The Message

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.

This is a controversial book because of its final essay, but when you take the book as a whole you realize that it is more than just about politics, but instead about the way narrative and storytelling shapes the world around us. Coates’ writing is mesmerizing as usual, and there is an incredible lucidity to his arguments. This book is a deft narrative about the power of narrative.

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.

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!