Teju Cole starts his novel Open City with the narrator’s recently acquired pastime of evening walks through New York. A recounting of the various routes and their particular sights follows, along with one of the preceding hobby, namely, bird watching. While these descriptions do not ground the narrator’s initial interest or the subsequent change, they do share a common theme: movement. The movement of both the narrator and the birds immediately evokes a pattern of migration, of travel to a destination and of return to an origin, or home. One could easily interpret this imagery through the lens of trans-national studies and make the connection with people, or peoples, who set out on journeys to new and unfamiliar places, whether out of necessity or desire. However, I would like to consider Open City not from the perspective of movement, but from that of boundaries and restrictions of movement. The barriers found in the pages construct an inability on the narrator’s part to connect with other people, and blocking cultural accessibility.

Some of the boundaries found in the novel are ordinary, physical obstructions. Early, as the narrator makes his way to visit a friend, he finds one path blocked by police cordons (7). As he remembers a visit he once made to a detention center for undocumented immigrants, he describes the meeting room as “split down the middle by Plexiglas, with…small perforations at face level” (64), yet another border to cross. Even at home in his own apartment building, he is cut off from his neighbors. He is stunned at the revelation that the woman who lived next door died, and that he had not known. The gap between apartments twenty-one and twenty-two seems too great for him to manage without engaging in “false intimacy” (21). While the narrator is often able to engage with other figures and hear their stories, these physical blockades prevent the type of intimate interaction that could lead to a more complete understanding.

Other boundaries in the novel are more inter-personal in nature, without any physical obstacles. The narrator describes a trip on the subway after one of his evening walks. Lost in thought about one of his patients, he fails to exit the train and misses his stop. As he considers possible reasons behind this momentary lapse, he becomes aware of the other passengers on the train, and how they all ride in total silence. After switching to another train, he notices its passengers are livelier, but although some are talking with each other, and others’ reading materials seem to invite interaction, he makes an escape through closing doors and is left “all alone on the platform” with “this assortment of inwardly focused city types still swirling in [his] mind” (45). Even in one-on-one interactions, as is the case in the scene with the African taxi driver (40-41), he is unable to bridge the distance and reach another person. Their shared African identity, whether real or imagined, leads not to harmony, but instead discord due to a cultural misunderstanding.

The last boundary I would like to address is that of time and space, one that Cole addresses both directly and through metaphor in his novel. The many memory scenes—I would not refer to them as flashbacks—serve to provide biographical information about the narrator, as well as some of the other characters he encounters. Further, these memory scenes provide the chance to grapple with events and places from the past that have shaped the narrator’s present, and continue to do so. Memories of his grandmother, for example, set the stage for his chapter-spanning trip to Belgium, where he must cope with multiple cultural identities in a multicultural setting. In addition to distinct intervals, past and present, Cole also writes of elastic time (74) imbuing it with a physical quality. Carrying the metaphor further, he occasionally blurs the boundary between time and space. As the narrator wanders the streets of New York, a tourist asks for directions to 9/11, “not the site of the events of 9/11 but to 9/11 itself, the date petrified into broken stones” (52). At the site of another memorial for fallen officers, he describes “a vast, blank face of polished marble, awaiting those among the living who would die in uniform, and the not yet born, who would be born, grow up to be police officers, and be killed while doing that work” (57).

As a fictional work, Cole’s Open City is able to create a context for the reader, in which questions of heritage, identity, nation, and culture can be asked. The form allows Cole to present these questions outside the structured outline of a theoretical argument. In fact, the reader is under no obligation to follow, accept, or even identify an argument at all. Instead, the narrator guides the conversation(s) important to a trans-national critical understanding through plausible settings and experiences. The reader is able to engage first with the characters and story, and then (or simultaneously) with an examination of what it means to be African, or German, or Belgian, or American, or some hyphenated combination of national identities. The fictional form brings with it both a freedom from strict theoretical analysis, as well as an environment where such analysis can be carried out organically.