A few weeks back I was in a bookshop where the staff had chosen The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates as their book of the week. A sign encouraged shoppers to “make time to read, think about and discuss this important book”. I’ve done the first two but not the third, so I figured that writing about it may be the next best thing.
In my experience there are some books that help you to see things differently or understand things that you had perhaps not noticed or realised before. Other books help you to see things with more clarity, comprehending what you had probably always known all along but in sharper relief and with more clarity.
Coates’ magesterial earlier works fall into the first category, drawing an umbillical link between our history and our present. It was reading Between the World and Me and The Beautiful Struggle them that made me realise the history I had been taught at university was - quite frankly - bollocks. I was ‘taught’ American history by a visiting professor from Mississippi who spent our tutorials reclining in his rocking chair, never quite getting round to setting an essay on slavery, civil rights or race.
The Message falls into the second category, of seeing the present moment with renewed clarity. I was sceptical at first, of a journalist writing about the power and importance of journalism whilst the world burns felt a bit vainglorious and self-reverential. The book is itself almost a letter to young writers Coates teaches, urging them to aspire to “nothing less than doing their part to save the world”.
Spanning three continents, The Message considers how narratives are constructed, used and abused through reporting and mythmaking. Covering the banning of his own books in America and the stories he told himself about Senegal shaped his own identity and reality Coates the power of stories, the significance of who controls and gets to tell them (and of course who does not get to tell them). “History is not inert but contains within it a story that justifies political order.” It’s worth reading the full quote.
The Message is not solely or even primarily about Israel and Palestine, but the response to the book has inevitably focused on the essay recounting his time in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It feels too small and insigificant to recommend this book and say “it’s good - you should read it”. Perhaps it is better to try to explain how it effected me.
Since reading The Message I have been unable to read the news about Gaza and what Israel is doing in Palestine, almost as though I am seeing the prevarication and obliqueness with renewed clarity and a quite visceral disgust. It has made me more determined to value self-evident morality and the truth about what is right and wrong above all else and the compromises that life forces us into. It has made me angry at the dissembling and stuttering justifications of the unjustifiable we are surrounded by, sceptical that when someone says “it’s complicated” it is probably actually very easy to get to the heart of the matter and what they really mean is “it’s uncomfortable”. I don’t think I ever wanted comfort or congenial small talk over dinner anyway.
As a case in point last month the BBC sent me a push alert about an appaerntly “controversial West Bank settlement project”. The settlement is illegal and this fact is not controversial or complicated to understand for someone in the possession of basic skills of comprehension and literacy. The government is arresting peaceful protestors against genocide as terrorists whilst British nationals who serve in the IDF walk free.
The Israeli Ambassador openly opposes any claim to Palestinian statehood and supports Israeli claims to all land from the river to the sea (a statement which is viewed as anti-Semitic if made in support of Palestine) yet she has the ear of the government. Our armed forces share surveillance footage from planes over Gaza with Israel but say this footage cannot be used to assess to Israel's compliance with international humanitarian law.
One freedom we have is the freedom to reject this institutionalised gaslighting, the freedom not to be cajoled into accepting the unacceptable, the refusal to be forced into accepting as the truth that which we know to be wrong.
So much blood on so many hands will never wash off, and Coates’ message is that this applies to the consent manufacturers too. As a journalist and writer himself, Coates is horrified and unfliching about what he sees as the lies he has been told by the media, the deceptions promulgated and the simple truths unspoken:
I felt a mix of astonishment, betrayal, and anger. The astonishment was for me—for my own ignorance, for my own incuriosity, for the limits of my sense of reparations. The betrayal was for my colleagues in journalism—betrayal for the way they reported, for the way they’d laundered open discrimination, for the voices they’d erased.
It is journalists themselves who are playing god - it is the journalists who decide which sides are legitimate and which are not, which views shall be considered and which pushed out of the frame. And this power is an extension of the power of other curators of the culture - network execs, producers, publishers - whose core job is deciding which stories get told and which do not. When you are erased from the argument and purged from the narrative, you do not exist. Thus the complex of curators is doing more than setting pub dates and greenlighting - they are establishing and monitoring a criterion for humanity.
The most arresting passages of the books are the author’s reflections on the African American experience and the Palestinian experience, drawing paraells between American apartheid and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. In the West Bank, Coates instintively recognises a system of Jim Crow institutionalised discrimination and state-sanctioned violence: of Israeli illegal settlements with swimming pools while Palestinians collect rainwater, of checkpoints where “soldiers stand there and steal our time, the gun glinting on their shades like Georgia sherrifs”, of Palestine as the “one place on the planet - under American patronage - that resembled the world that my parents were born into”.
As he travels amongst segregated roads and militarised borders, what Coates offers above all is the clarity of someone blinded by the light, angry at how he has been misled and shamed by the complicity of the Western world. It is almost as though he is saying to us: we know what this is: this apartheid, this murder, these structures determining not only two classes of human but even who is seen as human and who is not. We are told that this is complicated, but ethnocracy isn’t that complicated.
Coates purposefully does not engage with academic perspectives on Israel-Palestine, arguing that the “elevation of complexity over justice is part and parcel of the effort to forge a story of Palestine told solely by the colonizer”. This of course saw him accused of being an extremist and terrorist apologist by the press and Israeli and Jewish organisations, but Coates is clearly at peace with this inevitability.
