Writer Ta-Nehesi Coates returns to nonfiction with his essay collection 'The Message'
Ta-Nehisi Coates is no stranger to tackling fraught topics. A decade ago, his in The Atlantic titled "The Case For Reparations" spurred a national conversation about compensating African Americans. His goal, he says, was to get people to stop laughing about the idea and start talking. He followed up a year later with a book called "Between The World And Me," an exploration of his own history and the realities of being Black in the U.S. History is complicated, Ta-Nehisi Coates says, and so in his new book, "The Message," he takes on the stories that we tell and that others tell about three places - the Middle East, the American South, and Africa. His journey begins with travel to Goree Island just off the coast of Senegal, to the Door of No Return, a memorial to the victims of the Atlantic slave trade. Coates says that place and that portal, which legend says enslaved people pass through to be shipped to the new world left him speechless, and that in the end, he rejects romantic notions that Black people's worth is based on potential royal ancestry, snatched from dignity into slavery.
TA-NEHISI COATES: To base your self-worth as a people, to base your self-esteem on being Black or being part of the African diaspora or part of the Black diaspora, on the same metrics of the people that enslaved you, is a mistake. So all of this conversation about who we are the descendants of, our need to put ourselves in the shoes of people that did, quote-unquote, "great things" or made great, you know, works, is to, in fact, to repeat the mistake.
RASCOE: What is it, though? Because I think it is so complicated as a Black American born in this country to go to Africa. I haven't been, but I know people will feel a connection. And I'm sure you've heard of the diaspora wars. You know this. There are Black Americans who say, I'm not African. I've never been there. That's not me. How do you reckon with all that? And what is Africa to you?
COATES: I can't make anybody feel a certain kind of way. And I wouldn't ask anybody. If you don't know feel a connection in Africa, that's certainly, you know, your right. I didn't go there looking for acceptance necessarily from Africans...
RASCOE: Or like a kinship.
COATES: Well, maybe kinship, but not necessarily acceptance.
RASCOE: (Laughter).
COATES: But, you know, I didn't show up, you know, like, break out the drums for me and say, welcome home, brother. You know, I didn't need that. This is the site of my creation as an African American. My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers were taken from this place on the water, and then in the plantations of this country here, we were genocided and created into a new people. But the process begins there. The great epic that I rooted myself in, the great Black American epic, the great Black diasporic epic - I was at the origin point. That was deeply moving.
RASCOE: You also go to South Carolina. You talk about a teacher who risked her job to keep teaching your book "Between The World And Me." And this is where you get into book bans and censorship. But you say in one passage that much of the hoopla about book bans and censorship gets it wrong. What do we get wrong?
COATES: I think the first thing I would say off the top is that I as the writer and the author of the book, I am not the victim.
RASCOE: You don't take it personally. It's not - you are not being victimized.
COATES: I don't. But I'm also not the person who's going to suffer. My personal offense and to make it about me misses the point. The people that are really hurt are the children and the students there. They're not necessarily hurt because they need to be exposed to my voice or my books, or they need to adopt my politics or my particular view of the world. But I know that the seat of me as a writer is so much varied literature in terms of its type and genre, and what all of that literature had in common was to open the world for me, and to say that I was free to find my own politics, my own views, my own future, I did not necessarily have to even believe everything that was said within my own house.
RASCOE: Is there a reason why you think writing catches it more than even other...
COATES: Yes.
RASCOE: ...Forms of media? Because...
COATES: Yes.
RASCOE: ...You would think with the internet and all these things, that would be much more dangerous...
COATES: No, no, no.
RASCOE: ...Than the writing.
COATES: Absolutely not.
RASCOE: No, the writing is extremely dangerous. And the books in particular are very dangerous. In fact, I think the people who are in favor of book bans understand the power of books much, much better than those that oppose them. Books are intimate. It's a one-on-one connection. So that kid in South Carolina, that 15-year-old, 16-year-old kid is taking "Between The World And Me" or whatever other book they're reading - they're taking it into their bedroom, and they're having a connection with them that nobody else can actually perceive. Even if you took the book from the kid and read it yourself, you would still not have the same interaction because the way books work is they are necessarily a union between the imagination of the reader and the words that are on the page.
RASCOE: The longest essay in the book is on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Why did you choose to delve into this topic, which is one of the most, if not the most, fraught topic of public discourse today?
