Ways of Seeing and Writing About Cities

Notes on writings by Teju Cole, John Berger, Etel Adnan and Hisham Matar

“In every act of looking there is an expectation of meaning.”
- John Berger

Increasingly my desire to spend time in a city is informed by a text, not travel writing per se, but writing that has an unmistakable sense of texture of a place. Some of the most compelling writing on travel and cities is not gesturing towards what to see but rather how to see - how to turn consciousness into context, meditation into meaning. It is the writer in dialogue with the city – its history, its art, its inhabitants, the ambient conflict in the streets. It is writing that is searching, that can hold space for ambivalence, and uncertainty.

For long I thought that my academic training in anthropology equipped me to be an observant traveller, never satisfied with floating close to the surface. A conversation a few years ago with an editor made me aware that what equipped me to be an attentive traveller was in fact born out of a constraint: when you're often reminded that the country in which you live will never fully embrace you as its citizen, when your movement between frontiers has been conditional for most of your life, you develop an embodied understanding of how you occupy space in places and move with a unique sense of awareness and respect. Perhaps unsurprisingly, several writers whose writing on travel and cities I find instructive are writing from a vantage point of marginality of some kind and in some cases an exilic existence.

What I seek in writing about cities is the quality of being visceral, contemplative, and politically observant. Art critic, photographer, and writer Teju Cole’s work has frequently felt like a guiding light. As a travelling African man, he has grappled with the question of who has the right to make a subject of what. I particularly love his travel writing on Switzerland and Brazil in his collection of essays Known and Strange Things. Reading these essays is akin to walking unhurriedly alongside an insightful friend who has witnessed cities that retain traces of the things that have happened in them. He builds on Italo Calvino’s idea of ‘continuous cities,’ as described in Calvino’s seminal book ‘Invisible Cities,’ which suggests that there is actually just one big, continuous city that does not begin or end: Only the name of the airport changes. Cole writes in an essay:

“To travel is to find, in that continuity, the less-obvious differences of texture: the signs, the markings, the assemblages, the things hiding in plain sight in each cityscape or landscape.”

Cultivating an eye for the less obvious differences requires a non-utilitarian approach to seeing cities. It requires an appetite for wandering without a map and remaining porous to uncertainty and wonder. It also demands a robust relationship with walking as a vessel of exploration. In Cole’s debut novel Open City, the protagonist Julius takes long walks through New York City to contemplate the city's history, as well as his identity as both a Nigerian-German immigrant and a psychiatrist in training. Moving through the city becomes an intimate, philosophical way for Julius to metabolise his emotions about race, belonging and memory.

My recollections of walking across towns in the French Riviera and writing a daily journal became the basis of my prose poem Sojourn, on how cities give us maps to examine our lives. The months I spent in the Côte d'Azur were imprinted by Etel Adnan’s writing, in particular her collection of letters Of Cities and Women. Born in 1925 in Beirut to a Greek Christian mother and Syrian Muslim father, Adnan lived to the age of 94 and bore witness to the successive waves of hope and despair that Beirut has experienced. Her early years in Beirut in a multicultural and multilinguistic household, her time in France and California where she evolved into a polymathic thinker and artist lend her a poetic and political consciousness that I think is quite unmatched. In solidarity with the Algerian War of Independence, Adnan began to resist the political implications of writing in French and became a painter. Through her participation in the movement against the Vietnam War, Adnan then began to write poetry and became, in her own words, “an American poet.” Her writings and paintings are luminous company and have indelibly shaped my reflective and writing practice. To read Of Cities & Women is to wander through a city in search of an “open space, a privileged place where the free line of the horizon creates a pure pleasure.” The letters, written by Etel Adnan to Fawwaz Traboulsi, an editor living in exile in Paris, are sent from Barcelona, Aix-en-Provence, Skopelos, Murcia, Amsterdam, Berlin, Rome, and Beirut. They unfold in a stream of consciousness manner with meditations on gender, place, art, landscape, illness, mortality, and war. She talks to her friend Fawwaz, to no-one in particular, and then to you and me, with endearing intimacy. Adnan is a consummate witness to the spectacles she observes in these cityscapes. In Barcelona she marvels at how women appear to have control over their bodies and their movements and a sense of harmony they seem to live from within, and with the world around them. In Marrakesh, Adnan observes that women carry their social status much more than they carry their soul. Adnan universalises this impression:

“They remind me that it is interesting to be alive, to be a human being, and to be part of a precise moment in time and space, that theories get lost when confronted with privileged experience.”

If you do read this book, I suggest lingering a bit longer on the Beirut letters, where Adnan’s intimacy with the city and its history truly shines.

