The Message
“part memoir, part travelogue, part guide for writers, part polemic.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates specializes in telling devastating truths. His previous works of nonfiction, The Beautiful Struggle, We Were Eight Years in Power, and Between the World and Me, shed light on some of the darkest passages of U.S. history and some of the darkest instincts of white supremacists. He not only recognizes racism; he interrogates it, contextualizes it, and lays it bare, like a pathologist dissecting a corpse.
This new book begins as a meditation on writing, in the spirit of George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language.” But it morphs into something else entirely when Coates embarks on journeys to Senegal, South Carolina, and Israel.
In Dakar, he reflects on the myth of Africa as an Eden (“a place without The Mayflower, Founding Fathers, conquistadors, and the assorted corruptions they had imposed on us”) and contrasts the myth with the reality (“collapsed buildings on roads littered with rusted cans . . . potholes filled with water”). He remembers the writings of white Americans who tried to justify the oppression of Black people: Josiah Nott claiming Negroes are “organically inferior” and Teddy Roosevelt describing Africa as a continent of “ape-like savages.”
Coates makes a trip from mainland Senegal to Gorée Island, an historic place of departure for Africans forced into American slavery. As the island comes into view, he recognizes himself as a pilgrim on an ancestral journey commemorating the earlier journeys of the stolen ones, the journeys that formed the birth of the modern world.
If his time spent in Senegal is reflective and mainly solitary, his trip to Columbia, South Carolina, is triggered by collective action. The trip is precipitated when a school board considers banning his book Between the World and Me. Coates, invited by a brave teacher, finds himself thrust into the world of school board meetings, local gossip, and tall glasses of iced tea. Against the grain of southern stereotypes, he meets a vibrant and progressive group of educators and parents who resist book bans.
He then visits the 22-acre State House grounds, which provide fuel for his ruminations on history and memory, education and justice. The State House, it turns out, is a shrine to white supremacy. In its statues of Confederate slaveholders, segregationists, and murderers, Coates sees not some glorification of a distant Neverland, but symbols of a living, breathing movement attempting to turn back the clock to the days before civil rights for all.
The final chapter, which occupies half the book, takes place in Palestine, where Coates is invited to a book festival. In the Occupied Territories, he witnesses how the formerly oppressed have become the oppressor. He immediately recognizes the evils of segregation because he’s seen them in the subjugation of Black people in his own country. He notes the parallels between the Jim Crow South and Israel: Palestinians are routinely removed from their own land, harassed at checkpoints and in their own homes, and subjected to random violence which goes unpunished.
In this “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns,” ironies abound: Golda Meir, Israel’s Prime Minister from 1969 to 1974, publicly denounces South African apartheid only to institute a similar system in Israel; Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Museum, is located just a short drive from Deir Yassin, the scene of a covered-up massacre of Arab civilians; the Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem is built on top of a Muslim graveyard. Coates is only in the region for ten days, but it affects him profoundly: “Of all the worlds I have ever explored, I don’t think any shone so bright, so intense, so immediately as Palestine.”
The Message marks a departure for the author. His usual canvas is the U.S., where he can attest to injustices from direct experience. The consequence of writing about Senegal and Palestine is that he can only be a witness rather than a protagonist. He’s an ally, a moral conscience, but his perspective is that of the onlooker. Each night in Palestine, he returns to his comfortable hotel, free to write without fear of the knock on the door from security forces or the thunder of the bulldozer come to flatten his home.
This state of being an outsider does not diminish the strength of Coates’ convictions or the potency of his writing. One theme that unites the essays is the importance of the stories we tell or the mythologies we invent. Symbols and stories are everywhere: statues, flags, institutions, art, and essays written by journalists. These either feed into or correct the myths—usually the former, according to Coates.
The Message is a hybrid of various genres. It’s part memoir, part travelogue, part guide for writers, part polemic. And, like much of Coates’s finest writing, it’s usually riveting.