Name: Mike M's review of The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Item: The Message
Rating: 5
Author: Mike M

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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.

The Message

Ivana Varesko

“Passport stamps and wide vocabularies are neither wisdom nor morality. As it happens, you can see the world and still never see the people in it.” 

An inhumane system demands inhumans, and so it produces them in stories, editorials, newscasts, movies, and television.

“An inhumane system demands inhumans, and so it produces them in stories, editorials, newscasts, movies, and television.” 

I now hear this word - occupation - in the same way I might hear a middle-aged man speak of his ‘medical procedure’ when what he means is ‘colonoscopy’. 

In setting my sides upon the field, my frame excluded any defense of the patently immoral. And I would sooner hear a defense of cannibalism than I would hear any brief for what I saw with my own eyes in Hebron. 

The statues and pageantry can fool you. They look like symbols of wars long settled, fought on behalf of men long dead. But their Redemption is not about honoring a past. It's about killing a future.

I was saved by the books in my house, by the implicit message that learning does not belong exclusively in schools. Who would I be, left to the devices of those who seek to shrink education, to make it orderly and pliable? 

The fear instilled by this rising culture is not for what it does today but what it augurs for tomorrow - a different world in which the boundaries of humanity are not so easily drawn and enforced.

The arts tell us what is possible and what is not, because, among other things, they tell us who is human and who is not. 

Politics is the art of the possible, but art creates the possible of politics. 

Books work when no one else is looking, mind-melding author and audience, forging an imagined world that only the reader can see. Their power is so intimate, so insidious, that even its authors don’t always comprehend it. 

Karolina

But passport stamps and wide vocabularies are neither wisdom nor morality. As it happens, you can see the world and still never see the people in it.

Oppressive power is preserved in the smoke and fog, and sometimes it is smuggled in the unexamined shadows of the language of the oppressed themselves.

The systems we oppose are systems of oppression, and thus inherently systems of cowardice. They work best in the dark, their essence tucked away and unexamined.

Lindsay

You cannot act upon what you cannot see. And we are plagued by dead language and dead stories that serve people whose aim is nothing short of a dead world. And it is not enough to stand against these dissemblers. There has to be something in you, something that hungers for clarity. And you will need that hunger, because if you follow that path, soon enough you will find yourself confronting not just their myths, not just their stories, but your own.

The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized.

This meant that we could never practice writing solely for the craft itself, but must necessarily believe our practice to be in service of that larger emancipatory mandate.

Rick Powell

"If this had happened in America [getting stopped and interrogated about my religion], I would have told you that the soldier who stopped me was Black, and I guess he was here too. In fact, there were “Black” soldiers everywhere lording their power over the Palestinians, many of whom would, in America, have been seen as “white.” Again I felt the mental lens curving against the light and was reminded of something I have long known, something I’ve written and spoken about, but still was stunned to see here in such stark detail: that race is a species of power and nothing else." (Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message)

"My sense is that if I spend more time talking to you than I spend complaining about you, then something wonderful often happens and the enlightenment is mutual. So I don’t really worry about the young, whose excesses are confined to lecture halls and quadrangles, so much as I fear the old, whose tyrannies are legislative." (Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message)

Caelan

Armed with those raw sources and my own sense of how words might be organized-- /a style I possessed/ --maybe I could go from the haunted to the ghost, from reader to writer, and I too could have the stars, and their undeniable gravity, at my disposal.

I was about your age when I began to understand...that sound and rhythm are even more powerful when organized into narrative. 

In 2020, the historian Maha Nassar surveyed the nation’s opinion pages and journals to see how often Palestinian writers were granted access. What she found was that the country’s papers and magazines preferred writing about Palestinians to allowing Palestinians to write. Through a fifty-year period stretching from 1970 to 2019, Nassar found that less than 2 percent of all opinion pieces discussing Palestinians had Palestinian authors. The Washington Post ranked at a dismal 1 percent. The New Republic during this period did not publish a single piece on Palestine from the perspective of Palestinians.

I do not believe that this is a conspiracy. But more important, I do not think it is a coincidence. An inhumane system demands inhumans, and so it produces them in stories, editorials, newscasts, movies, and television. Editors and writers like to think they are not part of such systems, that they are independent, objective, and arrive at their conclusions solely by dint of their reporting and research. But the Palestine I saw bore so little likeness to the stories I read, and so much resemblance to the systems I’ve known, that I am left believing that at least here, this objectivity is self-delusion. It’s not that the facts of the stories are so wrong—though sometimes it is that—it is what is not said, the passive voice, the ceding of authority to military flacks, the elevation of factual complexity over self-evident morality.

This elevation of complexity over justice is part and parcel of the effort to forge a story of Palestine told solely by the colonizer, an effort that extends to the proscribing of boycotts by American states, the revocation of articles by journals, the expulsion of students from universities, the dismissal of news anchors by skittish networks, the shooting of journalists by army snipers, and the car-bombing of novelists by spy agencies. No other story, save one that enables theft, can be tolerated.

But there are other stories, and we who bankroll apartheid are more ignorant for not hearing them directly from storytellers like Deanna. I know that there are a lot of writers who believe they have access to a kind of artistic magic that allows them to inhabit any community in the world and write about it as if it is their own. I think those writers overestimate the power of their talent and intelligence, and underestimate how wisdom accrues over time, among nations and peoples, across ancestry. Even my words here, this bid for reparation, is a stranger’s story—one told by a man still dazzled by knafeh and Arabic coffee, still at the start of a journey that others have walked since birth. Palestine is not my home. I see that land, its peoples, and its struggles through a kind of translation—through analogy and the haze of my own experience—and that is not enough. If Palestinians are to be truly seen, it will be through stories woven by their own hands—not by their plunderers, not even by their comrades.

