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

Lindsay

Daddy says he reads to learn. But what was Daddy trying to learn?

I think if he tried to describe the forces shaping his life, my father would see his own actions first: his credits, his mistakes. But if he widened the aperture to the world around him, he would see that some people’s credits earned them more, and their mistakes cost them less. And those people who took more and paid less lived in a world of iniquitous wealth, while his own people lived in a world of terrifying want. And what my father would have also seen is that he was confronted not just by the yawning chasm between wealth and want, but by the stories that sought to inscribe that chasm as natural. He would have pointed to the arsenal of histories, essays, novels, ethnographies, teleplays, treatments, and monographs, which were not white supremacy itself but its syllabus, its corpus, its canon.

It may seem strange that people who have already attained a position of power through violence invest so much time in justifying their plunder with words. But even plunderers are human beings whose violent ambitions must contend with the guilt that gnaws at them when they meet the eyes of their victims. And so a story must be told, one that raises a wall between themselves and those they seek to throttle and rob.

But I think human dignity is in the mind and body and not in stone. And I think the moment we root our worth in castes and kingdoms, in “civilization,” we have accepted the precepts of those whose whole entire legacy is the burning and flooding of a planet. And then we have already lost.

I don’t really care much for hearing “both sides” or “opposing points of view,” so much as I care about understanding the literary tools deployed to advance those views— the discipline of voice, the use of verbs, the length and brevity of sentences, and the curiosity of mind behind those sentences. It is this last I find so often lacking. Great canons angle toward great power, and the great privilege of great power is an incuriosity about those who lack it. That incuriosity is what afflicts the dullest critics of safe spaces and the like. But if these writers, teachers, and administrators could part with the privilege of their own ignorance, they would see that they too need safe spaces— and that, for their own sakes, they have made a safe space of nearly the entire world.

The human mind can only conceive of so much tragedy at once—and when lost lives spiral into the hundreds, then thousands, and then millions, when murder becomes a wide, seemingly unending mass, we lose our ability to see its victims as anything more than an abstract, almost theoretical, collection of lives. In this way, a second crime is perpetrated: Human beings are reduced to a gruel of misery.

My hosts were both Israeli— as nearly all my guides would be for the second half of my trip. This was a conscious decision. What it was not was an empty declaration to “hear both sides.” I had no interest in hearing defenses of the occupation and what struck me then as segregation. Journalists claim to be hearing “both sides” as though a binary opposition had been set down by some disinterested god. But it is the journalists themselves who are playing god— it is the journalists who decide which sides are legitimate and which are not, which views shall be considered and which pushed out of the frame. And this power is an extension of the power of other curators of the culture— network execs, producers, publishers— whose core job is deciding which stories get told and which do not. When you are erased from the argument and purged from the narrative, you do not exist. Thus the complex of curators is doing more than setting pub dates and greenlighting— they are establishing and monitoring a criterion for humanity. Without this criterion, there can be no oppressive power, because the first duty of racism, sexism, homophobia, and so forth is the framing of who is human and who is not. But there is space beyond the brackets. For me it is a world of Emerge and “Evening Exchange,” of barbershops and Baltimore Afros, a land where The Last Dragon is a classic teen movie and Lake Trout is heritage. What I have always wanted is to expand the frame of humanity, to shift the brackets of images and ideas. So that in thinking about my trip, 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.

But here, I felt something that I have always enjoyed about reporting, about seeing worlds beyond my own— I feel myself disappear. When no one is holding my hand or guiding me, and I am watching people living out their particular customs, engaged in their small conversations, I can feel myself dissolving into it all.

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.

Caelan

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

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.

The Message quotes

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