Multiculturalism in Teju Cole's Novel "Open City"

Multiculturalism as the main trend in the development of American literature

The phenomenon of multiculturalism is an integral and comprehensive characteristic of the modern world literary process. In relation to the literature of the USA, this phenomenon is fundamental. As M. V. Tlostanova writes, "multiculturalism in the USA is unique for a number of reasons, in particular, because of the special attitude of American culture to the problem of regional, ethnic, racial identification, because of the more acute contradiction between the powerful pragmatic, rational national ideology and the socio-cultural reality of the country than in other cultures-experiment" ^[1]. Today, this phenomenon continues to actively develop, transform and acquire new features. The peculiarity of the development of multicultural literature in the XXI century is largely due to the fact that a significant number of writers cannot be attributed to any particular national literature, since in their biography they have experience of living in different countries, are carriers of several cultures, as well as the experience of forming their own identity as a result of interaction or confrontation of various cultural paradigms. According to Yu. V. Stulov, such "authors with a similar history can be called carriers of transculturalism – a phenomenon that is indicative of the modern stage of world development aimed at openness of society and interaction based on the recognition of the rights of the individual, human communities regardless of race, gender, class or other affiliation. Accordingly, as never before, the problem of identity and self-identification is being brought to the fore" ^[2].

Noting the role of a new type of author in the multicultural world, S. P. Tolkachev rightly notes that most of them are "migrant writers who, for one reason or another, dramatically change their cultural environment, forced in new conditions to experience and pass through their creative consciousness the symptoms of the often very painful process of acculturation in a new environment, in as a result, there are works with certain specific features that can be combined under the general name "cross-cultural literature" ^[3]. In addition, Tolkachev identifies a number of features peculiar to this type of authors, namely, the arrival from a former colony to the metropolis; a complex process of adaptation to the center; constant reflection on the abandoned homeland.

Teju Cole as one of the representatives of modern multicultural literature of the USA

One of such authors in the modern literary space of the USA is an American writer of Nigerian origin Teju Cole (1975), whose work embodies a combination of cultural traditions of Africa, the USA and Europe. Describing Cole's work, T. M. Gavristova calls him not only "a full-fledged representative of American multicultural prose, but also a recognized star of the literature of the "generation Africa" or "a representative of afropolitism, which can be considered as a kind of claim to "a new type of biographical time and a new specifically constructed image of a person going through his life path" ^[4]. The writer spent most of his childhood in Lagos, where he arrived with his mother immediately after birth. Realizing that the opportunities and prospects for self-realization in the United States would contribute much more to his career than the situation in Nigeria, at the age of 17, Cole moved to America, which allowed him to get acquainted with the peculiarities of American reality. Another significant stage in the biography of the writer is studying at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, which deepened his knowledge of the European cultural tradition. Unlike some contemporary writers from Africa (C.N. Adichie, B. Vainana), T. Cole quite positively assesses his experience of Afropolitism. "I am quite tolerant of what is written about me as an Afropolite, African, or American, or pan-African, Yoruba or Brooklynite, black or Nigerian. Without a difference. As long as these labels are numerous, I am "my own" in many places. And I don't think that such a life is better or worse than the one that people live in one place ^[5].

To date, Cole is the author of two novels, three photo books, one short story, as well as numerous essays. In addition to writing, he is engaged in photography and art, and also teaches a creative writing course at Harvard University.

Cole began his first pen tests in 2007 with the publication of the novel "Every Day Is for the Thief" (Every Day Is for the Thief), in which his primary interest in the problems of the African reality of the present was manifested. The place of action of the novel becomes the city of Lagos, which is not surprising, since many Nigerian writers (C. N. Adichie, K. Abani) are literally obsessed with this largest metropolis, calling it "African New York". For Cole, this is a city where there is "good food, great music, dancing people and huge prospects" and which the locals, "loving, are ready to hate" ^[6]. This ironic characterization, which the writer gives to Lagos, largely determines his ambivalent attitude to the place of his growing up. As the author himself admits, he "has a premonition of the danger coming from Lagos, <...> and every time he lands at Murtala Mohammed International Airport, he hopes for good insurance. <...> And this is not panic; rather, a sense of vulnerability, exposure to accidents and incidents" ^[6].

 The work that brought fame to T. Cole is the novel "Open City", which was published in 2012, and translated into Russian by S. Silakova in 2022. The novel instantly became a bestseller, and the author was awarded 8 awards, including the German International Literary Prize or the E. Hemingway Prize.

The novel is unusual in its structure, because it lacks a plot in its classical sense. The main character is a young doctor named Julius, who lives in New York. Written in the first person, the novel is a kind of inner monologue of the hero, consisting of individual facts of his biography, family history, reflections on abstract concepts, philosophical theories of the past, global problems of today's life, as well as descriptions of daily walks around New York that the hero makes.

