The Message

An upcoming book to be published by Penguin Random House.

Autorentext

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The renowned author of Between the World and Me journeys to three resonant sites of conflict to explore how the stories we tell—and the ones we don’t—shape our realities.

“Ta-Nehisi Coates always writes with a purpose. . . . These pilgrimages, for him, help ground his powerful writing about race.”—Associated Press

“Coates exhorts readers, including students, parents, educators, and journalists, to challenge conventional narratives that can be used to justify ethnic cleansing or camouflage racist policing. Brilliant and timely.”—Booklist (starred review)

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.

Leseprobe
I

Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world. —James Baldwin

Comrades,

In the summer of 2022, I returned to Howard University to teach writing. Given my rather middling career as a university student, I couldn’t help but feel somewhat sheepish about the honor. But it was an honor, because it was there that I met you. Our first class was in the woods—out in rural Virginia, where, with my friend the poet Eve Ewing, we spent two weeks reading, writing, and workshopping. I’ve been teaching writing in some form or capacity for almost as long as I’ve been a writer, and the only work I love more is writing itself. But with you I found the former rivaling the latter. I don’t mean to slight any other cohort of students I’ve taught in other times and places—all were talented and hardworking. But the fact is, we were drawn together by something more profound.

I guess it begins with our institution, and the fact that it was founded to combat the long shadow of slavery—a shadow that we understood had not yet retreated. This meant that we could never practice writing solely for the craft itself, but must necessarily believe our practice to be in service of that larger emancipatory mandate. This was often alluded to, if not directly stated. All of our work dealt with the kind of small particulars of being human that literature generally deals with. But when you live as we have, among a people whose humanity is ever in doubt, even the small and particular—especially the small and particular—becomes political. For you there be no real distance between writing and politics. And when I saw that in you, I saw myself.

A love of language, of course, is the root of this self. When I was barely six months old, I would crawl over to my father’s speakers when he played the Last Poets. And when the record ended, I would cry until he played it again. At five I would lay on my bed, with the Poems and Rhymes volume of the Childcraft series splayed open to “The Duel,” and all day I could not help but to murmur to myself, “The gingham dog and the calico cat / Side by side on the table sat.” I did this for no other reason than the way the words felt in my mouth and fell on my ears. Later I discovered that there were MCs—human beings seemingly born and reared for the sole purpose of matching the music of language to an MPC snare or 808 kick—and the ensuing alchemy felt as natural to me as a heartbeat:

I haunt if you want, the style I possess

I bless the child, the earth, the gods and bomb the rest

Haunt. You’ve heard me say this word a lot. It is never enough for the reader of your words to be convinced. The goal is to haunt—to have them think about your words before bed, see them manifest in their dreams, tell their partner about them the next morning, to have them grab random people on the street, shake them and say, “Have you read this yet?” That was what I felt whenever I heard Rakim spit, or for that matter the Last Poets. That was the thing that had me murmuring lines from Childcraft. This affliction was enchantment and desire. It was pleasure but also a deep need to understand the mechanics of that pleasure, the math and color behind words, and all the emotions they evoked. I imagine there are children who see a painting and cannot get the image out of their minds. I imagine they turn it over alone at night in the dark, haunted, considering and reconsidering, and a small secret ecstasy grows in them each time they do this, and, just behind this, a need to convey an ecstasy all their own. I was like that from the moment I could inscribe words into memory. And this instinct naturally linked to the world around me, because I lived in a house overflowing with language organized into books, most of them concerned with “the community,” as my mother would put it. And so it was made clear to me that words could haunt not only in form, not only in their rhythm and roundness, but in their content.

When I was seven years old, my mother purchased a copy of Sports Illustrated for me. She taught me to read before I entered school, and encouraged the practice however she could. And what more encouragement could there be than this issue of Sports Illustrated, which featured my hero, Tony Dorsett, running back for the Dallas Cowboys. This was 1983, an era of American football when running backs seemed as large as champions pulled out of Greek myth. How could a man of Earl Campbell’s might move so fast, racing past one defender and then staving in the chest of another? How could Eric Dickerson run so high, against all convention, bounding through holes in the defense, an obvious target that was never caught? These days I will occasionally watch an old clip of Roger Craig, through will alone, breaking off a forty-six-yard run against the Rams or Marcus Allen reversing field in the Super Bowl. But back then, in an unwired world, stories, words, histories—none of it could be gotten on demand. If you bore witness to such a feat—as I did with Allen—it lived in memory until the broadcast gods decided you could see it again. And so a magazine featuring the exploits of one of these heroes was not just, to me, an assembly of words and stories. It was a treasure.

Because I really did believe that Tony Dorsett was magic. He was …