The book is not intended as a treatise on the entirety of the Israel-Palestine issue. Instead, Coates rejects this notion first-hand - arguing that he does not need to cover ‘both sides’ because the Israeli perspective has shaped our entire perception of the situation while the Palestinian experience has been eradicated from public consciousness. He explains his position in an interview with the New York Times on Ezra Klein’s show:
I felt lied to. I felt lied to by my craft. I felt lied to by the major media organisations. By media organizations, I mean, like producers of books, films, etc. Like the whole corpus of storytelling, which is what this book is obsessed with… I wanted to know why there was so much difference between what you saw and what I saw and what I felt like I understood back here in America and with what most people I knew understood back here in America. That immediately forced me to privilege — and this was just a decision I made: OK, who am I not hearing from? Who have I not heard from? And so that necessarily means marginalizing a portion of it. But what I felt was largely like the narratives that I’ve heard have been discredited.
Considering only what he sees with his own eyes and his own experience of human life under Israeli rule, at the heart of the book is a very clear thread. Coates tell us that we have the experience, the tools and the language required to perceive and understand what he saw in Israel and Palestine:
Those who claimed Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East were just as likely to claim that America was the oldest democracy in the world, and both claims relied on excluding whole swaths of the population.
In media interviews Coates said that: “the most shocking thing about my time over there was how uncomplicated it actually is”. Expecting to find complexity and “a situation in which it was hard to discern right from wrong”, Coates found a society in which the lives of certain people are inhibited in every possible way based on their ethnicity:
I immediately understood what was going on over there. It became very, very clear to me what was going on there… History is always complicated. Present events are always complicated. But the way this is reported in the Western media is as though one needs a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern studies to understand the basic morality of holding a people in a situation in which they don’t have basic rights, including the right that we treasure most, the franchise, the right to vote, and then declaring that state a democracy. It’s actually not that hard to understand. It’s actually quite familiar to those of us with a familiarity to African American history.
The Message is at times devastatingly beautiful on the importance of narrative and stories and at times quietly haunting on the role that they play in upholding power and oppression. Coates is a writer who makes you reflect on what you see all around you and forces you to confront the stories that we tell ourselves. He is unrelenting and unyielding in setting out the moral disgrace of our present moment: the proscription of protest, the dismissal of academics and writers, thesilencing of those who speak out and of Palestinian voices - pervasive across the public sphere, universities and workplaces.
I have always admired the power and clarity of Coates’ prose and sometimes even marvelled at the assemblage of his words. I respect him for publishing this work and taking on the media storm with so much dignity and strength, in the full knowledge of the personal and professional consequences. There is a certain power in speaking the truth and refusing to be cowed, or as the top YouTube comment on Coates’ CBS interview put it: “Brother answered these scripted questions beautifully and kept immaculate composure. Protect him at all costs.”
Most of all, I am grateful to Ta-Nehisi Coates for reminding us that seeing and describing things with clarity matters:
You cannot act upon what you cannot see. And we are plagued by dead language and dead stories that serve people whose aim is nothing short of a dead world. And it is not enough to stand against these dissemblers. There has to be something in you, something that hungers for clarity. And you will need that hunger, because if you follow that path, soon enough you will find yourself confronting not just their myths, not just their stories, but your own.
Reading The Message I was reminded of Elizabeth Bruenig’s paean to Bernie Sanders at the end of the 2016 Democratic primary:
None of this means you will get what you want, in politics or in life: Mr. Sanders did not win, after all. But he never lied, and he never pretended to like what is so clearly detestable or attempted to persuade any one of us that we ought to like it either. He was right to the end, and he refused to reconcile himself to the forces that eventually overtook him. It is hard to see him go. But there is at least some dignity in it.
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“Resistance must be its own reward”. When I was David Lammy’s speechwriter I had this quote from Coates’ book on the promise and shortcomings of Obama presidency - We Were Eight Years in Power - pinned above my desk. At the time I was flat broke and trying to either prevent the Home Office from deporting Windrush citizens or force the Home Office to repatriate those who had already been deported.
I thought of this work last week, when a Cabinet Minister in a government of which David Lammy is now the Deputy Prime Minister described racist and violent far-right marches as “klaxon calls”. Peter Kyle told the BBC that the Tommy Robinson march didn’t “disturb” him because it was in fact proof that free speech is “alive and well”. After all, what was the Ku Klux Klax if not merely an association of concerned local residents? Is there any real difference between an ethno-nationalist movement and a Change.org petition, Peter?
I thought about what David Lammy used to say about the Windrush scandal and Theresa May’s hostile environment, about the mainstreaming of far-right rhetoric and anti-immigrant sentiment which “blurs the lines between illegal immigrants and people who are here legally and even British citizens, creating a hostile environment not just for illegal immigrants but for anybody who looks like they could be an immigrant.”
We are certainly living in a hostile environment. Look around us at the racist pogroms, neighbours too scared to leave their homes for fear of suffering violence because of the colour of their skin, talk of mass deportations and every day a fetid and shameful race to the bottom of the gutter.
When Keir Starmer quotes Enoch Powell and prostrates himself at the feet of Nigel Farage’s boorish, flag-waving nationalism I thought of another speech: “if you lie down with dogs you get fleas, and that is what has happened with this far-right rhetoric in this country”. That was less than a decade ago - it really is later than you think.