The novel is largely autobiographical, because its content resembles the author's own life collisions. Being a native of Nigeria, the hero, after numerous trials related to the civil war in the country, finds himself in Europe, from where he is transported overseas, where he receives medical education and internships as a psychiatrist in a New York clinic. Having lost his home in his native country, he tries to find it on another continent, where he can live in safety and sufficient comfort. Thus, the reader sees America through the eyes of a hero who arrived in the United States in the hope of realizing his "American dream".

Note that at the beginning of his stay in America, Cole also studied medicine at the University of Michigan. Another similarity is due to the fact that, like the writer, the main character of the novel is not a typical African. Cole himself was born in the USA from Nigerian parents, which first of all makes him an American citizen. In the novel, the main character is the child of a Nigerian and a German woman, which initially opposes him to Nigerian society because his skin color is not black enough. In addition to skin color, the main character has a European name – Julius, which he inherited from his mother, and her name "must also have been borrowed from someone from her family: perhaps from her grandmother, or from some distant relative, from an aunt, some forgotten Julianna, unknown Julia or Juliette" ^[7]. Observing the traditions of the Yoruba, an ethnic group living in Nigeria, Julius has a middle name – Olatubosun, but as the hero describes, "it belongs to someone else, but has been transferred for long-term storage. The fact that I was Julius in everyday life reinforced in me the idea that I was not quite Nigerian."^[7] The juxtaposition with society is also connected with the fact that by African standards, the main character's family embodies unimaginable wealth and privileges: they live in a two-story house, own valuable shares, and can afford a car with a driver. Julius is an only child, which is also not typical for a Nigerian family.

The European origin gives rise to a feeling of envy and malice in his compatriots. The case of a teacher at a military school who, looking at Julius, "half Nigerian, a foreigner, saw swimming lessons, summer holidays in London, servants" ^[7] becomes indicative, which was not true. Out of hatred, Musibau's teacher accuses him of stealing and arranges a demonstrative spanking in front of the whole school.

Julius is an outstanding African who came to America to escape from the horrors of his homeland and survive in another country, but a real intellectual, a complex multi–faceted personality who has deep knowledge of music, painting, architecture, photography, history. He is constantly reflecting, which undoubtedly deepens the process of self-knowledge, which is so necessary when moving to another country with a different culture.

Being already in America, the main character still feels his connection with Africa. So, seeing two blind people in the subway, the hero prefers to explain their shortcomings with the help of the main Yoruba myth, which says that the almighty Olodumare commissioned the god Obatala to mold people out of clay. Obatulu coped well with the task until he started drinking wine, which made the people he made flawed.

If such a memory is neutral for the hero, then meeting with the sister of a school friend of Moji is a traumatic experience, because this meeting was a part of "my" self, which I exiled to Africa as a child ... so something that seemed to have completely disappeared was revived" ^[7]. Julius tries to forget Nigeria, except for a few things that are remembered especially vividly. These were things that made up a "safe version of the past" ^[7] and which could not harm his emotional state, so at first Julius does not recognize the girl, and then tries to end the conversation with her as soon as possible.

Even trying to forget his traumatic past, the hero cannot abandon his roots and condemns those who act differently. An example is the successful Dr. Gupta, originally from Uganda, who, due to violent harassment by Idi Amin, the cruel and bloody dictator of Uganda, was forced to flee his country to America. Dr. Gupta does not hide his anger and contempt towards all Africans, stating that "when I think about Africans, I want to spit" ^[7], perceiving everyone as a whole, not dividing into Nigerians, Ugandans, Kenyans, etc. Julius is outraged by this wording, since he was the only African among those present and the doctor's anger was clearly directed at him. Once in America, Gupta betrays his origin, broadcasting a typical white man's idea of Africa and the role of a "good white" who is called upon to save it. "Africa is frozen in eternal expectation: she is the substrate for the will of the white man, the background of his deeds" ^[7].  

In this episode, you can guess the attitude of the author himself, since in his interviews Cole often speaks in defense of his homeland. "When I am in the USA, I argue with those who believe that Lagos is dangerous to visit. I tell them that I grew up there and wandered the streets for 17 years and nothing happened to me. I note that this is a city where 21 million people wake up, brush their teeth, go to work, fuss, get into traffic jams, come home in the evenings to have dinner with the kids, watch soap operas before going to bed and start it all over again the next day. There's modern infrastructure, entertainment, boredom; it's not a battlefield. People in Lagos live a normal life <...>, as in London, San Francisco and Jakarta" ^[6].

