Review of The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Some books are plodding and predictable (even if they are ultimately rewarding). Others are byzantine and meandering (even if they are ultimately rewarding). The Message is a secret, third type: it is a careful bundle of missives about the struggle for liberation. Writing about events and stories across space and time, Ta-Nehisi Coates unifies these long essays under the guise of talking to his workshop students about writing. The title belies its simplicity by taking on so many meanings.

First, Coates visits Dakar, Senegal, and ruminates on being an African American visiting Africa. What does it mean to be Black in a country populated mostly by Black people? I am reminded of Esi Edugyan’s similar reflections in Out of the Sun. This theme, of the way place can reinforce how much race is just a social construct, continues throughout The Message. Coates seeks to understand how even though different communities around the world experience oppression in slightly different ways, we are all connected; the fight is one.

This first essay gives way to a longer, more drawn out meditation on resistance in the United States. Located temporally in 2020, that fateful summer of protests triggered by George Floyd’s murder, this essay is spiritually connected to the previous one. What I learned here—what I have been learning, the more I read Black authors like Coates and Lorde and Oluo and others—is how deeply the tradition of African American scholarship goes on the subjects of freedom and struggle. It’s very easy for those of us who are not Black and (in my case) not American to view these subjects in facile ways, to understand the history of enslavement in the Americas as a simplistic story of good people and bad people, White people vs Black people, and so on. Coates’s discussion is a rich one, but he built it on the shoulders of the giants who came before him.

There is so much in this essay that I recognized—either as something I related to, or as something familiar to me from my different positionality. For an example of the latter: Coates mentions being a lacklustre student when he was younger, for school didn’t challenge him, yet this was viewed as defiance and noncompliance by his teacher. As a white educator, I am complicit in a similarly racist system here in Canada, where Black students are disproportionately disciplined or viewed as more aggressive than their peers. From here, Coates moves on to discussing the rise in book bans, censorship, and other ills insidiously making their way through classrooms and legislatures in the United States (as well as Canada), including his own personal connection thereto. He deftly weaves in and out of his personal narrative while still offering a wider perspective. At one point, he says:

Politics is the art of the possible, but art creates the possible of politics. A policy of welfare reform exists downstream from the myth of the welfare queen. Novels, memoirs, paintings, sculptures, statues, monuments, films, miniseries, advertisements, and journalism all order our reality.

Mmm. Yes. As an English teacher, as a book reviewer, as a media criticism podcaster … yes, I feel this so hard! I teach English to adults seeking their high school diploma; most are not “readers” in the classical tradition I have grown into. They want a diploma and the skills needed for college courses or the workplace. Yet I never stop trying to connect our English lessons to social justice, to history, to geography. I never stop sneaking in personal essays by marginalized voices or history lessons in the guise of “analyzing a text.” I say sneak, yet I am also explicit with them: I teach about storytelling, and why it is important beyond entertainment. For, as Coates says above, the stories we tell are the constraints we create for the society we can imagine.

The next essay underscores this vividly when Coates describes his visit to Palestine and Israel—mere months before the October 7 Hamas attack that initiated Israel’s most recent episode of genocide against Palestinians. While it is important, as Coates notes, that we listen to Palestinian voices on Palestine, his voice here serves an important role as interlocutor and interloper. In the US, Coates is marginalized: a Black man in white supremacist society. In Israel and Palestine, his status is more conditional. Depending on how he is read, which gate he goes through, whom he’s with, he might first be pegged as Muslim, or he might be read as an American. One interpretation gives him far more status than the other. This essay is Coates discovering and attempting to come to terms with America’s inextricable complicity in Israel’s settler colonialism—and by extension, his own complicity. He connects this to the absence of Palestinian voices from the news rooms and journalism circuits where he himself has often been the lone Black journalist.

Throughout, Coates writes with an enviable and exquisite command of language. His diction is delectable; his sentence structure second to none. Reading The Message is like floating along a river that is provoking you into deep thought. Whether or not you are well versed in the issues Coates covers here, you owe it to yourself to read this book, for it is simply beautifully written.

The Message challenges, documents, describes, decries, and clarifies. It is meditation, mea culpa, and even manifesto. It is a book unfortunately appropriate and sorely needed in the current times, with a second Trump presidency looming and the genocide in Palestine continuing seemingly unabated. With such darkness, hope sometimes feels fleeting. What can I do? What can I do? It seems trite to say that reading is resistance, but reading The Message, with its intention to spur his fellow writers into action, certainly feels like resistance. I guess what matters, of course, is where our reading and our writing goes from here, and the possible politics our art creates.