Apurva Shah

Insightful and imbued with the powerful prose and poetry, addictive and explicit imagery, The Message is frank, truthful, and welcome in a time when forceful truth speaking is often drowned out by propaganda and vitriol.

Mike M

brimming with clarity about what it means to be a writer in a world on fire—this book makes a beautiful case for why our poetics matter; why it matters for us to investigate the way we think & write through our imaginations & narratives; why/how we should tell the stories of our lives & our lineage; why/how we should move through telling the stories of others, even & especially in solidarity, & how to make reparations where we have plundered. what struck me the most about this text is coates' insistence on implicating the self, his self-reflection is so persistent, so honest—this was my mistake, this is how I failed, this is how I lack, he says, at so many points—so untrammeled by what is the imagined expectation for a writer of his stature to be sure & perfect. this text says, we can have knowledge, we can have language, & still fail, fail again. & then we can fucking do better. once again learning that the work/life/person does not need to be good, just true. not good, just true

biddy

The writing in this book is impeccable, TaNahesi Coates is a spectacular and gifted writer. 

I was truly mostly interested in this book for the essay on Senegal. There's a long tradition of African American writers, intellectuals and activists coming to Africa and writing about it, from Maya Angelou’s “Gods children need traveling shoes” to Saidiya Hartman’s “lose your mother” unfortunately he’s own reflections are shallow and summed up  in the closing of the essay where is delighted to find he’s work being studied by scholars in Senegal. He is also shocked to discover colorism in Africa. This sort of shock and naivety is a theme in most of the essays. 

In the longest essay of the book and one that caused so much unnecessary mayhem last year, he discovers the Israeli apartheid in Palestine by going on a trip organized by the Palestinian literature festival. This essay is filled with lamentations of being failed by the mainstream American media who he argues mostly report and support the Zionist project. He returns to America with a very righteous anger and conviction to overturn this, however I couldn’t help but wonder how the current leading public intellectual on black life in America could have spent he’s entire life not only indifferent to Palestinian suffering but going as far as using Germany reparations to the Israeli state as an example of a blueprint for reparations for descendants of enslaved African Americans. I think I would go as far as saying this essay and book is atonement for he’s silence on this issue and the last few months he has done a lot to raise Palestinian voices in places where they have none.

Marion

The writing in this book is impeccable, TaNahesi Coates is a spectacular and gifted writer. 

I was truly mostly interested in this book for the essay on Senegal. There's a long tradition of African American writers, intellectuals and activists coming to Africa and writing about it, from Maya Angelou’s “Gods children need traveling shoes” to Saidiya Hartman’s “lose your mother” unfortunately he’s own reflections are shallow and summed up  in the closing of the essay where is delighted to find he’s work being studied by scholars in Senegal. He is also shocked to discover colorism in Africa. This sort of shock and naivety is a theme in most of the essays. 

In the longest essay of the book and one that caused so much unnecessary mayhem last year, he discovers the Israeli apartheid in Palestine by going on a trip organized by the Palestinian literature festival. This essay is filled with lamentations of being failed by the mainstream American media who he argues mostly report and support the Zionist project. He returns to America with a very righteous anger and conviction to overturn this, however I couldn’t help but wonder how the current leading public intellectual on black life in America could have spent he’s entire life not only indifferent to Palestinian suffering but going as far as using Germany reparations to the Israeli state as an example of a blueprint for reparations for descendants of enslaved African Americans. I think I would go as far as saying this essay and book is atonement for he’s silence on this issue and the last few months he has done a lot to raise Palestinian voices in places where they have none.

Coates is extremely compelling as always, but in reflecting on the uses and misuse of the power of journalism and storytelling, he ends up making it all about dot him, instead of the people he's ostensibly writing about.

Andrew

Coates is an excellent writer and I see why many call him a modern Baldwin. The Message largely felt like a personal testimony, a correction on past musings; perhaps that’s why it sat a bit weirdly with me, as it went inward, not outward.

I think people who are trying to read this as if it’s a history of Palestine are setting the wrong expectation; it’s really a book of correcting the record and rage. It’s a little self-centered but I ultimately think the book was written for himself and maybe his students and then got a ton of air time because he is Coates. Powerful though, a lot of moral clarity. Disagree with folks who think he doesn’t tackle the context of the holocaust. 

Shohini Gupta

I was a big fan of Coates when he was writing and blogging for the Atlantic, where he often had a fruitful back and forth with Andrew Sullivan, but was cool to his evolution as one of the voices of what I would call bleak racial essentialism. I was also not nearly as impressed with Between the World and Me as everyone else on the left was, perhaps because I was in New York on 9/11 and couldn't countenance his dismmisal of the deaths of so many, and not all of them American citizens either, something everyone seems to forget. I thought some of his comments came from a damaged mind, to put it bluntly. But The Message is lucid and persuasive, somewhat mirroring my own journey from wanting to live on a kibbutz in my late teens to now wanting nothing whatsover to do with Israel as an arrogant, immoral, ethnocratic, apartheid nation-state with a blank check from the US of A, which is now Israel's bitch. We don't even debate whether Israel is an apartheid state anymore. Have you noticed that? We're only told "it's complicated." Is it now? Coates's book is an essential read, whether you agree with him or not, and it's remarkably humble too with some dazzling, beautiful prose.

Apurva Shah &
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Reviews

Highlights

Join the club

Apurva Shah &The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Reviews

Highlights

Join the club

Apurva Shah &
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates