“This Counter History”: Teju Cole’s Pandemic Visual Diary on the Kitchen as a Domestic Postcolonial Medi[t]ation

During the first pandemic year, 2020, contemporary Nigerian-American writer and photographer Teju Cole spent a week prior to the American presidential election, in his Cambridge, Massachusetts, house daily photographing objects on his kitchen counter. He subsequently published Golden Apple of the Sun, a book of thirty-five photos of objects on the counter plus 28 handwritten pages of a 1780 cookbook and an unparagraphed, diaristic essay variously addressing several “you’s.” Cole’s photographs of objects that happened to be on his kitchen counter track “the operation of chance in this small space,” with nothing moved or arranged, in their repetition and variation of objects and—seemingly—no human subject. His meditative writing, in tandem with the photos, links pandemic melancholy to several topics: the tradition of still-life painting (nature morte); reflections on food, hunger, and appetite; his own childhood memories; an homage to just-deceased British documentary photographer Chris Killip; histories of imperialism from the point of view of the enslaved; and more. This intersection of photographs and texts traces an associative, recursive itinerary linkng the transience of consumption, the fragility of objects, and the vanity of worldly desires; at the same time, it infuses ordinary kitchen things and the unreadable cookbook with a subjectivity that is relational even as it plays automedially on multiple genres. As a memento mori, the photo-diary is both an immersion in the pleasures of memories of pleasure, and a scathing documentation of the enslavement and abuse of African and other victims of colonialism, including around his location, Cambridge, that pointedly applies Benjamin’s assertion of the inescapable entwining of civilization and barbarism. As the Yeats poem invoked in his title suggests, the project thematizes both its own transience and the ability of photographs, like “light falling on stone,” to record what is already lost. Cole’s autobiographical rendering of domestic objects in the personal space of his kitchen and interrogation of them through multiple frameworks and temporalities articulate an “intransigent” subjectivity that provokes reader-viewers to interrogate their own positions in relation to his complex location.