Sylee Gore

 

Teju Cole’s mesmeric image/text book Pharmakon begins with eight colour images. The photographs, with one exception, are of human- built structures and flora. Notably, many of them show liminal spaces: windows seen from the outside, reflecting like mirrors; exterior views of portals, mailboxes, walls, framing space in poem-shaped forms: structured, dignified, restless, glittering, allusive. The defining sensibility of Cole’s visual argot is a timeless ephemerality. His photographs twin the incidental with a profound belief in beauty.

Cole is a Nigerian American writer, photographer, and art critic perhaps best known for his 2011 novel Open City. Pharmakon is not his first book to feature his photography: previous publications have paired his photographs with diaristic meditations (Blind Spot, 2017), historic guidebook snippets (Fernweh, 2020) and a long-form essay (Golden Apple of the Sun, 2021). But Pharmakon is notably the first to bring together his imaginative writing and his photographs. The generous A4-sized, buckram- bound softback volume contains 12 pieces and 104 photographs. One of the written pieces in Pharmakon hews closely to the conventional short story form at 1800 words; the others stand between 150 and 300 words. Termed ‘compact fictions’ on the publisher website, they hover in tone and character between flash fiction, dramatic address, and prose poem. Images dominate the book, with the mostly one-page texts (some of which have been published in The New Yorker) each following a run of a dozen or so photographs. The experience of the book could be likened to a film installation with intertitles, or a voiceover.

In the writing, an atmosphere of frozen motion evokes Godot. Menace is the overriding mood: stark moments in extremis in situations of intense and witless totalitarian terror, evoking the current political flashpoints of migration, sealed borders and the right to self-determination. To gloss a few of the pieces, we have: a doomed attempt to flee unstated captors, a discussion of the viability of support from an influential figure, an exchange between king and chorus, an exquisite performance by a singer who is soon arrested, and a scene of waiting prisoners in a dystopic world. Many have the quality of testimony, a version of events insisted on and clung to. The first-person plural (‘We had been compromised’) alternates with a heroic singular voice (‘I am not to be mocked’). The language is often a plain learner’s lexis and syntax. ‘We should go,’ ‘Asleep in the grass in the dark,’ and ‘Our pallets are side by side on the concrete floor’ are all opening lines. These are brief framed moments, operating by the rules of poetry or flash.

In the photographs, a tree of green apples bends as if in a storm. There is a luminous view through what might be a ferry window, the voluptuous gleam of a seatback and a patinated door. There is mossed pointing and lichened stone. Residue – of stickers, or paint – acquires a painterly precision. Though we see signs of age in the photographs, we rarely see dust or decay. There is no litter, no filth. This cleanliness lends the images the universality of dictionary definitions. There are gestures of abstraction: lines written into a sky, peeling paint as palimpsest. Texture becomes text as the eye is arrested by a glottal nail or plosive torn wallpaper. In their perforations and corrugations, we sense the used quality of all things. Yet patina is displayed proudly. These are photographs of chalky greens, greys, taupes, creams, sand and limpid blue. Scars in the earth resemble graves. In a note of light benediction, we end with a pinkening sky, pinkened dusk. The only fauna to be found here is a severed bird’s wing; above it, a crumpled pack of Winston cigarettes is just visible, bearing a health warning in Greek.

In a book of image and text in dialogue, it is especially interesting to examine ‘Archduke’, which is written in a dual dramatic address. Eight photographs precede this piece. One is of a pine tree, three birches, and an ivy-covered deciduous tree against parched grass. Another shows a sculpture in burlap-brown fabric bound with rope, against a backdrop of rusting chestnut trees in full sun. A forking tree (or perhaps two trees) is shown from two angles, sharing the same backdrop of mirrored modern windows in two buildings. Just before ‘Archduke’ begins, we are shown the extended branches of a tree in rainfall, before a low metal fence and a misty field. No countries are named, but intuitively many of the places seem intimately familiar to me as someone who has lived in central Europe for years.