Last year I spent two weeks in Bologna to attend a film festival but the seed for visiting the city was planted a few years ago when I read John Berger’s The Red Tenda of Bologna, a meditative essay in memory of Edgar, Berger’s beloved uncle, who ran a modest employment agency in South Croydon, and who also had a particular penchant for spending time in Bologna in the early 60s. Edgar had a love for reading and writing letters and cultivated a spirit of optimism that was hard to sustain in post-war Europe. “He believed in general and in principle that the best was to come,” writes Berger. Edgar kept his eyes open to the world and guided a young boy – as he then guides the man – through a city. After Edgar’s passing, Berger visits the city and wanders its streets and expansive porticoes. The essay made me alive to Bologna as an improbable city of secrets. Of secrets hidden from the outside world by red tenda draping windows - the linen shop blinds that distinguish many of the arcaded cafes and stores, but whose exceptional hue dramatised Berger’s memory of the city. Berger’s Bologna is less a map and more a series of images that enliven the imagination: The steps of a church from where you can watch grandmothers entertain young children. The fabric shop with bolts of coloured fabric horizontally stacked to create a wall, whose watchful owner perches in a high stool above Berger’s head. Finding a kilo of passatelli in a paper bag, that looks as if it was made to hold truffle, on the Via Caprarie.

Siena is another city in Italy that opened up to me through a piece of writing. Novelist Hisham Matar’s travelogue A Month in Siena is a mesmerising read. After completing the writing of his memoir The Return, Matar decides to spend a month in Siena, a town which he always promised himself he would visit, immersing himself in various significant works from the Sienese School of painting. Matar’s engagement with Sienese art dates back to the time of his father’s disappearance while he was living in exile in Egypt. It is a pleasure to be able to accompany Matar, to see what he sees, and feel what he feels as he contemplates the end of his search for his father and his disappointment in not finding any answers. His observations take us into a world where we can feel the weight of longing and what it means to continue life and pursue beauty after a terminus. Matar’s understanding of art is an expression of faith and its inextricable connection to hope. On one of his walks through the folds of the city, he encounters an older Nigerian lady, who speaks to him “with the generosity of outsiders.” She has spent over twenty years in Siena and is now eligible for Italian citizenship so she can finally return to the place she considers “home”. His curiosity towards strangers he meets is guided by twin questions that have followed him to every city: “What is it like to be born here, I wondered, and what it is like to die here? He also meets a Jordanian family who have been resident in Siena for thirty years after he hears them speaking Arabic. Upon meeting this family, Matar admires “their quality of lives together, the atmosphere they had created in their home, the unpretentious authenticity of their curiosities and the kindness of their human feeling”. His writing is instructive towards embodying an imagination and curiosity about what life is like for people who live in a city that doesn’t merely reduce them to a monolithic local. To listen is also a way to see.

Etc

Reading:

A brilliant conversation published in 2019 between Teju Cole and literary critic Parul Sehgal on contemporary criticism.

Katie Kitamura’s stunning new novel Audition on the parts people perform even in the most intimate facets of their lives. Similar to her previous novels, Intimacies and A Separation, the prose is taut and propulsive. I received an advance copy but it’s out this week in the UK and US.

Ugliness (translated from the German by Elisabeth Lauffer) by Afghan German author and artist, Moshtari Hilal, combines personal memoir, social history and feminist thought to explore how perceptions of human beauty and ugliness are shaped by war, imperialism, colonialism, power hierarchies and economics. Hilal uses a broad cultural lens to interrogate norms of appearance including body hair, noses, teeth — ostensibly her own, but also in society more broadly.

Film:

At the Screen Cuba film festival in London in March, I rewatched a restored version of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Memorias de Subdesarollo, a film I had first watched as a 19-year-old sophomore in university. I was struck by how much I had remembered in the 20-year gap between the two viewings but I saw the film completely differently now, with a better understanding of its experimental form stitching fiction, photography, documentary, and past and present.

It was released in 1968 as a portrait of post-revolutionary Cuba expressed through the observations of Sergio, an affluent intellectual who decides to remain in Cuba more out of listlessness than conviction even though his wife and friends, like many members of the elite, have taken flight from the country. Memorias de Subdesarollo is an experiment in narrating, through the cinematic medium, a history of social and political change that was still ongoing.

Writing:

I interviewed Italian novelist Vincenzo Latronico whose novel Perfection has been long-listed for the International Booker. We spoke about the mechanics of writing a novel about a life lived largely online that shapes the intimate aspects of our existence, choices, and desires. Latronico is a brilliant thinker and I greatly enjoyed our chat. Hope you do too.

I also wrote a feature on Boutheina Ben Salem, a Franco-Tunisian chef and writer, delving deeper into her work and ethos as a culture preservationist. Ben Salem is a charismatic storyteller and our conversation was wide-ranging on history, politics and reclaiming narratives.

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