COATES: Well, the fact was probably my most celebrated work of journalism is "The Case For Reparations." That essay has a section in which it talks about reparations from the state of Germany to the state of Israel as recompense for the survivors of the Holocaust or those fleeing the Holocaust, in fact, fleeing Nazi Germany's existential violence to Israel. And I was roundly and sometimes loudly critiqued for using that as an example.
RASCOE: What was the criticism that you faced for that?
COATES: The criticism was that German reparations had been paid to build a project that necessarily was taking the land from other people, and itself was perpetrating another atrocity. What I wanted to do was I wanted to see that firsthand myself. I wanted to read as much as I could about it within the time I had to get this book done. I wanted to spend as much time as I could out of the three chapters in the book. One of the reasons why that's as long as it is because it's the place that I spent the most time. It's the place I talked to the most people. I felt the responsibility to take that criticism as seriously as I could.
RASCOE: In the essay, you draw parallels to the Jim Crow South with the treatment of Palestinians. And you also say that people say this issue is so complicated, and you say it is not complicated.
COATES: Well, the first thing I will say is history is always complicated. Stories are always complicated. What I saw over there was not especially complicated. It was not any more complicated than American history. Look, I am the descendant and the child of people born into Jim Crow America. When I step into a city like old Hebron, and a man stops me, a man young enough to be my son, with a gun that looks like it's about half his body weight - if I'm walking with a guy whose family has lived in that old city from time immemorial, for generation after generation, and that soldier tells me, I can walk down the street, but he can't, that evokes certain things in me. When I'm around a group of people who have been denied any real ability to determine their fate because of who they are, by which I mean the ability to vote, I can't look at that and say, that's complicated. That's not complicated to me, not with my background.
RASCOE: It doesn't sound like it, but did you have any pause about taking this on? You could have looked at this and said, this is not my conflict. This is not my fight.
COATES: I did. I did, I did. But every single fighter jet that drops a bomb in Gaza is of American providence. This is ours. You know, I think it's irresponsible as an American to say that this isn't really my struggle while your tax dollars undergird this war. I don't think that's an option.
RASCOE: In a review of your book in The Atlantic...
COATES: "My Old Home."
RASCOE: Yes. It criticizes you for, quote, "refusing to countenance conversations with Jews who don't share his opinions and don't denounce their nation." How would you respond to that?
COATES: I would respond to that by pointing out that I've spent the vast majority of my career around people, be they Jewish or not, who were very much believers in the dream and the idea of Israel and the Israeli project. That is the waters of journalism that I swam in. That's how that example ended up in "The Case For Reparations" in the first place.
RASCOE: Some may hear that and think, like, is the contention that Jewish people control the media or things of that nature - can you clarify what you meant by the representation?
COATES: I meant exactly what I said. I would like to know the number of Palestinians that are working at a major bureau for a major outlet, be that TV, newspaper, magazines. I would like to know the number of Palestinians specifically.
RASCOE: Who are covering Jerusalem?
COATES: Who are covering the West Bank, who are covering Israel, who are covering this conflict, as we call it. I would like to know that. I don't necessarily need the numbers of anybody else. I need the numbers of Palestinians.
RASCOE: What do you think that would show?
COATES: Well, here's what I would say. I am here talking about this book as a Black writer. And I'm being interviewed by Black journalists. There is a kind of conversation that you and I can have that is very, very different than the conversation that somebody who doesn't have that experience has. That doesn't mean I'm not going to talk to anybody else. That doesn't mean I shouldn't talk to anybody else. It just means that there is a certain perspective. I think we recognize that across journalism. I think we would say if The New York Times did not have any Black people covering race in this country - I think we would say that's a problem. I am asking that we export that same standard to Israel, to Palestine, to the Jerusalem Bureau.
RASCOE: What would you say to those who I am sure listening to this, who will be concerned, who will say, look, I love "Between The World And Me." But on this, I think this could lead to antisemitism. This has gone too far. What do you say to those?
COATES: Not much.
RASCOE: Not much.
COATES: Not much. I'd say, well, if that's how you feel, that's how you feel. I can't really influence that. You have to do what you have to do. As a writer, what I have to do is I have to be able to look at myself in the mirror and be OK. I got to be able to wake up in the morning and say, I feel like I did the right thing. Folks who feel that it's doing something else and that, you know, it offends their particular politics. I'm sorry, but I have to do what I have to do, and I have to say what I have to say.
RASCOE: That's Ta-Nehisi Coates. He is the author of "The Message." Thank you so much for joining us.
COATES: Thank you for having me.
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RASCOE: You can hear all of NPR's reporting and analysis on the conflict in the region by going to npr.org/mideastupdates.
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