‘Archduke’ itself is a word taut with the pressure of European history seeded in Sarajevo. Cole’s story is a brief, urgent dialogue between two individuals arguing over whether an unspecified, powerful ‘he’ will see them. One is hopeful, the other pessimistic. A lullaby is heard briefly, which the hopeful one appreciates, and the pessimist dismisses. The whole story is told through insistent variations on sentence structure that could be a feature of language practice. Chanted phrases, including ‘Give me my coat,’ ‘What’s the worst that could happen’ and ‘We should go’, build a sense of claustrophobia and restlessness. We encounter the phrase ‘he will receive us’ twice, then one of the speakers offers a language lesson in grammatical variation: ‘We are not the ones he will receive. We are the ones he will not receive. The ones he will receive will not be us.’ The villain remains a cipher to the two characters and to us, though the stakes come into focus in the final lines: ‘What’s the worst that could happen, that he will turn us away? That he will turn us away and we will die? That’s all? Then no harm trying.’ So often in Pharmakon, what’s on the line is a matter of life and death.

We seldom hear the voices of power; instead, hesitant suppositions are our guide. The writing is from the perspective of the dispossessed: entreating, supplicating, hoping, requesting, insisting, escaping, succumbing. In contrast, the images are composed and confident. In another book, these could be unframed everyday moments elevated to art. (Several of these images are still found on the author’s now stripped-back Instagram feed.)

In Greek, the word ‘pharmakon’ means both remedy and poison. French philosopher Jacques Derrida has written extensively on the term to discuss an opposition between speech and writing. As Derrida has it, ‘There is no such thing as a harmless remedy. The pharmakon can never be simply beneficial.’ This ambiguity is the guiding principle of this book. Derrida suggests that dialogue is preferable to the pharmakon as an ‘immutable, petrified identity of writing.’ Yet by using dialogue as the chief form in his texts, and additionally by placing text and photograph in fluid dialogue with one another, Cole’s layering of text and image paradoxically creates a successful form of truth dissemination: a remedy to the poison – a remedy forged from the poison, even.

After all, although the total text in Pharmakon adds up to scarcely more than double the length of this review you’re reading, Cole’s words colour the whole of the images amid which they are set. Though there is nothing forensic about the photographs themselves – each one exquisitely balanced, often refulgent – together, they toy with an aesthetics of bland documentation heavily underscored by the texts’ sense of impending or felt horror (‘I got tangled in barbed wire. The world stopped. My body filled with pain’). Cole’s photographs share the lack of overt subject typical of dispassionate surveillance photographs. They evoke what film and media professor Rizvana Bradley has described as ‘the harrowing meeting grounds of photography, the contemporary political imagination and the racial metaphysics of presence.’ Behind the photographs and between the texts, we begin to smell the bodies and shiver at state violence and executions by a violent regime.

In interleaving charged texts and cool abstractions, Cole’s work evokes associations with artists who steadfastly examine photography’s struggle to depict extreme events. Chilean photographer Alfredo Jaar (b. 1956), for instance, largely refuses to depict horrific massacres and genocides, instead working closely with what a photograph cannot capture. ‘The Eyes of Gutete Emerita’, one of his best-known works, presents a table with one million photographic slides showing not the carnage the photographer witnessed, but a close-up of the eyes of Emerita, a survivor of a Hutu massacre who watched her husband and sons being killed.

Jaar has said, ‘We have lost our ability to be affected by imagery’, and has remarked that ‘there must be another way to talk about violence without recurring to violence.’ Faced with a public numbed to visual depictions of horror, the artist uses suggestion and implication to let the reader’s mental theatre enact what his images imply. Jaar’s work shows what we know from Western mass media, which lionizes the favoured few in copious colour photographs and relegates the dispossessed many to minor texts.

Cole’s photographs show the seemingly banal with glacial austerity, revealing a cruel and corrupt world. In this, they evoke the evidence-based photography of Forensic Architecture (FA), a research agency working across journalism and art to create a new practice of truth telling. Some of FA’s seemingly innocuous photographs of natural features and structures are revealed to be the effluvia of industrial factories or sites of centres for interrogation and imprisonment.

‘Sometimes when I open my eyes in the dark,’ Cole writes, ‘I feel that there is something I have forgotten.’ Such seeing in the dark, such seeing- in-not-seeing encapsulated in this charged and complex book represents a forward step in the burgeoning body of phototextual works in our century. Inserting non-illustrative images into text creates new forms of ambiguity. By using imaginative writing to recategorize our reception of his photographs, Teju Cole creates fissures in an often-impermeable documentary landscape. Pharmakon is a conceptual practice where the text poisons the photographs while the photographs serve as a support for a knowledge that remedies unknowing, a knowledge visible only in the words we’ve read.