Coates starts us off with a quote and explains that a writer’s words leave you with an impression, haunts you, giving you something to think about, talk about and share with others. He tells us about his beginnings, his family and household growing up. His mother bought him Sports Illustrated magazines – an article that struck him hard was the injury and paralysis of a gifted football player. As a child he wondered how this could happen to such a strong, skilled player. He also had many other questions about this story; some he could answer, but others he had to research and couldn’t answer until years later. He then realized all stories don’t have happy endings and violence became a reality – it was a part of life, and it was all around him – violence on the playing field, in his neighborhood and violence in society-at-large. Coates connects the emotional, mental and physical dots of how he evolved as a writer – very captivating and interesting.
Coates then shares his trip to Africa – Dakar, Senegal. This is his first trip to the continent. He says it was like coming home to see distant relatives that were separated by centuries. While there he valued his alone time so he could cope with the feeling of traveling with ghosts. It took him a while to deal with the past before he could actually enjoy where he was in the present. This section was particularly moving. Those that are descended from stolen generations of Africans should definitely give this section a read.
He moves on to education. As a child, he found it hard to focus in the classroom setting and questions whether this education model of confinement, filling one with information to repeat as a mark of scholarship is the best. Does this model enhance or inhibit creativity? If it is the intention of the State that provides education to stifle creativity and to serve State interests – the government has no interest in revealing truths of the world or seeing it transform. If left alone to this system, Coates may not have become a writer. Those that question or upset the State order are set upon, sanctioned. Coates explains his works and many others have been removed from libraries and school curriculums. He describes what happened when he attended a School Board meeting in Chaplin, South Carolina to support an English teacher.
The author also visits Israel and its occupied territories – Palestine. He sees the Holocaust Remembrance Center’s Book of Names, walks The Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations to the Holocaust History Museum. The formation of Israel was partly redemption after the Holocaust, its justification for existence. While in this place he couldn’t overlook the presence of armed Israeli soldiers on-guard. Coates on this trip at the invitation of the Palestinian Festival of Literature, at this point knew well that soldiers were a normal presence. He experienced going through checkpoints and being stopped and questioned by soldiers in East Jerusalem, being made aware that no Palestinian is equal to any Jewish person. He saw the similarities in contradictions of the two states of Israel and the United States. Both claim to be democracies while abusing, discriminating and separating certain groups, justifying it by depicting and reducing these groups to being inferior also using negative imagery declaring them not worthy of equality.
Coates also met with members of a group called Breaking Silence, former IDF soldiers against the Israeli occupation – the occupation is complete and constant – drones, observation towers, checkpoints, home invasions, arrests, surveillance via intelligence files, sectioning and walling off of communities. Coates remarks that these Breaking Silence members he spent time with “were raised under the story that Jewish people were victims. But they were confronted with an incredible truth – that there was no ultimate victim, that victims and victimizers were ever flowing.” Coates continually examines throughout the book the differences between the stories we tell and the reality, the facts on the ground. Excellent reading. I learned quite a lot about the history and present-day dynamics compared to the narrative we are constantly fed.
Coates writes that ‘censorship is not about him or any other writer today, but about writers of the future – the boundaries of their imagination, angles of their thinking, depths of their questions.’ The point I got from reading is that artistic expression is important, whether it be written form or otherwise. Expressing yourself is important. People’s expression should not be censored, and they should be allowed to tell their story. No one else – a visitor, a colleague, and certainly not one’s oppressor – can relay your specific point of view. The message and the messenger matters. I hope you will give The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates a read. It was just excellent!