The Message - Gatti Ninja

eBook, 256 pages

English language

Published 2024 by One World.

ISBN:: 978-0-593-23039-8
OCLC Number:: 1453408759

Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell’s classic “Politics and the English Language,” but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities.

In the first of the book’s three intertwining essays, Coates, on his first trip to Africa, finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind. Then he takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on his own book’s banning, but also explores the larger backlash to the nation’s recent reckoning with history and the deeply rooted American mythology so visible in that city—a capital of the Confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares. Finally, in the book’s longest section, Coates travels to Palestine, where he …

Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell’s classic “Politics and the English Language,” but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities.

In the first of the book’s three intertwining essays, Coates, on his first trip to Africa, finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind. Then he takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on his own book’s banning, but also explores the larger backlash to the nation’s recent reckoning with history and the deeply rooted American mythology so visible in that city—a capital of the Confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares. Finally, in the book’s longest section, Coates travels to Palestine, where he sees with devastating clarity how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives, and the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground.

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths. Source: penguinrandomhouse.com

2 editions

Fionnáin reviewed The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Perfect Revisionism

5 stars

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 …

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.

Eric reviewed The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Message

4 stars

First time reading Coates--eager to read more. Last 1/3 or 1/2 of the book about his visit to Palestine. Admirable reflection on his evolving views from writing The Case for Reparations to now.