Reviewed by Janette Jameson
“To look is to see only a fraction of what one is looking at. Even in the most vigilant eye, there is a blind spot. What is missing?” –Teju Cole
“I want to reduce the number of sparks. I want to embed hesitation and lack of certainty in it.”
Reading and distilling Blind Spot is an invitation accepted to walk into the many layers of Teju Cole and remain open to his world, which consists of Art History, Philosophy, World History, Racism, Poetry and Photography.
His photographs and words tantalize, stretching and allowing for one’s world view to become skewed-altered.
He switches time, space and depth within a poem and within his collection. He plays with caught situations of the ordinary by throwing them out and then on to the next page. As he travels the world, he enters deeply as he wanders into workplaces, alleyways, meeting strangers who feed him banquets and then is face to face with a reminder of Nazi Germany or Bloody Sunday.
His approach to the subject is spot on, indirect,
mysterious, no questions asked or many raised.
The relationship between photograph and prose is likewise synchronized or not, and crafted for tension in front of what could be emerging in the swamp of non-verbal knowing.
He takes you into art history, the big and the small, from painters – Hammershoi – to tile makers. He suggests a philosophy of perpetual deferral, to never reach destination, and then slings to Turner’s Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and the Dying.
He sees beauty, poetry and protest in simplicity. The presence of human evil and witness go hand in hand as he reveals emerging and past violence.
He replicates images: shroud, drapery, reflected pictures in windows, work sites, empty chairs, the backsides of streets. He repeats them as an accent before or after a poignant frame.
In photographs, he captures minutes before they are lost in a stream of narrative. In his prose, he lengthens and expands upon moments of stillness.
As I approached the end of over 300 pages, it was almost as if he had been asking all along, are you going to stay with me? Do you want to get closer to my simmering truth? Towards the end it is there: racism in America grounded in the past of others around the world and in time. The “what next” is not there; that is up to us. Shrouds and coverings are gone. It is in the eyes looking out and looking in.
