While doing research for a book set in his hometown, Lagos, Nigeria, author Teju Cole (Open City) kept coming across these incidents in the newspapers of Lagos. Known in the French as fait divers, Cole describes the stories as “an event, usually of a grim nature, animated sometimes, but not always, by a certain irony.”
Two examples from his website:
“Raoul G., of Ivry, an untactful husband, came home unexpectedly and stuck his blade in his wife, who was frolicking in the arms of a friend.”
“A dishwasher from Nancy, Vital Frérotte, who had just come back from Lourdes cured forever of tuberculosis, died Sunday by mistake.”
He calls them “small fates” and posts them daily on his Twitter account.
Matt Pearce at The New Inquiry delves deeper into what Cole is doing with these tweets. Pearce writes: “Most of us are nobodies, and we have a few writers who make nobodies famous. We keep most of them in newsrooms. So it’s not that what Teju Cole is doing — making Lagos’ nobodies famous — is, technically speaking, all that unique. What’s new is that he’s doing it on Twitter.”
Read more about Teju Cole’s project here.
