The Message
Ratings27
Average rating4.5
15
Ratings27
Average rating4.5
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.
Reviews with the most likes.
I always love reading anything Ta-Nehisi Coates writes. This covers his travels to Dakar and Palestine as well as his own thoughts that stem from those experiences. He compares the Jim Crow-era South to current Palestine and the Apartheid state. Another book that I feel can add to this is Caste by Isabel Wilkerson so I’d also recommend that if you’re interested.
This book is an easy endorsement, and the audiobook is read by Coates himself so that’s fun.
4/5 - Another banger from T. Coates. He really has a way with words.
Literature is anguish.
It is also the fourth wall of a comic panel. It is also the sky beyond the roof, a ship deck in a storm. It is a hammer that must put a blow right into our self-assurance. And, the Ta-Nehisi Coates I have read do just that.
About a year back, I met a middle-aged person. The now ongoing Palestine conflict has just started back then. That person believed that whatever was happening to civilian Palestinians was happening for good. He was an Islamophobe of particular brutality.
I know he was bullied for being an atheist in a Muslim-majority country; I know drug abuse also contributed to this bitterness. But, mostly, it was propaganda. It was a lack of critical thinking. It was the lack of knowledge— of human cruelty that found its outlet in power. Power makes everyone an oppressor without failure.
Ta-Nehisi Coates made a point of that. I can try, too. But, I know very well, being a minority in many axes myself, no one will understand, except the oppressed.
In the end, this book saddened me. Because I know humanity is beyond saving.
Originally posted at hermitage.utsob.me.
Read for collective liberation book club. Beautiful & thought-provoking. I am most struck by Coates' humility. He realized (through feedback) after "The Case for Reparations" how much he still had to learn about Palestine, and then wrote a book as his apology-through-education. I do wish there was a little more in the book about the time between this first feedback and the trip to Palestine he discusses, but you can't have everything!
