Ethan writes today about “Everyday Is For The Thief,” a book by Teju Cole:

The book wanders the fine line between fiction and memoir. It’s the story of a Nigerian intellectual living in New York returning home to Lagos, a story told in part on the Teju Cole blog. Reading it, I realized how many books I’ve read about northerners encountering Africa for the first time and how precious few I’ve read by Africans returning. There’s a commonality to the narratives - a narrative of discovery, combined with a search for one’s place in this overwhelming and beautiful world. But they diverge sharply - even in the best of the Northern narratives, there’s a sense of a search for the “real” Africa, which leads to either a xenophilic embrace or a recoiling from a Conradian heart of darkness.

Cole is looking for something else entirely - we see him search for his possible place in a Nigeria that’s unfamilar, strange and sometimes unfriendly to him. He gets ripped off by petrol dealers, threatened by “area boys” when his family imports a load of school supplies, and stands out as a kind of foreigner to bus drivers and market women. His childhood friends greet him with warmth, but he struggles to put himself in their shoes, surviving power cuts and insultingly low salaries. He’s stunned by the criminality, the corruption, the struggle each resident is occupied with, making it each day in Lagos.

The most moving moments, I found, were the ones where Cole sees reference points, not of the Nigeria he remembers, but of New York intellectual culture. A woman on the public bus is reading Michael Ondaatje, and we watch Cole struggle to place her within the Nigeria he’s encountering again, wondering where she found this thick, rich book. He finds a jazz record store that doesn’t sell records, but pirated copies, the source CDs too expensive to be sold legitimately. A music school teaches privleged Nigerian students the piano, the violin, the cello… but African teachers are paid a small fraction of the salary of foreign ones. He’s looking for a way he might live in this Lagos and continue life as he knows it, and it’s a losing battle.

Jenny, my wife, says I should write a book about my experience coming to the Philippines. I always thought it should be fiction, drawing upon my experiences. I dunno. Maybe.

In finding my place in the Philippines I’ve encountered the “unfamiliar, strange and sometimes unfriendly” and I can certainly identify with the feeling that it’s a “losing battle,” that I’m a piece of transplanted tissue the body is doing its best to reject.

It’s not a losing battle, of course. And I’m no more of a piece of foreign tissue being rejected than any of us here, in our own ways, are. I’m claiming my place, as part of society here. And that’s one of the concepts that the book would lead to, I believe.