Teju Cole: "If they let him, Donald Trump would start extermination programs."

Teju Cole is clear: art is useless. It doesn't have to be useful. It's not its usefulness that gives it value. "A poem is not a chair," he asserts. But if it's useless, how can it hold so much beauty, so much meaning, so much solace for human beings? "If you give an engineer instructions to build an airplane, they'll build an airplane and fly it every time. If you give a poet instructions to write a great poem, they may never write it. Art is a mystery, it's magical, and that's its great value," he comments.

Art and the human capacity to create the most absolute horrors and the most sublime beauty are the main protagonists of "Black Paper: Writing in Times of Darkness" (Acantilado), a collection of articles and essays that explore how art can coexist with humanity's greatest catastrophes, from the Gaza conflict to the war in Ukraine, from the plight of refugees to institutionalized racism and the rise of hate speech. "Art allows me to open a door to delve into the heart of these conflicts and speak about them more directly, much more so than if I were limited to discussing statistical data," Cole notes.

The essays, divided into five parts, open with a daunting comparison between Caravaggio's work and his own journey as a refugee in Naples, Malta, and Sicily, with the plight of the immigrants who arrive hourly on the Italian coast aboard boats that often never reach port. "There are moments that upset all your senses. They're shocking reality checks. I was following Caravaggio's journey as he fled Rome on charges of murder, and I arrived at a port where they were keeping a small boat recovered from the sea. As soon as I boarded, I didn't see death, but I smelled it, and I couldn't help but fall to my knees and start crying. Because there were dozens of stories there that I didn't know, stories of real people who had just been erased forever," the writer says.

From here we can read how he can't help but write to a friend, despite knowing he's dead. Or of his admiration and idolatry for Edward Said and his fight for the Palestinian cause . "The fact that we're sitting here while 10,000 people die there without consequences is a moral catastrophe," he states. The structural hierarchy of the West, which seems to affirm that some lives are more valuable than others, is another theme in the book. "There are realities that break any intellectual categorization, and you have to confront them more freely," Cole asserts.

The writer gives us a hand to travel with him and his friends around the world and see the influence of art on other people's lives. "We don't belong to nations, races, or religions, but the greatest feeling of belonging is with our family and friends. These essays don't seek answers, but rather to initiate a thought in the reader and see where it leads. Art opens up conversations that simulate those we might have with people important to us," he concludes.

In another essay, Cole recalls the day he confirmed that Donald Trump was a true movie villain. It was 2015, and he was still in the race to become president of the United States for the first time. Two Caucasian men had violently beaten another man of Mexican descent. Instead of condemning the attack, Trump simply said his supporters were very passionate. "And there are still those who deny that I'm racist. One topic that fascinates me is how we can become stubbornly preconceived opinions despite the many facts and evidence presented to us. I'm convinced that Trump, if he knew he could get away with it, would initiate extermination programs," he says.

What he doesn't believe will ever change is the dominance of human creation over any experiment in artificial intelligence . "I'm interested in decoration, and sometimes I see AI-generated images of different rooms on Instagram. They all seem dead, because there's no story behind them. It's our personal history that gives us life, and it's the echo of this history that connects us among humans and homogenizes us as a species," Cole concludes.