Ta-Nehisi Coates discusses latest book ‘The Message’

In his latest book, “The Message,” award-winning author Ta-Nehisi Coates writes that “novels, memoirs, paintings, sculptures, statues, monuments, films, miniseries, advertisements, and journalism all order our reality. … 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.” 

Coates’ latest book is a collection of essays about the myths we tell ourselves that are used to justify the oppression of others, both in the United States and Israel. It urges readers to consider their own perspectives, prejudices and biases related to important issues: segregation, censorship, national myths and more.

The author is no stranger to challenging the status quo with his work. One section of “The Message” focuses on an attempt to keep Coates’ work in a South Carolina school’s curriculum, while the section on Israel and the Palestinian territories led to a heated interview on CBS in September.

“The book is essentially about nationalism, and (in the South) about a particular kind of chauvinistic nationalism,” Coates said ahead of a Feb. 18 event with Seattle Arts & Lectures. “Nationalism can blind a community. It can blind people.”

In “The Message,” Coates argues that we are shaped by stories and myths that lead certain groups to believe they are better or less than others. “We are plagued by … dead stories that serve people whose aim is nothing short of a dead world,” Coates writes. Asked why such stories are pervasive, the author said, “I think it takes a lot of work to think. It is a much easier world to have these ‘perfect’ stories.”

But Coates suggests we’re now living in an era when people must question and confront their beliefs.

“We’ve had 20 years of people saying, ‘America’s fine,’” he said. “This political moment right now is the result of people not questioning fairy tales — the notion that there was something in the blood and bone of America that somehow made it invulnerable to fascism and authoritarianism.”

“The Message” begins in Senegal, where Coates unpacks his own internalized biases about African people, whether it’s being surprised at seeing people jogging on the beach or marveling at the beauty of Senegalese people. “It’s a really, really beautiful thing,” Coates said, “to have these revelations.”

Coates was shocked to find out that some Senegalese people want to emulate the Westernized look of African Americans despite the fact that this “mixed” look comes from “an industrial act of sexual violence.” 

“It’s all over us,” Coates added. “These are very complicated things to accept about your ancestors.”

He also unpacks stories related to the origins of his name and the story of his ancestors. One collective story is that Senegal was an “origin point for Black America … an origin imagined and dreamed up to fill an emptiness of a people told they came from nothing.”

In the book, Coates describes his emotional visit to the island of Gorée, where he confronts — and lets go of — this origin myth. Coates said it took him a long time to go to Senegal because he knew it’d be a difficult journey. “Going to Senegal was a weighty trip,” Coates said. “You have to confront the source of the mythmaking,” Coates said. He admits that facing such myths was also liberating. 

“I feel like I got something that was a little bit more grounded — like on my last night, when I was sitting there with all these folks whose ancestry I share,” Coates said. “They were talking about various struggles, and it was like talking to long-lost cousins.”

From Senegal, Coates moves to South Carolina, where he witnesses an English teacher rally against literary censorship of his seminal work on the Black experience in America, “Between the World and Me.” The white teacher, who grew up in the conservative town where she teaches, is threatened with dismissal, but she rallies members of the community to fight to have the book taught in her class.

Coates said this community effort to oppose censorship “was invigorating. It was one of these things where you realize, this isn’t about you. There are people who put their jobs on the line, feeding their families on the line, and their wealth on the line. It was deeply empowering.” 

In South Carolina, Coates notes how a person’s physical environment can help shape their beliefs. Although the state government in South Carolina was majority-Black during the Reconstruction era, Coates writes that most of the grounds of the statehouse are now a “shrine to white supremacy.” While walking among “Klansmen, enslavers and segregationists raised up on their platforms to the status of titans,” he muses that the statues are “not about honoring a past,” but rather about “killing a future.” 

The role of historical monuments in shaping perceptions is a thread that continues into the final section of “The Message,” which covers the relationship between the Palestinian territories and Israel. Of the latter nation, Coates writes that “every expansionist power needs a good story to justify its plunder.” He argues that the City of David is one example of Israel using history to justify seizing Palestinian land.

“I think the moment we root our worth in castes and kingdoms and civilizations,” Coates said, “we have already lost.”   

In both the Palestinian territories and Israel, Coates sees that certain roads and parts of towns and cities are closed off to Palestinians. In witnessing enforced segregation, Coates recalls his own history. 

“As sure as my ancestors were born into a country where none of them was the equal of any white man, Israel was revealing itself to be a country where no Palestinian is ever the equal of any Jewish person anywhere. The law itself … clearly and directly calls for a two-tier society.”

Coates said speaking up on the conflict was a moral imperative.

In that CBS interview from the fall, co-host Tony Dokoupil said the stories in “The Message” describing Coates’ visit to the Middle East “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist,” because the book did not offer an Israel-centric perspective. Coates retorted that he’s most concerned with writing for those who don’t have a voice or a megaphone, saying this new book is “not a treatise on the entirety of the conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis.”

Consequently, Coates called criticism over his new book “irrelevant.” “I stand by the book,” he said of “The Message.” 

“I have great difficulty imagining somebody seeing what I saw and having any other response,” he said. “I know that people are different, but what I saw was so terrible, I had no other choice.” 

“It depends on the criticism, but I think for the most part, there was nothing I could have said that would allow me to be true to my ethics and my morality that would have made any of those people happy,” Coates said. “It is what it is.”