A kind of loss of the African component in Julius' mind occurs when his father's funeral happens. "Only at the open grave did this absurd feeling of completeness cover me, the guess that he would not recover, would not return after a few months: a feeling that devastated me" ^[7]. Together with his father, the hero buries a part of himself that was associated with Nigerian culture, so later it is the date of the funeral, and not the death of his father, that Julis marks as an anniversary. According to Yoruba traditions, Julius now has to take care of his mother and that he is now a man in the house, which was clearly premature for the main character. The death of his father helps the hero decide to move to America, but at the same time provokes a cooling in the relationship between him and his mother. Actually, the hero repeats the path of his mother, who, being German, moved to Nigeria in the 1970s, severing her relationship with her mother and actually abandoning German culture. The beginning of the breakup of the relationship occurs in the childhood of the hero, when he stops talking in his second native language – German. "This is a secret language between me and my mother in the first five years of my life."^[7] It was through language that the hero felt a connection with his mother, and through her with German culture. When he hears a child's cry "Mutter, wo bist du?" in a department store, his chest aches, because once in his childhood this phrase was uttered by Julius himself. The hero already feels his belonging to European culture while in America. It manifests itself in the passion for the music of the Austrian composer G. Mahler and regular memories of her maternal grandmother Magdalena Muller. Since childhood, the hero feels a certain connection with her, because "he partly inherited her character, and on this basis a kind of solidarity arose" ^[7]. Her arrival in Nigeria contributes to the establishment of warm relations between them, although they did not know each other before. "That day I took as an expensive gift the silence that united me with Oma... she and I had a heart-to-heart conversation almost wordlessly, just waiting for the wind to blow in the grove next door, watching the lizards scurry through the small remnants" ^[7].  

In order to realize part of the European component, Julius goes in search of his grandmother, whose traces were lost in Brussels. But contrary to his expectations, the hero not only does not feel his involvement, but also faces an extremely negative attitude towards Africans, in particular Nigerians. So, even before arriving in Brussels, a white neighbor on the plane says that she knows a lot of Nigerians and many of them are very arrogant. A new acquaintance of Julius Farouk, a native of Morocco, told him the story of discrimination he faced while working as a cleaner at the university. One day he managed to start a conversation with the rector about Deleuze's concept of waves and dunes. Such awareness of the Moroccan surprised the rector, who suggested that Farouk somehow continue the discussion. But when the rector saw the young man again, he not only refused to talk to him, but even pretended that he did not know him. The novel takes place in 2006 – "the same year when several crimes committed on the grounds of hatred led to an aggravation of tension, which was felt by residents who do not belong to the white race" ^[7]. Cole describes the events almost immediately after the tragedy of September 11, so the negativism of the Belgians is directed against the Arabs and Muslim immigrants from African regions who flooded the capital. So, while on the tram of some routes, the hero discovers that the former are a tiny minority.

As S.P. Tolkachev writes, "a special place in the works of migrant writers is occupied by the chronotope of the metropolis as a symbol of multicultural space. At the same time, the capital of the metropolis becomes something more than just a city for the artist" ^[3]. The city becomes a place where different groups and cultures converge, allowing the artist something new, or as F. rightly notes. Jameson, "the third, cultural space," where negotiations about incommensurable differences create tension inherent in borderline existence" ^[3]. In the novel, New York becomes such a place – a city representing "a multicultural cauldron in which the boundaries of time and space are shifting, and peoples from the most remote points of the globe, and various epochs, and historical trends converge" ^[3]. So, the hero meets a dark-skinned guard from the island of Barbuda, a black shoeshine from Haiti, an African student from Liberia, an Indian from Guyana with African roots who was imprisoned. In this regard, it is impossible not to say about the title of the novel, which is metaphorical. An open city is, on the one hand, New York, open not only to its residents, but also to the crowds of migrants who are fleeing poverty and war in their native countries to the United States in the hope of realizing their "American dream". On the other hand, it is a city that is at the mercy of the winner, as happened with Brussels in 1940.

Describing the megacities of Great Britain and the USA, Tolkachev writes that these toposes "are transformed due to the dialectical processes of globalization and glocalization, as a result of which the diaspora "absorbs" the experience of the root culture of the host country and destroys the established philosophy and ideology of race, nation, identity. In other words, migrants become not just contemplators, "travelers", they actively transform the worlds they arrive in" ^[8]. Cole describes the events 5 years after September 11, so the main character constantly refers to this event. So, walking around the city, Julius stumbles upon a plaque in memory of the policemen who died in the fall of 2001, describing as "an expected, heartbreaking multitude of names" ^[7] or a description of the layout of the city in the museum, on which Julius sees a pair of gray boxes, which "in the world of layout symbolize the inviolability of the towers of the World Trade Center, in the real world already destroyed" ^[7]. Thus, the events of 9/11 have forever entered the historical memory of Americans, creating a new point of calculation of American history, which migrants like Julius are actively reconstructing. In an interview, the writer admits that "one day he felt the need to write about this event, realizing that such terrible injuries are not new to this city" ^[9], also referring to the history of slavery, which is repeatedly mentioned in the novel. In particular, the author does not ignore the fact that for many years it was New York that was the port for the departure of slave ships.