Ta-Nehisi Coates speaks at the Convocation Center on Xavier University’s campus in New Orleans, Louisiana, November 15, 2024 (Sipa USA/Alamy Stock Photo).

When Ta-Nehisi Coates spoke about his new book, The Message, in his hometown of Baltimore, six hundred people packed into the public library to hear him—and to give him a standing ovation. At Howard University where he teaches, seven hundred audience members received free copies of his book. And in Harlem, at the storied Apollo Theater, Coates spoke about The Message with MSNBC host Ayman Mohyeldin in front of more than 1,500 people. Amsterdam News columnist Herb Boyd mused, “The Apollo itself must have swooned with memories of James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and the Motown days when the lines wrapped around the block.”

Coates is not just a celebrated author. He is the superstar of Black writing today. Dubbed the heir to James Baldwin by Toni Morrison, Coates’s career took off during the Obama presidency, when he worked as a staff writer at the Atlantic. It exploded with the publication of his 2014 essay “The Case for Reparations,” and, the next year, Between the World and Me, which was the object of countless antiracist book clubs but was also deeply resonant with many Black Americans. Before the release of The Message, Coates had been out of the spotlight for nearly a decade, writing comic books, Hollywood scripts, and a warmly if quietly received novel.

When Mohyeldin began his interview at the Apollo, he asked the question that was on the minds of many—the same question that 27 million social-media viewers had watched a confrontational CBS morning-show host ask Coates: “Why did you leave out so much? Don’t you believe Israel has a right to exist? You write a book that delegitimizes the pillar of Israel. What is the role of the Palestinians in their own oppression?”

The Message presents itself as a book about writing: it is addressed to Coates’s students at Howard. Coates told a New York Times interviewer, “I really wanted to write a craft book. I wanted to include things you should do in sentences, things you should not do, why things work, why things don’t work.” In a sense, the book teaches by showing: it consists of three essays about Coates’s travels; he repeatedly steps out of the narrative to reflect on the role of writing and the vocation of the writer. The last of these essays, which fills more than half of the book, recounts ten days Coates spent in Palestine and Israel.

Wrenching meditations on the experience of being a Black American brought Coates fame, and in the Palestinians he meets, Coates finds another people who have endured horrific suffering and whose stories have often been overlooked. He makes these connections explicit: Palestine is the first place he has been where he encounters state-sanctioned segregation and violence of the kind his ancestors endured, the kind that led Coates’s father to take up arms with the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. The Message uses the same formula that brought Coates acclaim in his writing for the Atlantic: letting his curiosity lead him into scholarship on a topic and into conversations with those who have firsthand knowledge of it, then weaving together these two sources in stylized prose.

Coates talked to a former Israeli soldier who describes how the Israeli military establishes operating bases by taking over the houses of Palestinians they judge to be the least militant and so the least likely to resist, handcuffing fathers and terrifying their wives and children. Coates recounts being stopped by an Israeli soldier who asks him about his religion and is unsatisfied when Coates says he is an atheist, and that his father is an atheist. Only when Coates acknowledges that his grandparents were Christian does the soldier allow him to pass. And Coates describes a tour he took of an archaeological theme park that constructed a mythology to justify Israeli occupation, complete with “a 3D film that featured a man dressed in the manner of Indiana Jones narrating an animated reenactment of the conquest of the City of Jerusalem by David’s army.” Coates holds these stories together with general information about Palestine: descriptions of the West Bank, which is nominally governed by the Palestinian Authority; quotes from Israel’s founders contrasting their European purity with the dirty, degraded Arabs; and a summary of the direct connections between the South African and Israeli armies and ideologies.

On the one hand, Coates makes a straightforward political point, that the indignation he felt in Palestine at what he deems Israeli apartheid is based on the facts and is something we all ought to feel. On the other hand, Coates is grappling with moral complexity. He realizes that his own confident denunciations of injustice against Black Americans and his embrace of the richness of Black life sound eerily similar to the rhetoric of early Zionists, who condemned antisemitism and imagined a homeland where the Jews could flourish. Early in The Message, Coates recalls a trip to Senegal, on a vexed quest to trace the origins of his people and their suffering. He does not find vindication or redemption in Africa, but grappling with the conflicted emotions the trip elicits is, in his telling, necessary work. And it is work that advances through writing. When writing is censored or constrained, we know politics has turned away from justice. Coates ponders this dynamic in another early section of The Message, when he visits educators who are fighting to be able to teach Between the World and Me. Coates argues that writing about Palestine is also constrained, with few major media outlets featuring Palestinian voices, and with the Israeli perspective distorted by fantasy and nostalgia.

