isn't a priority for me. What I value about Kerry James Marshall is the power of his paintings.

In his book he devotes as many pages to Kerry James Marshall as to the photographers who have dedicated series of images to the Fukushima nuclear disaster or to the paintings of Caravaggio.

— In the plural and diverse world we live in, it's important to open our eyes and allow ourselves to be influenced by as many paths and perspectives as possible. Yet, even now, white intellectuals tend to judge a work differently depending on whether it's made by a man or a woman, whether it comes from Europe or Asia. If it's an Asian woman, they'll continue to focus on the identity element. If it's a white man, they grant him the right to have a universal perspective that can be informed by whatever he wants.

One of the many problems with the literary system—and the society it represents—is that it still expects novels about identity if they're written by someone who isn't white. I'm afraid, your second novel?

— I'm at a point in my career where what interests me most is freedom. Open city the story was minimal, in I'm afraid It's even more so. I've written a novel in which identity issues are of no importance. While I was writing it, I was thinking about those Michelangelo Antonioni films where, when you watch them, you don't know where they're going and you're constantly wondering what's going on. And maybe nothing happens, but the atmosphere is impressive and full of small, revealing details. That's how I would like it to be. I'm afraid.

Somewhere he has also acknowledged that Eight and a halfFellini's , has been a very important influence on you.

— It's a film about consciousness and the role of dreams in our lives. It still guides me now. Now that I'm approaching 50, I'm beginning to feel interested in lightness. It took me until I reached midlife to realize that. I'm still preoccupied with the shadows of this world, and there are many, from the wars in Gaza and Ukraine to the global economic crises. But alongside all this, there's a lightness that draws me in... Perhaps it should be clarified that this lightness has nothing to do with superficiality. What I'm looking for isn't a radio-friendly pop song, but the pain hidden behind the simplicity of Ella Fitzgerald's voice.