Ta-Nehisi Coates visits Senegal, South Carolina and the Middle East for ‘The Message’

Ta-Nehisi Coates always writes with a purpose, so calling his latest collection ‘The Message’ is nothing if not on-brand. But what is the actual message? The book consists of three pieces of nonfiction and is part memoir, part travelogue, and part writing primer. It covers his recent trips to Dakar, Senegal; Columbia, South Carolina; and several cities and towns in the Middle East.

He writes in the introduction that the essays fulfill a promise to a Howard University writing class he taught in 2022: “I bring my late assignment… I have addressed these notes directly to you, although I must confess that I think of young writers everywhere . whose job is nothing less than doing their part to save the world.”

Coates offers excerpts from his biography in each essay, but always returns to lessons for writers, as in this reflection on his very first visit to Africa: “There are dimensions to your words – rhythm, content, form, feeling… The accretions of the imperfect, uncomfortable life must be seen and felt in such a way that the space in your mind, gray, automatic and square, fills with angles, colors and curves.” These pilgrimages help inform his powerful writings on race. As he reflects on his visit to Gorée Island, the place where tens of millions of Africans left for a lifetime of slavery, he admits that he is “welling up, grieving for something, gripped by a feeling that I still feel, even as I write this, struggling to name it.”

The second essay examines racism closer to home, as Coates travels to a South Carolina town where the school board considered banning his 2015 book “Between the World and Me” because students in an Advanced Placement English class were partially “ashamed to be Caucasian” when they read it. Supporters of the teacher manage to show up with enough force to circumvent the ban, but Coates sees that as the power of the story. A middle-aged white teacher in Chapin, South Carolina, read his book—a letter to his teenage son about the realities of being black in the United States—and decided to use it as an example of how to write a persuasive essay. “We have lived for so long under a class of people who ruled American culture with a flaming cross that we often lose track of the importance of being governed,” Coates writes.

The final and longest essay covers a ten-day trip that Coates makes to the Middle East. Like his trip to Senegal, it is his first time in the region, and the experience is truly eye-opening. “Of all the worlds I have ever explored, I think none shone so brightly, so intensely, so directly as Palestine.” That’s because everywhere he looks he sees familiar signs of submission. The parallels between being black in America and being Palestinian in the Middle East are countless. “The state had one message to the Palestinians within its borders… ‘You really would be better off somewhere else,’” Coates writes. But while it is a message that Coates clearly conveys in his essay, he realizes that it is not his story to tell. “If we really want to see the Palestinians, it will be through stories woven by their own hands – not by their plunderers, not even by their comrades.”

___

AP Book Reviews: https://apnews.com/hub/book-reviews