The Message
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
One World, 2024
[Publication date: October 1, 2024]
The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Between the World and Me journeys to three resonant sites of conflict to explore how the stories we tell—and the ones we don’t—shape our realities.
“[Coates] is intellectually fearless . . . unshackled by political or racial ideology, humane in his judgments, respectful of facts, acutely aware of the difference between what is knowable and what is not.”—The New Yorker
Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell’s classic “Politics and the English Language,”but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities.
In the first of the book’s three intertwining essays, Coates, on his first trip to Africa, finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind. Then he takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on his own book’s banning, but also explores the larger backlash to the nation’s recent reckoning with history and the deeply rooted American mythology so visible in that city—a capital of the Confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares. Finally, in the book’s longest section, Coates travels to Palestine, where he sees with devastating clarity how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives, and the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground.
Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.
REVIEWS:
“An earnest and intimate exploration of locations of extreme injustice, and of the power of writing to render a more compassionate—and more honest—future . . . At once a rallying cry and a love letter to writing itself, the book is an urgent reminder that ‘politics is the art of the possible, but art creates the possible of politics.’ ”—Oprah Daily
“Ever since his Baldwin-inflected Between the World and Me, Coates has been known for his incisive (and sometimes uncomfortable) cultural and political commentary. Here he journeys from West Africa to the American South to Palestine to examine how the stories we tell can fail us, and to argue that only the truth can bring justice.”—The Boston Globe
“Award-winning author Ta-Nehisi Coates returns with a powerful critique on modern American society. With his signature incisiveness, Coates interrogates the intersections of race, power, and identity while blending historical insight and personal reflection. Through three essays, Coates presents a global perspective that challenges the status quo and dares us to envision a more just future.”—SheReads
“With the game-changing success of his essay/memoir Between the World and Me, anything [Coates] writes will immediately command attention. Here he grapples with the power and danger of storytelling, the too easy way of shaping and softening reality. Coates travels to Africa, to South Carolina, and—in the longest piece—Palestine to observe how rarely life as it is lived fits into the stories we want to tell ourselves.”—Parade
“Coates presents three blazing essays on race, moral complicity, and a storyteller’s responsibility to the truth. . . Coates exhorts readers, including students, parents, educators, and journalists, to challenge conventional narratives that can be used to justify ethnic cleansing or camouflage racist policing. Brilliant and timely.”—Booklist, starred review
“Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal . . . Chapin, South Carolina, . . . and to Israel and Palestine . . . Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual . . . A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Ta-Nehisi Coates is the author of The Beautiful Struggle, We Were Eight Years in Power, The Water Dancer, and Between the World and Me, which won the National Book Award in 2015. He is the recipient of a National Magazine Award and a MacArthur Fellowship. He is currently the Sterling Brown endowed chair at Howard University in the English department.
Nonfiction
Ta-Nehisi Coates Returns to the Political Fray, Calling Out Injustice
“The Message” marks his re-entry as a public intellectual determined to wield his moral authority, especially regarding Israel and the occupied territories.
by Jennifer Szalai
September 29, 2024
New York Times
THE MESSAGE
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
One World, 2024
Ta-Nehisi Coates has returned to the fray. In 2017, after getting into a public dust-up with Cornel West, who accused him of being in thrall to a “neoliberal establishment,” Coates, declaring he “didn’t get in it for this,” summarily deleted his Twitter account. A year later, he left his longtime post as a staff writer at The Atlantic. He spent the next several years far from the combative world of intellectual celebrity and immersed in his own creative projects: writing comics, publishing a novel and working on Hollywood scripts.
[Listen to this article with reporter commentary]
In his new book, “The Message,” Coates likens his books to his children, better left to make their way through the world while he, the protective author, hung back: “My work is to set the table, craft the argument, render the world as I imagine it and then go.” Defending his books brought out the worst in him, he says; he was at his best when “making more of them.”
But after protests against police brutality erupted in 2020 and school boards started trying to ban Coates’s “Between the World and Me” (2015), he eventually decided that retreating “into my own private space of bookmaking” was no longer conscionable. Teachers and librarians were standing up for his work, often at great risk; to decide that his writing could speak for itself was a “privilege,” he says, one unavailable to his embattled defenders on the front lines.
