Teju Cole is a writer, born and raised in Nigeria and is IU’s Inaugural Susan D. Gubar Lecturer for 2015. On Thursday, Cole spoke to a full room of students and public on his fiction works, Twitter projects and photographic endeavors.
Cole has published two books, “Every Day is for the Thief” and “Open City,” as well as articles in the New York Times and the New Yorker, he said.
As a photographer, Cole said he took a series of photos to correspond with his book “Everyday is for the Thief in Nigeria.”
Cole said he had second thoughts about attending the lecture because of Indiana’s recent Religious Freedom Restoration Act, he said.
“When I heard the news from Indiana last week my first thought was to call and regretfully cancel and say ‘I don’t want to be here.’” Cole said. “I don’t believe in these petty and surreal forms of discrimination.”
Taking to Twitter, Cole posted several short stories like “Hafiz,” “Seven Short Stories About Drones” and “A Piece of the Wall,” he said.
Cole said he reported the Twitter story, “A Piece of the Wall,” in the same manner he would in a published newspaper article and even posted it in the same traditional order.
The piece is about families and individual testimonies about their experiences on the Mexican-American border, he said. The story goes into detail about the conditions individuals are subjected to in the process of becoming an American citizen.
“It’s horrifying. It’s very, very scary to think of this as the same country that we are in,” Cole said.
He took on the story as traditionally as any reporter would, he said. He said he went to the border, different immigration offices and spoke to people who were open to tell their stories, he said.
“I talked to the people who were involved, I went to court, I went to Mexico, I talked to activists,” Cole said. “Large numbers of people attempt to walk across the desert to the United States for various reasons, to reunite with their families. Coming back, very many people die in the desert, hundreds every year.”
Cole said this piece, as well as his other Twitter short stories, could be a new medium of storytelling.
No one takes Twitter seriously, Cole said. With storytelling like this it could bring certain seriousness to the medium that people don’t expect to see on their news feeds.
Cole has coined other less serious Twitter events like the Sunday Flower Report in which his followers tweet him photos of flowers where they live, he said.
“Each Sunday that I did it, I got hundreds of submissions,” Cole said. “Just flowers and flowers. That was a good way of just saying this costs zero dollars. It became a way of creating a shared space.”
Emily Sullivan is a sophomore studying theater and English. She said she came to the lecture because her professor recommended it and she said she was very adamant about attending.
“He’s producing interesting and excellent work,” she said. “It made me think about, as an artist, what ways I can affect other people and in what ways I should, with the way he utilizes Twitter and writing.”
Sullivan said the diverse subjects he covers are an interesting mix of intentions and goals. She said she wonders how she can implement that in her own life.
Cole’s next project is with the New York Times, he said, on a piece that asks, “What is a photographer?”
