The Message

An academic friend of mine once said that only the best writers admit they were wrong and revise their past work. This book is, at its heart, a revision and an awakening in a writer who was already a wonderful and careful essayist. Ta-Nehisi Coates has beautiful prose, giving voice to Black and other marginalised people, influenced by his own US (Baltimore) lived perspective. His writing plays with ideas, a type of artistic journalism that unravels myth and connects disparate parts.

The Message comes in three sections: First, a visit to Dakar in Senegal, where he unpacks some of his ancestral baggage. Second, a trip to South Carolina where he tries to help a schoolteacher stop a ban on his and other Black authors' books. And third, a trip to Palestine, where he witnesses the apartheid system there and then revises his essay over a decade old, 'The Case for Reparations'. Each section grows on the last, reasoning why he has come to a new awakening in his own writing and why he feels it is time to revise his past perspective. It is personal and political, macro and micro.

I had some issues with 'The Case For Reparations' when I first read it a decade ago, but I also loved how it introduced me to a radical idea I had never conceived: the idea of paying back slave families the debt that was accrued through their labour. But Coates rightly highlights that this is colonial logic solving a colonial problem. Using these essay/lectures, and particularly leaning on his witness accounts of Israel and Palestine, he brilliantly revises this. Tremendous writing.

The tide has certainly shifted in the U.S. when it comes to the conversation around Palestine, and this book is more evidence of this. It is tempting to think that because Coates is the author, this book will somehow break through or crack open the rhetorical situation and allow things to be said that have, to date, been deemed unsayable. But I think that's a dream. Unfortunately, the shift in public conversation has tended to coincide with a ratcheting up of the killing of civilians. Those who think that rhetoric and discourse are an alternative to violence will have to contend with that fact.

"An inhuman system demands inhumans, and so it produces them in stories, editorials, newscasts, movies, and television. Editors and writers like to think that 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."