Black Paper: Writing In A Dark Time
A profound book of essays from a celebrated master of the form. āDarkness is not empty,ā writes Teju Cole in Black Paper, a book that meditates on what it means to sustain our humanityāand witness the humanity of othersāin a time of darkness. One of the most celebrated essayists of his generation, Cole here plays variations on the essay form, modeling ways to attend to experienceānot just to take in but to think critically about what we sense and what we donāt. Wide-ranging but thematically unified, the essays address ethical questions about what it means to be human and what it means to bear witness, recognizing how our individual present is informed by a collective past. Coleās writings in Black Paper approach the fractured moment of our history through a constellation of interrelated concerns: confrontation with unsettling art, elegies both public and private, the defense of writing in a time of political upheaval, the role of the color black in the visual arts, the use of shadow in photography, and the links between literature and activism. Throughout, Cole gives us intriguing new ways of thinking about blackness and its numerous connotations. As he describes the carbon-copy process in his epilogue: āWriting on the top white sheet would transfer the carbon from the black paper onto the bottom white sheet. Black transported the meaning.ā