When in Florence for the biennale where my wife’s sculptures were being shown, we had a day to ourselves. Should we visit the Venice biennale and its supposedly cutting-edge modern art, or Rome, for the paintings of Caravaggio? Do we go to the future or to the past?
It wasn’t a difficult choice. It had to be Caravaggio, whose powerful works both drew you in and left you uneasy. The 16thcentury Italian was a notorious brawler, murderer and thug and his life asked the question: the man or his work? Can we, should we, separate the two? The prolific artist who was in constant exile (usually running from the law) was dead by 38; only about 80 of his works survive.
In a brilliant essay in his new collection, Black Paper , Teju Cole writes of visiting the cities Caravaggio had been in exile, to see his works there.
“The places of Caravaggio’s exile had all become significant flash points in the immigration crisis, which was not a coincidence: he’d gone to them because they were ports,” writes Cole, and unexpectedly connects Caravaggio to the moral question of our time: forced displacement and immigration.
“I could no longer separate my exploration of Caravaggio’s years in exile from what I was seeing around me in contemporary Italy,” he writes, “the sea was the same, the sense of endangerment rhymed.”
He reads about a sunken refugee boat being berthed in Augusta and goes there. He writes movingly of the struggle and the deaths of the desperate human cargo, his responses flowing from confronting an empty boat. In Syracuse, he takes a survivor, a young Gambian, to a Church where Caravaggio’s The Burial of Saint Lucy is housed. The writing here is matter-of-fact, shorn of drama, and the more powerful for this connect across centuries.
Saul Bellow once infamously asked, Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?The best response came from an American sportswriter, Ralph Wiley. “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,” he wrote, “unless you find profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.”
We live in each other’s worlds. The Tolstoys and the Shakespeares, the Kalidasas and the Mishimas belong to all of us. Wiley’s response identifies accurately “how we live: in a polyphony of cultural influence that is not eclipsed by the other facts of race, age, gender, citizenship, or historic period,” writes Cole, thus taking the air out of the ‘cultural appropriation’ argument so beloved of some contemporary deciders of social norms.
In a crude version of this formulation, a non-Western writer cannot write about western art (although the traffic has been in the opposite direction for centuries). Cole, Nigerian-American, essayist, novelist, photographer, and all-round breaker of rules indicates in that one essay that Caravaggio is the Caravaggio of the Zulus, while also reminding us why any person’s suffering or death should affect all of us.
Few write about inter-connectedness – of people, of ideas, of writing techniques, of history – with such acuity.
(Suresh Menon is Contributing Editor, The Hindu ).
