Teju Cole gives us two departures in "Every Day is for the Thief.” This unflinchingly observed novel's first farewell is in despair and estrangement, as the unnamed main character escapes as a teenager in 1990 from the land of his dead father, abandoning his mother for a future in America. The second, after the month-long return that is the novel's subject, is feverish. Our protagonist contracted malaria during his 2005 visit.
I read "Every Day is for the Thief” on a flight to San Diego to visit my father. I left the book with him even though I feared reading it would leave him wondering why I had holidayed in Nigeria last year. The answer is not in Cole’s vivid descriptions of Nigeria’s poverty, violence, corruption and history of slave trading. The genomics and biotechnology company 23andMe determined from a saliva sample I sent in that my roots are in what is now Nigeria, but that’s only part of what drew me there. The explanation for my visit is more rooted in the urgent poetry with which Cole describes Nigeria. The country made astonishing writers such as Cole, a Nigerian-American novelist, photographer, and art historian who was educated in New York and London. Cole is part of a tradition stretching at least to the great Chinua Achebe that includes Wole Soyinka and Chimanda Ngozi Adichie.
As a reader, going to Nigeria was a pilgrimage.
I found Lagos to be the "creative, malevolent, ambiguous" city of "Every Day is for the Thief." But some things Cole described changed a bit between the 2005 of the novel and my 2023 visit. The National Museum Cole describes with poignant disappointment was at least less dusty when I explored it. And if it remains intellectually neglected, with too little information offered on its collection, many of its objects are extraordinarily beautiful. Every object I saw in the museum seemed to tell a story. Any writer steeped in such traditions starts out with a rich and nuanced advantage.
After seeing the treasures in the main museum building, my husband and I were directed to an annex with an exhibition on Nigeria's political history. So was Cole’s main character in “Every Day is for the Thief.” The main artifact in the annex is the bullet-riddled limo in which military dictator Murtala Ramat Muhammed was riding when he was assassinated in 1976. Muhammed’s and other leader's stories of violence and unfulfilled promise were related with restraint on placards on the annex walls. Nigerian writers have lived through and met the challenge of making sense of turbulent times.
I never got the chance to talk with my dad about Cole’s writing. My father died a few weeks after I left the book with him. After his death, judging from a book mark in “Every Day is for the Thief” that my dad had made out of a scrap of cardboard, he had read as far as a key chapter in the intense 162 pages of Cole’s novel. The chapter, just two pages, sums up the theme of the book: What each generation owes the next. In it, Cole’s main character, who is closely modeled on himself, meets a cousin who was born in Nigeria after his first departure.
“I am awed by her silence and excited speech, her darkness, her self-possession. The completeness of a child is the most fragile and most powerful thing in the world. A child’s confidence is the world’s wonder.
“A month later, as I prepare to leave, she says she will miss me. And I know I will miss her too, and I see with a pang that every good thing I wish for this country, I secretly wish on her behalf. Any prayer I have that the future be a good one, that the place keep from breaking, is for her sake.”
I think my father felt that way about every young person he ever met – that sense of possibility. I’d introduce him to friends, and he would urge them to embrace their possibility. The phrase “in no uncertain terms” comes to mind. One of my friends says my father spoke with authority.
As Cole writes with authority.
The Yoruba proverb from which Cole draws his title goes like this: “Every day is for the thief, but one day is for the owner.” I translate that as “every dog has its day.” And I hope Nigeria one day has its day.
For all Cole found that was disheartening, he was energized by the people with whom he reconnected or connected for the first time, people determined to leave Nigeria and the world a better place for their children. I, too, was energized during my visit by forward-looking and enterprising Nigerians -- artists, businesspeople, craftspeople, some all of the above -- with whom I was privileged to connect. And Cole loved things I loved about Lagos. They include the book and music store Jazzhole, which is also a cafe. My dad loved books and music, though not coffee.
Cole writes that the people behind Jazzhole are among a group of determinedly imaginative Nigerians who are "signs of hope in a place that, like all other places on the limited earth, needs hope." My dad would have liked that.