The Physiognomy of an Impossible Return: Relational Geometries Between Autobiography, Narration and Image in Every Day Is for the Thief by Teju Cole

From the start of his career, Teju Cole has presented himself simultaneously as writer and as photographer, always directing his creative production towards a space with a hybrid and plural nature, going beyond and contaminating performative and semiotic codes, making the textual and visual field interact through particular poietic and compositional strategies. The short novel Every Day Is for the Thief (2007), conceived and structured as an internally layered autobiographical phototextual device, is at the same time also a travel reportage, a memoir, a photo-essay, in which the author's experience is declined in that liminal and porous limbo in which fiction and non-fiction tend to converge. Through an analytical reading, this essay aims to investigate the expressive resources and compositional strategies through which writing and image interact with each other inside the textual field, constantly balanced between depiction and re-semantization, between production and reproduction of the existing, providing a hermeneutic tool of a double matrix to embrace the surrounding reality, trying to provide a representation of memorialistic and individual identity that is at the same time the bearer of universalizable meanings.