Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book The Message could just as easily have been called Between the World and Me had that title not been taken by his own 2015 bestseller. In The Message, Coates travels to Senegal, South Carolina and Palestine, offering reflections along the way on the African diaspora, US book bans and Israeli apartheid. The result is a work that both digs into the ways that the powerful seek to monopolize storytelling to preserve their privileges and charges writers with the duty to fight back by writing back.
With the enormous success of his previous books; his many awards, including a MacArthur fellowship and a National Book award; and his celebrated career in journalism, Coates is known as perhaps the most perceptive critic of American racism and an eloquent chronicler of Black life in the United States today. The Message contains the same moral authority that we are accustomed to from him, but the vision and geography of this book are wider than his past work.
At more than half the book’s length, the chapter on Palestine is clearly the beating heart of The Message. In the summer of 2023, Coates spent 10 days in the West Bank and Israel, five days with the Palestinian Festival of Literature and much of the rest of the time with Breaking the Silence, a group composed of former Israeli soldiers who now oppose the occupation. He witnessed first-hand the daily humiliations Palestinians endure traveling on segregated roads or walking through checkpoints. In Hebron, an Israeli soldier stopped him on the street, repeatedly pressing Coates to state his religion, only allowing him to proceed when he told the soldier his grandparents were Christian. He saw how Israel controls the distribution of resources: “Israel had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and the fountains, but the water itself.”
