Teju Cole

I have taken into myself some of the assumptions of life in a Western democracy—certain ideas about legality, for instance, certain expectations of due process—and in that sense I have returned a stranger.”

There’s strong leftist support for Palestinian causes in the United States. Many of my friends in New York, for example, think that Israel is doing terrible things in the Occupied Territories.

Blacks, ‘we blacks’ had known rougher ports of entry [...] This was the acknowledgement he wanted, in his brusque fashion, from every ‘brother’ he met.

Did the Palestinians build the concentration camps? He said. What about the the Armenians: do their deaths mean less because they are not Jews.

Policemen routinely stop drivers of commercial vehicles at this spot to demand bribe

I have mentally rehearsed a reaction for a possible encounter with such corruption at the airport in Lagos. But to walk in off a New York street and face a brazen demand for a bribe: that is a shock I am ill-prepared for.”

Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks.”

Help us fight corruption. If any employee of the consulate asks for a bribe or tip, please, have a discreet word with the Consul General

the hardest thing to deal with, after weeks of constant power cuts, is the noise of the generators

They gave no reason. They just said I would have to submit another one in twelve months. I was crushed. I left school. Plagiarism? The only possibilities are either that they refused to believe my command of English and theory or, I think this is even more likely, that they were punishing me for world events in which I had played no role. My thesis committee had me on September 20, 2001..That was the year I lost my illusions about Europe.

thousands of cars over the course of a day would pay toll at the informal rate, lining the pockets of the collectors and their superiors

To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone.

while the buildings and roads of the capital city suggest a rational, orderly society, the reality is the opposite

the moment there is a power cut

the next Edward Said! I was going to do it by studying comparative literature and using it as a basis for societal critique.