Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Message hits too close to the bone

A new book has ruffled feathers by reminding America of its full complicity in the ongoing massacre in Palestine.

Outgoing US President Joe Biden with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in New York, on September 20, 2023. | Photo Credit: Susan Walsh/AP

As demonstrated by Between the World and Me, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2015 and is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the US today, Ta-Nehisi Coates has an extraordinary ability to use a personal narrative to make vital and complex political points. This enables him to get across to readers in a country—and an Americanised world—where the political has mostly been reduced to the private and the personal.

This fascinating ability is evident in his new book, The Message, too, and it is used to make some powerful points once again. However, unlike in his other books, where the points he makes relate directly to the experience of being African-American, the largest and most important section of this book is about Palestine. This is what drew my attention.

The Message

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

OneWorld

Pages: 235

Price: US$30

The Message contains three long “travel” essays, presaged by a short introduction, “Journalism is not a Luxury”, addressed to a class of creative writing that Coates taught at Howard University—the primary university of African-American consciousness. The first essay, “On Pharoahs”, starts with the story of white historians trying to prove throughout the 18th and 19th centuries that the ruling and affluent classes of Ancient Egypt were  not  black or that they employed “blacks” only as slaves.

Coates’s intervention is interspersed with notes on his own upbringing—struggling against the burden of white disdain, embodied also in the educational system—and his first visit to Africa, to Dakar in Senegal. It is a story that Coates has told in other books too, but here it is recounted primarily to ask why “people who have already attained a position of power through violence invest so much time in justifying their plunder with words.” It is a question that relates to the other two essays.

The Message contains three long “travel” essays, presaged by a short introduction, “Journalism is not a Luxury”. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

In the next essay, “Bearing the Flaming Cross”, Coates moves to a small town in South Carolina. This is in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s Executive Order 13950—rescinded by Joe Biden, but imitated by many state legislatures—which prohibited the “divisive concepts” that provoked in students “discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race and sex.” This was, as we Indians will recognise, only a slightly less sweeping version of our own increasing insistence on “hurt sentiments”, and it was used to ban books that were critical of racism, sexism, etc.

Coates goes to a small town, where a local (white) teacher is being prevented from teaching Between the World and Me, and, despite justifiable apprehensions about walking into a den of fanatics, he discovers that “there were allies fighting back.” This is a kind of upbeat ending, and from here he moves to the last and longest essay, “The Gigantic Dream”, which recounts his experience of Israel and Palestine.

Blinkers off

It is this essay that has made The Message controversial in the US, though there is nothing new here for those who have been reading historical accounts of what has been unfolding in those parts of the world since 1948 (and Coates, with his usual attention to details, sticks closely to facts). What is it that made this mild, retrospective essay controversial? One answer is the US’s choice to wear Zionist blinkers across decades, the other is the genocidal war against Palestinians that the US has armed the Isreali Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to wage since 2023, following an act of terrorism by Hamas.

But, more significantly, Coates’ account of what has been happening to Palestinians since 1948, evokes ghosts that many Americans feel that they have already exorcised: racism, colonialism, segregation and apartheid. And above all, it serves as a troubling reminder that all these spectres are not rampaging across Gaza or West Bank today because of the occasional villains that Americans prefer to blame—they were and remain “state projects,” conducted with full complicity of the mainstream media.

Tabish Khair is an Indian novelist and academic who teaches in Denmark.