Black Paper by Teju Cole review – how do we defy these dark times?

The novelist and critic travels through genres and across the globe in these thoughtful, powerful essays about the lives of migrants and man's inhumanity

I never stay long in one place," writes Teju Cole in Black Paper. I have known half a dozen cities as home." Cole's writing, too, often deals with ideas of transience, restlessness and not belonging. Open City, his debut novel from 2011, tracks the meandering thoughts of a young Nigerian immigrant, Julius, who walks the streets of Manhattan as if in a waking dream. It was followed by Every Day Is for the Thief, in which a young man returns to his native Nigeria and finds himself adrift in a country that is all too familiar, but whose shortcomings have been amplified by his absence. In each story, constant movement, whether aimless or purposeful, generates a spiral of associative thoughts that evoke the restlessness and the constant self-reflection synonymous with exile.

Black Paper, Cole's second book of essays, finds him travelling freely across a range of locations, subjects and styles - art criticism, aphorisms, homage and reportage - all of which, to different degrees, carry a political undertow in keeping with the book's subtitle: Writing in a Dark Time. It opens deceptively with Cole following the footsteps of Caravaggio across Italy and on to the island of Sicily. What appears to focus on the quintessential uncontrollable artist" soon becomes something else entirely: a series of fleeting personal encounters that evoke the fugitive lives of the migrants who have survived the perilous journey by boat from Africa and beyond. The places of Caravaggio's exile had all become significant flashpoints in the immigration crisis," elaborates Cole, before visiting the port cities in which the artist sought refuge but also found a kind of safety among the transient and the exiled.