Human Archipelago

Teju Cole, Fazal Sheikh — 2019

For the past 25 years, Fazal Sheikh has highlighted the plight of displaced people and refugees around the world. He has photographed people driven from their homes by war as well as those upended by the redrawing of national borders and the reassertion of racial and ethnic divisions. Sheikh has also made sublime photographs of landscapes altered by political and environmental crises. In the past two years, the shift to the political right in the US has been replicated across Europe, the Middle East, Central and East Africa and Southeast Asia, as authoritarian governments and xenophobia have increased. As an act of refusal to these political trends, Sheikh sought out the celebrated novelist and critic Teju Cole for a collaboration that would reinforce their commitment to the ideal of a compassionate global community as well as the importance of individual courage. The resulting book represents the two authors' distinct visions, their shared values and mutual spirit of cooperation. With Cole's words and Sheikh's photos we are confronted with fundamental and newly necessary questions of coexistence: who is my neighbor? Who is kin to me? Who is a stranger? What does it mean to be human? Teju Cole (born 1975) is a Brooklyn-based novelist, essayist and photographer. His honors include the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Cole's photography book Blind Spot was shortlisted for the Paris Photo--Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards. He is the photography critic of the New York Times Magazine and Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard University. The photographs of Fazal Sheikh (born 1965) have been exhibited internationally from Tate Modern, London, to the Metropolitan Museum and United Nations Headquarters in New York and the Mapfre Foundation, Madrid. The author of 15 monographs, many published by Steidl, Sheikh is currently the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and the Humanities at Princeton University.

Reviews

Aisha Mugo@mugoa

Mar 17, 2024

One of the best gifts I’ve ever received. Thank you @mariorugu!

Completed it within one sitting, compelling imagery that befits equally compelling words. A masterclass.

Marion@mariorugu

Feb 19, 2024

“There are no refugees, only fellow citizens whose rights we have failed to acknowledge.”

A collaboration between writer Teju Cole and photographer Fazal Sheikh

Got this for a friend decided to read 😅

Highlights

Marion@mariorugu

But why do they have to suffer? Why do they have to be unhoused, removed, turned refugees a second time for no good reason? The only reason being that it pleases certain people to be cruel, and to feel the pressure of their boot on someone else's neck.

What is watching all this cruelty going to do to those not directly in its path? What does watching torture over an extended period eventually do to you, even when you're not the torturer or the tortured? Why do you think you can stay clean?

Marion@mariorugu

The extraordinary courage of Lassana Bathily, an immigrant from Mali, saved six lives during a terrorist attack at a kosher supermarket at the Porte de Vincennes.

He was rewarded with French citizenship by the French president François Hollande.

But this is not a story about courage.

The superhuman agility and bravery of Mamoudou Gassama, an immigrant from Mali, saved a baby from death in the 18th arrondissement. He was rewarded with French citizenship by the French president Emmanuel Macron.

But this is not a story about bravery.

The superhuman is rewarded with formal status as a human. The merely human, meanwhile, remains unhuman, quasi-human, subhuman.

The already human, to be granted humanity in this arrangement, must be superhuman. No, not merely superhuman, but visibly, demonstrably superhuman.

Gassama crossed the Mediterranean in a tiny boat, that was superhuman, but no one filmed that, he remained subhuman, and there was no reward.

Such is Empire's magnanimity. Merci, patron. Je suis tellement reconnaissant, patron.

The hand that gives, it is said in Mali, is always above the hand that receives. Those who are hungry cannot reject food. Not only those who are hungry but those who have been deliberately starved. But soon comes the day when the Hebrews will revolt and once and for all refuse Pharaoh's capricious largesse.