The epigraph that Ta-Nehishi Coates chose to introduce The Message, his latest collection of linked essays, is a perfectly apt reflection of the writer as provocateur and didactic secular missionary. It’s a passage from George Orwell’s “Why I Write,” a 1948 reflection whose title identifies its contents. Orwell (real name Eric Blair) is best known as the author of Animal Farm and 1984, both benchmarks of political allegories and speculative fiction. In “Why I Write,” Orwell’s reflections perfectly mirror where Coates obviously sees himself at this point in his life and career:
“In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.”
These are strong words from Orwell, who would live only two more years and slip this mortal coil with a reputation that would only grow in the generations that followed. What are we to make of the pamphleteer? How are we to read the agitprop essayist in 2024? Ta-Naheshi Coates certainly has spent time considering this question, and in his new collection The Message he continues the epistolary writing voice that made 2015’s Between The World and Me so compelling. Like that book, The Message is a letter to a particular audience. In this case it’s his students at Howard University. Coates had written Between The World and Me a book-length letter to his young son, influenced by James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, a 1963 essay collection (two long essays), one of which, “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation,” speaks as strongly to the despair of its time as it does now.
The release of any Ta-Naheshi Coates book or stand-alone essay (usually in The Atlantic) is not always cause for celebration. For every reader who might see Coates as this generation’s James Baldwin, there are just as many willing and ready to summarily excoriate him. Coates faces an avalanche of criticism from leftist friends upon the book’s October 1st release date. He was “comically ill-equipped to talk about Israel and its conflicts…” (The Free Beacon.) His appearance on CBS Morning, usually a bastion of non-problematic soft news/advice/occasional reporting, was strangely hostile and the three interviewers questioning him felt more like an interrogation than an exchange of ideas. Coates found a more receptive audience on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Late Show With Stephen Colbert, but the damage seemed to have been done. Once the darling of leftist progressive thinkers and fans of the longform essay, Ta-Nehishi Coates was now an “anti-Semite,” dangerous reactionary. In short, he’d gone to the other side.
This was the problem with initial coverage of The Message and the difficulty as a whole a discerning reader faces when separating identity politics from objectively strong and meaningful reporting. The stigma of not toeing the party line, whatever that might be, overwhelmed and prevented many initial readers from acknowledging that The Message is a masterful, important collection. It doesn’t matter that Coates comes with the baggage of critical acclaim (National Book Award Winner) or that he’s also written quite effectively as a graphic novelist in the Marvel Universe ( Black Panther and Captain America.) Coates had failed to fully and with absolutely no reservations support the State of Israel and its relationship with the Palestinian people.
The Message is a collection of journeys. Coates uses his reflections about experiences in Dakar, Senegal, Baltimore, Columbia South Carolina, and Palestine’s West Bank to reflect on white supremacy, colonialism, imperialism, and the very essence of being a black writer in America today. While he was reportedly shocked at the initial resistance and at times antagonism he faced when making the rounds to discuss his book, he most certainly could (and should) have seen it coming.
The most controversial essay. “The Gigantic Dream,” is the fourth and largest piece in the book, comprising almost exactly half of The Message as a whole. While controversy and viral gotcha interviews make for emotional viewing, they do a grave disservice to the writer’s strength. Coates is in absolute control through every step of the essay’s 100 plus pages. He was there with other writers, invited by the Palestine Festival of Literature, observing and connecting and concluding in no uncertain terms:
“For as sure as my ancestors were born into a country where none of them was the equal of any white man, Israel was revealing itself to be a country where no Palestinian is ever the equal of any Jewish person anywhere.”
Later, when Coates concludes that “…comprehension of ‘conflict’ was a matter of knowledge, not morality,” the reader can clearly see the line being crossed. “The personal is political” might have had its origins as a feminist rallying cry in Carol Hanisch’s 1969 essay, but Coates comfortably takes it as his own. It’s unlikely that any writer examining internecine conflicts in Israel will come out unscathed. You are either a Zionist or a fervent anti-Semite. Nothing exists in the in between. Coates saw the Palestinian cause paralleled with civil rights in the United States, from Reconstruction through George Floyd. “When you’re erased from the argument and purged from the narrative,” he writes, “you don’t exist.”
Coates spares nothing in his evocation of Jewish supremacists like Meher Kahane and Baruch Goldstein, reflecting upon visiting their memorials that “I was standing in a park that rested in a settlement sanctioned and subsidized by the state that claims to denounce him.” As he travels, observes, and listens to all voices during his nearly two weeks in Israel, Coates expresses feelings beyond simple reportage:
“I felt a mix of astonishment, betrayal, and anger…for my own ignorance…betrayal for the way they [my colleagues in journalism] reported…[how] they’d laundered open discrimination, for the voices they’d erased. And the anger was for my own past…Rosewood, Tulsa…”
It’s in this fashion that Coates writes, like a scorched earth soldier leaving no open space unscathed. Blood is on all hands, but Coates could not ignore that “…the prime purpose of any ‘settler organization’ was to push Palestinians out and move Jewish Israelis in.” Coates argues throughout that he wants to let the living speak for themselves, that the voices of the marginalized and disenfranchised are the common thread running through his land and the land of Palestine.
If there’s a criticism of The Message, and it’s minor, it’s that “The Gigantic Dream” overwhelms the otherwise hopeful and poetic tone of the other collections. It’s a pebble stuck in your shoe, a splinter on the palm of your hand. Had it been published separately, perhaps as a pamphlet in the old days of political pamphleteers like Jonathan Swift, the other essays would have gotten equal attention. He starts with “Journalism Is Not A Luxury,” in which he addresses his Howard University students that to draw the map of writing, “…to pull us into the wilderness, you cannot merely stand on the edge. You have to walk the land.” In the next essay, “On Pharaohs,” he mixes evocations of his childhood with activist and intellectual parents with reporting on disreputable 19th century researchers like Josiah Nott and Samuel Train Dutton, whose fervent drive to erase African people from lands like Egypt would have damaging repercussions for generations to come. Once Coates reaches Dakar, in Africa, he reflects that “I felt as if I had somehow beaten history itself.”
Of course, we never beat history. It simply laps back onto us like waves on a beach. It comes in strong, bashes our senses, then retreats to fight another day. It comes back even stronger if we fail to remember its initial power or put the lessons into context. Perhaps the bottom line of The Message, (a title that evokes the eponymously titled 1982 Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five song, whose opening reminds us “It’s like a jungle out there/sometimes I wonder how I keep from going under,” can be understood in a line from “Bearing the Flaming Cross,” which recounts the censoring of Between the World and Me :
“History is not inert but contains within it a story that implicates or justifies political order.”
As we enter the unknown and still unclear political world of 2025, this is a lesson we should all remember.
