I hadn’t read any of Coates’s books since Between the World and Me, but I heard his interview with Trevor Noah, and knew I had to read his newest book, The Message, in part because the description of his visit to Palestine was controversial.
Disclaimer: I recognize that Coates is only telling a simplified version of the situation in Palestine based on his own experience. The American Jewish Committee wrote a rebuttal here, and Ezra Klein takes Coates to task in his podcast, saying “one of the things you didn’t reckon with here, you reckon a lot with Israeli Jewish violence towards Palestinians and not with Palestinian violence towards Israelis or Jews, going all the way back.” They have a pretty contentious discussion about morality and complexity and politics if you want to read the transcript. Coates justifies his essay by saying that “I felt lied to by my craft. I felt lied to by major media organizations.” as the Palestinian perspective is rarely presented to American audiences.
As an author and a teacher of writing, Coates believes that stories can change the world. A few representative quotes:
- “this tradition of writing, of drawing out a common humanity, is indispensable to our future, if only because what must be cultivated and cared for must first be seen.”
- “words are powerful, but more so when organized to tell stories. And stories, because of their power, demanded rigorous reading, interpretation, and investigation.”
- “The systems we oppose are systems of oppression, and thus inherently systems of cowardice. They work best in the dark, their essence tucked away and unexamined…”
- “History is not inert but contains within it a story that implicates or justifies political order. … Some of us see the lack of policy change and wonder if the movement itself was futile. But policy change is an end point, not an origin. The cradle of material change is in our imagination and ideas. … we have the burden of crafting new language and stories that allow people to imagine that new policies are possible.”
But with that power comes responsibility, and what I found so powerful about the essays in this book is the way Coates takes personal responsibility for what he witnesses. He wrestles with his own complicity in amplifying or repeating stories he had been told rather than experiencing reality directly.
His first journey is to Senegal, which he had imagined as his homeland, as a place where Africans reigned supreme rather than being treated as second-class citizens as they were in America. He had told himself so many stories as a child about Africa, though, that when he actually got there, he was lost in his own memories and legends: “I had come to see a part of Africa, but not Africans. Indeed, almost every encounter I had with actual people found me seeking out the solace of my own reflection.” He was struck by the beauty of the Senegalese people with their deep-black skin, and was disappointed to find they aspired to a more American mixed-race look. He dreamed of being Senegalese, and they dreamed of being American, because they each had stories about the other that were more attractive than their lived reality. Our dreams often do not survive contact with the actual reality; most people prefer to hold onto their dreams, so I appreciate how Coates confronted the reality.
His second journey is to South Carolina to participate in a discussion where a school board wanted to ban Between the World and Me. In that essay, he wrestles with why people want to ban books. Rather than lecture the reader, he situates the control of access to stories within the larger context of the relationship between art (writing) and politics:
Politics is the art of the possible, but art creates the possible of politics. A policy of welfare reform exists downstream from the myth of the welfare queen. Novels, memoirs, paintings, sculptures, statues, monuments, films, miniseries, advertisements, and journalism all order our reality. Jim Crow segregation – with its signage and cap-doffing rituals – was both policy and a kind of public theater. The arts tell us what is possible and what is not, because, among other things, they tell us who is human and who is not.
Each piece of writing sharing somebody’s experience strikes a blow for a different reality. Those who seek to ban books are fighting a battle to preserve their reality by denying others the opportunity to experience a challenge to it. Coates positions himself in that battle by saying “We needed more writers, and I had a responsibility to help them as a reader, to be an active audience for the stories they wanted to tell, or as a teacher, so that they could learn to tell them better, to reach deeper into their own truth in the same way that brought me euphoria, and reach into the hearts of readers and set them on fire.” When we enable more people to tell their stories, we experience their humanity and we expand our sense of who is “us”.
Which leads us to the most controversial section of the book, when Coates goes to Palestine in May of 2023 (pre-October 7th) and shares his experiences. As noted above, many in America found this section threatening and offensive. I appreciated his exploration of his growing unease with the story he knew of the Jews, one where they had been the victims of the Holocaust, after which the world recognized the atrocity and created Israel as a safe homeland for them. He had repeated that story, using German reparations to Israel as a precedent for America to follow in his career-making essay The Case for Reparations.
But he kept hearing a different story, one where the Israeli Jews were not as pure-hearted and noble as that story would indicate; “I had then a vague notion of Israel as a country that was doing something deeply unfair to the Palestinian people, though I was not clear on exactly what.” So when he got the chance to go to Palestine, he went as a journalist to learn and share the stories that were untold and unseen in America. Unsurprisingly, he filtered what he saw through his own experience of being Black in America, treated as a second-class citizen, and separated from white Americans in the interest of safety (read The Case for Reparations for his account of how this racial separation was accomplished in America).
Coates shares that Palestinians are similarly treated as second-class citizens, unable to live where they want, unable to travel freely without being harassed or detained by security forces to ensure safety. Coates compares the Palestinian experience in Israel to the experience of black Africans under apartheid in South Africa. Even Coates was stopped by a soldier at a checkpoint, who wouldn’t let him through until he stated his religion (neither he nor his parents were believers, but when he said his grandparents were Christian, the soldier let him through).
Coates implies that the Israelis are repeating the story of power and dehumanization they had experienced as victims, but with the roles reversed. Rather than learn from their experience that treating anybody as less-than-human is unacceptable, they believe that their safety requires having the power to enforce their reality on others. And they are supported in that belief by America, which has a similar story that safety requires keeping people who look different under control.
Coates is a bit of a moral absolutist, believing that treating people as less than human is unacceptable no matter what. One atrocity doesn’t justify another in his view, so while he condemns Hamas and the horrible acts of October 7th, he also condemns what the Israelis have done in response. Humans deserve to be treated humanely, which is hard to argue with.
I appreciate that he doesn’t distance himself from the realization that he is complicit in what Israel is doing because he is an American, whose government supports these policies. He was also complicit in sharing Israel’s story in his essay on reparations. This essay is his attempt at a personal sort of reparations, to tell the story of Palestinians and humanize their experience in Israel. And he feels there is more to do:
Palestine is not my home. I see that land, its peoples, and its struggles through a kind of translation — through analogy and the haze of my own experience — and that is not enough. 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.
This book is an expression of Coates’s belief in the power of writing and of telling different stories, and an exploration of how his own work as a writer affects the world. I appreciate his courage in taking responsibility; when he saw something that didn’t align with what he believed, he chose to explore and learn more to see what he was missing. I highly recommend these essays as a way to similarly challenge one’s own beliefs by reading somebody else’s stories and experiencing their humanity.
