“Fifteen years is a long time to be away from home. It feels longer still because I left under a cloud.”

There’s something painfully familiar about this book, but not so much that it scared me off reading. A city on the north of Spain is not the same as Lagos, yet I found myself connecting deeply with the gestures of the migrant coming back home the narrator in Teju Cole’s book makes. The awkward conversations (or attempts at) with old friends, old lovers.

The brotherhood of the exiles is maybe an invented thing - something I made up when I needed to. There is a reason why Elaine Castillo became my favorite writer at a time when I was alone, friendless and going days without talking to anyone in London, on my first year here.

“there is much sorrow, not only of the dramatic kind but also in the way
that difficult economic circumstances wear people down, eroding them,
preying on their weaknesses, until they do things that they themselves
find hateful, until they are shadows of their best selves.”

We strive for connection to other exiles. Cole’s mention of Michael Ondaatje, only a few pages into his short book, made my heart leap with recognition. Here is my lineage. A particular author. Trying to find jazz records in your hometown. That there is a love for jazz there in the first place.

Somewhere between fiction and memoir (tiny memoir, a-handful-of-days memoir) is where I feel most comfortable as a reader these days anyway, Cole’s travel-writing-for-one’s-own-country a perfect example of why this non-genre enjoys such good health.

It’s too early to tell if Teju Cole will become part of my lineage, my own personal canon. But this little book has me excited about reading every other word the author has written.

“what if everything that is to happen has already happened, and only the consequences are playing themselves out?”