eporting from the Gaza Strip in 2006, the critic and essayist John Berger powerfully summed up the prevailing sentiment among suffering Palestinians: “How is it I am still alive? I’ll tell you I’m alive because there’s a temporary shortage of death. This is said with a grin, which is on the far side of a longing for normalcy, for an ordinary life.
, by contrast, is both lifelike and speckled with intimate details; the chapters are all treatises in learning to see and think. On a trip to Mali, Tunde wonders why the word “poor” keeps popping up in every journalistic dispatch about the country and yet “there was no connection made in any of what he read between Mali’s poverty and France’s wealth”.
The deliberate absence of narrative impetus becomes oppressive before long. Tunde is always listening to good music, or sampling culturally significant works of art. You yearn for an instance when he’d show up drunk at a gallery or watch someone bomb on stage. You wish his supreme attentive powers wouldn’t culminate in a tidy epiphany for once.