 

Predictably, Israel’s defenders have pounced on Coates’s book. In the newspaper Haaretz, writer Megan Peck Shub lamented, “The simplistic dynamic of oppressor versus oppressed is an insufficient framework for understanding Israel.” In the Jerusalem Post, Rabbi Uri Pilichowski described The Message as a “slanderous demonization of Israel.” In language uncomfortably close to the racist screeds of early Zionists that Coates quotes, Pilichowski asserts, “Choosing violence and terrorism instead of peace is the preference of savages, not civilized people”—implying, somewhat improbably, that the Israeli state has chosen peace. The millennial Black conservative Coleman Hughes, writing in the Free Press, charged Coates with conjuring a “fantasy world.”

Coates is not just a celebrated author. He is the superstar of Black writing today.

To the charge that spending only ten days in a region that has been engulfed in conflict for centuries is inadequate preparation for a book, Coates retorts: if you had spent ten days visiting the Southern states during slavery, the visceral horror you would have felt would point to moral injustice, not a need for contextualization. If you watched a video clip of a police officer killing George Floyd, you did not need to know about the complications of policing in urban environments to immediately understand that you were witnessing injustice. Coates argues that the media too often make it seem like extensive, technical knowledge of Israel-Palestine and its history is needed before moral assessment can begin.

Those whose response to The Message is not knee-jerk defensiveness will find Coates’s ruminations on the vocation and responsibilities of the writer intriguing, especially in how they speak to Coates’s own understanding of his celebrity status. His rapid rise in the media ecosystem meant that, by the time he became famous, his sense of himself was still in formation. In his previous book of nonfiction prose, We Were Eight Years in Power, Coates writes self-critically, even harshly, about the missteps he made in his vaunted essays for the Atlantic. He wrote about Bill Cosby without discussing sexual violence; he wrote about Barack Obama without discussing the violence of American empire. In a review of that book, Cornel West evinces little sympathy for Coates’s account of growing up in the spotlight. West concludes that Coates’s fawning portrayal of Obama reveals the writer’s allegiance to the powerful. For West, Coates is the ultimate pseudo-critic of our neoliberal order, turning white supremacy into something mystical and presenting resistance to it as ultimately aesthetic, with the writer cast as a superhero whose magical pen can pierce the forces of domination. A real critic would instead highlight the work of grassroots communities organizing against those forces.

With The Message, Coates is trying to respond to critics like West who charge him with political timidity. He takes a tough position, a position that he knows will cause controversy and alienate old admirers, and he defends that position strenuously. Coates has tasted the trappings of celebrity, and he is willing to risk it for the sake of truth-telling. This version of Coates’s evolution, which serves as the moral engine of The Message, sounds suspiciously like another superhero narrative. It does not substantially address West’s point, which is that real resistance requires the quotidian heroism of organizers rather than the grand but solitary aspirations of writers. Coates’s political awakening was live-streamed on the internet, on his blog at the Atlantic, and it may be that his political sensibilities are still too online. For the internet, resistance means the pithiest post, the cleverest meme. It means out-narrating the opposition.

The criticism of The Message that is surely the most painful for Coates is precisely about the quality of its prose. Writing for the Washington Post, the talented essayist Becca Rothfeld describes Coates’s book as “disjointed, heavy-handed and frequently clichéd.” The New Yorker’s Parul Sehgal, probably the most penetrating book reviewer writing today, concludes, “The Message is stitched together with haphazard reporting, and it suppurates with such self-regard that it feels composed by the very enemy of a writer who has so strenuously scorned carelessness and vague pronouncement.”

Coates has developed a singular prose style, and not all its peculiarities are good ones. Too often, he tells you what he is feeling rather than showing you. Many of his sentences come off as affected in a way that is, at its worst, cringe-inducing. For instance, after telling us that his ancestors live through his words, and that he reads the narratives of the enslaved “aloud like an incantation” before he begins to write, Coates pronounces, “I feel a portion of what they felt—a portion of their love, rage, hope, despair—and that portion is the power I try to convey in my own writing. I am not alone. I am in a tradition.”