“The Message” charts Coates’s re-entry as a public intellectual; it also marks a shift in his approach. Instead of focusing mainly on the American experience, most of the book takes place abroad. The rolling, elegiac cadences of much of his earlier work have yielded to a fury that’s harder edged. But a sense of shock also seems to have elicited in Coates a sense of possibility. He used to get criticized for being too fatalistic, too despairing, too insistent on presuming the world is what it is. Now, in “The Message,” he addresses himself to “young writers everywhere whose task is nothing less than doing their part to save the world.”
The book is several things at once: a letter to his writing students at Howard University; a meditation on storytelling, and the power of stories to delineate what may or may not be politically possible; a travelogue of his trip to Senegal, where Coates visited a site of the slave trade; an account of meeting a high school instructor in South Carolina who was being pressured to stop teaching “Between the World and Me.”
But all of this is a prelude to the last half of “The Message,” which is clearly the heart of the book, and the part that is bound to attract the most attention. Coates writes about a 10-day trip that he took in the summer of 2023 to Israel-Palestine, where he saw up close the brute force deployed to sustain the Israeli occupation: checkpoints, barbed wire, soldiers with guns.
He readily admits that until that trip he knew very little about the fraught politics of the Middle East. In 2014, he had published “The Case for Reparations,” an article that brought the subject of reparations for slavery into the mainstream. Among the examples of real-world reparations he cited were Germany’s payments to Israel after the Holocaust. Israel’s left-wing critics castigated him for it, but for the most part he was showered with liberal approval. After all, he writes, “the (mostly white) magazine writers I’d admired” had taught him that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “was a matter of knowledge, not morality. And that knowledge was as foreign to me as computational mathematics.”
So in one sense, what Coates saw in Israel was new to him; but in another, he says, he found it all too familiar. He draws repeated links between Jim Crow and “the separate and unequal nature of Israeli rule.” When his group is blocked by soldiers from entering the Aqsa Mosque compound, he notices “the sun glinting off their shades like Georgia sheriffs.” Writing about Israeli control of the water supply, which extends to the collection of rainwater, he says that Israel had “segregated not just the pools and fountains but the water itself.”
The very things that appall Coates also lead him to conclude that he is more qualified to comment on Israel than he once assumed he was. “It occurred to me that there was still one place on the planet — under American patronage — that resembled the world that my parents were born into,” he writes. He feels betrayed by “my colleagues in journalism” whom he blames, again, for encouraging him to believe that the history and politics of the region were too complicated for him to ever truly understand. They are guilty, he says, of “the elevation of factual complexity over self-evident morality.”
This binary is a potent, if unanswerable, refrain, suggesting that “factual complexity” is simply so much noise. It also forces — or allows — Coates, despite the history books he has evidently read, to keep the contemporary parts of his narrative about Israel-Palestine contained to what he saw of the occupation during those 10 days in the summer of 2023. The book includes no mention of Oct. 7 or Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. This is a choice — and a conspicuous one at that, especially for an author who had long positioned himself “against sentiment divorced from evidence, against a world that escapes footnotes.” What was so distinctive about his earlier work was how artfully he marshaled factual details in the service of profoundly moral arguments. His writing opened up space for more — more questions, more searching, more unknowns.
But then Coates is repudiating his old ways of doing things with his new book: “I became a better technical writer, but my sense of the world was stunted.” He doesn’t seem to be seeking to cajole or persuade; readers who are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and have even a passing knowledge of its history are unlikely to learn anything new from his descriptions of the occupation’s cruelty. He says that he seeks to “haunt” — to have readers think about his “words before bed, see them manifest in their dreams.” But haunting is evocative, not declarative; it stands at odds with anything “self-evident.”
What stands out most about “The Message” is who wrote it. Coates calls this book his “bid for reparation.” He is using his position of prominence and moral authority to draw attention to the plight of Palestinians. Having lived the life of the famous Black writer in mostly white professional spaces, someone who has been both venerated and vilified, he finds in his new community “the warmth of solidarity.” Instead of being the singular voice or the incomparable expert, Coates offers himself as an ally: “I feel myself disappear.”
THE MESSAGE | By Ta-Nehisi Coates | One World | 235 pp. | $30
Jennifer Szalai is the nonfiction book critic for The Times. More about Jennifer Szalai