The Message

An academic friend of mine once said that only the best writers admit they were wrong and revise their past work. This book is, at its heart, a revision and an awakening in a writer who was already a wonderful and careful essayist. Ta-Nehisi Coates has beautiful prose, giving voice to Black and other marginalised people, influenced by his own US (Baltimore) lived perspective. His writing plays with ideas, a type of artistic journalism that unravels myth and connects disparate parts.

The Message comes in three sections: First, a visit to Dakar in Senegal, where he unpacks some of his ancestral baggage. Second, a trip to South Carolina where he tries to help a schoolteacher stop a ban on his and other Black authors' books. And third, a trip to Palestine, where he witnesses the apartheid system there and then revises his essay over a decade old, 'The Case for Reparations'. Each section grows on the last, reasoning why he has come to a new awakening in his own writing and why he feels it is time to revise his past perspective. It is personal and political, macro and micro.

I had some issues with 'The Case For Reparations' when I first read it a decade ago, but I also loved how it introduced me to a radical idea I had never conceived: the idea of paying back slave families the debt that was accrued through their labour. But Coates rightly highlights that this is colonial logic solving a colonial problem. Using these essay/lectures, and particularly leaning on his witness accounts of Israel and Palestine, he brilliantly revises this. Tremendous writing.

I came here off the back of that CBS interview, but was surprised to see how the book went. It's really three quite separate essays, held together by a common theme of the stories we tell ourselves, and how important writing and story telling are. The third essay has obviously attracted the most attention and, while it's definitely thought-provoking, I think it really suffers from being too short -- perhaps it should have been a book on its own? One of the principal points of the essay is that we really need more Palestinian voices in the media. The stories we're told matter as they construct our reality.