Those concerned with the world would likely take Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me as an important work about racism in the United States. I could only believe the book’s importance would only rise further as the white identity politics entrenches itself in the western world. Coates there reveals the societal hypocrisy that exists in the United States with regards to racism vis-à-vis his experience as a black person. While the subject of Between the World and Me is grim, the language used by Coates across all its pages is beautiful.
When The Message came out in October this year, I was quick to pick it up. The controversy surrounding the book made me all the more curious about Coates’s latest work. That controversy involved him equating Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as apartheid. He had visited Israel and Palestine (and a few other places) and the book was published as Israel continue to commit horrendous killing not just in Palestine but also in Lebanon, while proceeding with its illegal land grabbing exercise in the West Bank.
Coates’s latest is beautifully written, no doubt, but equating Israel’s behavior to apartheid is hardly a new groundbreaking point. That message and other criticisms he lobs in Israel’s directions are only controversial because pro-Israel readers (and non-readers) consider any criticism of Israel as racism/antisemitism. To the wider world, there is no controversy but only a nod to Coates signifying the lack of moral authority Israel has in order to make such accusation.
Israel is not the only subject of the book. He speaks of his visit to Senegal to explore the history of slavery in the US and his own roots. It is here I think where the language is at its smoothest, hence my favorite section of the book.
In both parts of the book, the seeds are quite clearly the points on racism discussed earlier in Between the World and Me. Realizing this, I feel The Message is an extension of Between the World and Me. The former is expands the reality perceived by Coates in his earlier work with the wider world in mind.
But the act of expanding older points does not make The Message unimportant. Sometimes, profoundness of points made is not the point itself. Sometimes, the point is the realization of something had to be done. In justifying writing The Message, Coates writes:
…The figure is you, the writer, an idea in hand, notes scribbled on loose-leaf, maybe an early draft of an outline. But to write, to draw that map, to pull us into the wilderness, you cannot merely stand at the edge. You have to walk the land. You have to see the elevation for yourself, the color of the soil. You have to discover the ravine is really a valley and that the stream is in fact a river winding south from a glacier in the mountains. You can’t “logic” your way through it or retreat to your innate genius. A belief in genius is a large part of what plagues us, and I have found that people widely praised for power of their intellect are as likely to illuminate as they are to confound. “Genius” may or may not help a writer whose job is, above all else, to clarify.
And so he traveled and wrote.