The problem is that Coates is essentially a middle-brow writer who imagines himself as a high-brow writer. He sees imitating James Baldwin—the sweeping pronouncements, the piercing emotional nouns, the multiplying clauses, the second-person singular—as the path to high-brow success. For a moment, it was: what the United States needed in 2015 was some imitation Baldwin, and Coates won praise from all corners of the literary establishment. Ten years on, that style no longer matches the moment; what was rousing then now sounds cloying.

There is nothing wrong with being a middle-brow writer; to use a Gen Z expression, it does not make one “mid.” Yet The Message is a book about writing, a book about the writer as superhero. Coates never makes clear what kind of writer he has in mind. Is this the journalist? The blogger or Instagrammer? The essayist? The novelist? The author of Oprah’s book-club selections or experimental poetry? Each of these is a distinctive vocation, with distinctive responsibilities. Coates is clearer about what he means by bad writing: it is incurious and ponderous, leaning on cliché and abstraction. In other words, it is the writing of the internet’s comments sections. As a blogger, Coates’s prose towered above that of his commenters, but that is a mighty low standard for excellence. It is in fact a standard for mere competence.

Those whose response to The Message is not knee-jerk defensiveness will find Coates’s ruminations on the vocation and responsibilities of the writer intriguing.

 

In the final pages of The Message, Coates urges readers to listen to Palestinians themselves. Coates felt this need, and he spent time with a Palestinian family in Chicago, his views shifting as he listened to their stories of violence, dispossession, and resilience. “If Palestinians are to be truly seen, it will be through stories woven by their own hands—not by their plunderers, not even by their comrades.”

While there surely is a need to expand the stories we hear, Coates flattens “story” in the same way he flattens “writer”—and both lean on a rather simplistic account of identity. Ignored by Coates but essential to the vocation of writer, storyteller, and reader is judgment: sorting the excellent from the middling from the vapid, the fascinating from the familiar, the essential from the trivial. Part of the work of identity consists in making such judgments about self and world, pursuing the who of identity rather than the what.

In short, the fact of Palestinian origin or Black American origin does not guarantee wise stories. I had two Palestinian-American classmates in college, both from wealthy families. Neither of them spoke of their Palestinian identities at the time, and neither joined campus Palestine-solidarity activism. One became a corporate lawyer, the other a professional Palestinian influencer. I approach the stories of both with some skepticism, even as I am deeply sympathetic with the Palestinian cause.

One week before The Message was published, the young British-Palestinian novelist Isabella Hammad published Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative. In impeccable prose, Hammad urges writers not just to promote recognition but “to perceive clearly what on some level you have known all along, but that perhaps you did not want to know.” Hammad faults her own past writing for leaning too heavily on the mechanism of recognition, which has a history dating back to Oedipus and continues to be a staple not only of literature but of soap operas—the moment when a character realizes one person is actually someone else. Instead of recognition, Hammad urges writers to aspire toward epiphany, which she takes to mean “something appearing beyond the horizon, beyond the field of vision that your subject position allows, with the revelation of threat and light.” For Hammad, epiphany is a version of recognition that refuses redemption, that forces the reader into “a troubling encounter with limitation or wrongness.”

Recognizing the Stranger is motivated by a peculiar phenomenon that Hammad witnesses among non-Palestinian writers who visit Palestine. In a flash, these visitors’ perception of Palestine transforms: once they thought it was complex, morally ambivalent; now they recognize Israeli apartheid as a moral abomination. Hammad’s book is a meditation on the appeal of that narrative structure and its limitations. “The Palestinian struggle has gone on so long now that it is easy to feel disillusioned with the scene of recognition as a site of radical change, or indeed as a turning point at all.” Hammad does not name Coates, but Hammad and Coates spent a week together in Palestine as part of the same writers group just before they wrote their books. Hammad poses a pointed question to Coates: What sort of prose can produce an epiphany? Coates does not answer.

The Message
Ta-Nehisi Coates
One World
$30 | 256 pp.

Vincent Lloyd is professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University. His most recent book is Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination (Yale University Press).

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