I met him in 2013, with many admirers – new and old, riding on the fame of Open City. Teju Cole speaks to convince. His speech filled with pauses and precise anecdotes. He knows his way around words and understands how to convince and also ease you into his POV. His eloquence and carriage became my first point of curiosity. I dashed after him for a photograph when I noticed he was free. Then, being seen with a famous writer was more important than querying about the process of art. From the stage where he had just descended from his panel discourse, he had seemed almost god-like. I approached, and he agreed to pose, a photo on an old Tecno phone, gone now. Thankfully. I was staring at him, wondering about his size and care when proximity wasn’t an issue. He thanked me in perfect Yoruba, smooth, without an accent, for attending his panel session, displacing any mental throne I had placed him.

“Didn’t know you spoke Yoruba so fluently”, I asked.

He replied, “why wouldn’t I be able to?” So, I return to this moment often. Like others, I had perpetuated a stereotype against someone who has soon become one of my favorite writers of all time. 

Years later, at a reading on a wet Sunday evening at Jazzhole, a bookstore in Ikoyi Lagos, I met Cole again. Less jarring, it’s perhaps my most memorable meeting with him. Not much had changed. He still favored a skin-cut and his rectangular glasses still sat like a chief on top of his large nose. His fashion sense is still somewhat bum, a black blazer over a collarless shirt and a jeans pants. He read an essay he wrote in 2013 published on Granta titled Water No Get Enemy.

At Ake Festival in 2013, I had found the last copy of “Every Day is for the Thief” – his first book, published by Cassava Republic after my encounter with him. The book would lay unread in my shelf for months as I favored other books. But when I finally got to it, my first read took four hours to finish, but I read it over and over again till it became a bible. He treated Lagos like an outsider with an insider’s knowledge. His unnamed character spent his childhood in this city and perhaps because of this, carried a yearning for normalcy and a belief in humanity, finding himself a judge of everything which made Lagos abnormal.

I used to enjoy how random Lagos was, especially the random energy in Lagosians. They have an unaccounted exuberance to hustle, to keep moving as though pausing and catching one’s breath was something to worry about. I used to love this space because, somehow, I always thought one could find safety even amidst all the boisterousness. But it was no longer so. Lagos was now home to fuel tankers begging for explosions and containers begging to fall and crush random people walking by the streets. I had grown wearied by the gorier kinds of news coming from the city daily.

So, I wondered about a young Cole in the streets of Lagos. Did living abroad – in New York, travelling to Europe change how he saw life? Teju says Lagos is his favorite city, his favorite place in the entire world because of how much narrative everyday living in Lagos holds. I get it. Even with my trepidation, I still love Lagos, a love that returns me to it every time. But I have never been a Lagosian and this, perhaps, explains my insistence on romanticizing the place. Does it also explain Cole’s obsession with Lagos too?