“Idea l’a need” or, enough said: The poetics of reticence in Teju Cole’s Every Day is for the Thief and Open City

Abstract

ABSTRACT My reading of Teju Cole’s Every Day is for the Thief and Open City focuses on strategies of suppression or reticence. Cole’s aesthetic practice involves elision, omission, and revelation through indirection, his vocabulary weaving between terms of forgetting and recovery. One might name this a “poetics of reticence” or what Julius, the narrator of Open City, calls “the ability to trace out a story from what [is] omitted” (9), offering a readerly tool to confront trauma, unearth memory and, ultimately, make sense of the novels. I also discuss raced presences in both texts, frequently overlooked by early media reviewers in favor of reductive readings which foreground the narrators’ flâneurism, arguing that the narrators’ seemingly aimless roaming through New York City, Brussels, and Lagos performs a textualization of diasporic wandering, reinforced by images and narratives of migrancy, “New World Negro” tropes, and evocations of writerly traditions such as slave narrative.