Book of the Week: THE MESSAGE by Ta-Nehisi Coates
A decade ago Ta-Nehisi Coates won the National Book Award with the powerful and profound Between the World and Me. Now he steps outside of American history to confront nationalism, what we think of as truth, and the power of story-telling. The Message, started as a letter to his students on writing, in the style of George Orwell’s essay ‘Politics and English Language’, but soon become something deeper and more personal. Coates uses his personal experiences; his relationships with his parents, his travels to Senegal to connect with his ancestry, his connection with a school teacher in South Carolina to counter the banning of books (his included), and a visit to Palestine in 2023 which broke assumptions he held; to grapple with ideas about the power of stories and how that shapes our concept of reality. The beauty of Coates’s thinking and writing lies in his ability to write for the reader, as he says, ‘to put blood on the page’. He does not seek popularity nor to adhere to prescribed notions, nor does he seek to explain all aspects of a people’s history, making this book, The Message, tightly focused on the addressing, and challenging, concepts of structures, and the ways in which structures dictate the stories we believe and keep power in the hands of oppressors. Written at a dramatic moment in global life, this work eloquently expresses the need to interrogate our myths and liberate our truths.
“Brilliant and timely . . . Coates presents three blazing essays on race, moral complicity, and a storyteller's responsibility to the truth. . . . Coates exhorts readers, including students, parents, educators, and journalists, to challenge conventional narratives that can be used to justify ethnic cleansing or camouflage racist policing.” —Booklist (starred review)
”Ever since his Baldwin-inflected Between the World and Me, Coates has been known for his incisive (and sometimes uncomfortable) cultural and political commentary. Here he journeys from West Africa to the American South to Palestine to examine how the stories we tell can fail us, and to argue that only the truth can bring justice.” —The Boston Globe
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