The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Ta-Nehisi Coates returns with a timely investigation into how stories – reporting, mythmaking and narrative – shape our understanding of the world
Life’s lessons tend to fall into one of two categories: those which floor us with their injustice and those which take the form of more tender awakenings. The Message begins with a bittersweet example that could qualify as both.
In learning how NFL wide receiver Darryl Stingley was dealt the catastrophic blow that rendered him quadriplegic, a seven-year-old Ta-Nehisi Coates came to understand 'bad things' happen 'if only for the simple reason that they could.' But this brutal lesson had a buffer: reading about the sunset of Stingley’s career – and, in turn, reckoning with some of the 'weight' of 'wisdom' – sparked the dawn of Coates as a writer.
As origin stories go, it’s an impossibly neat one. But it’s not the only story The Message is concerned with telling. The book’s first three chapters – which find Coates at the front line of a book ban in South Carolina, as well as journeying to Dakar – largely attempt to demonstrate how 'the line between teacher and student is dotted.'
The Message’s fourth and final section, which finds Coates travelling across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, rearticulates his earlier realisation with a new edge. Coates experiences the region in the company of Palestinians and Israelis; it is here, on the ground, with the machinery of Israeli occupation inescapable – and its lessons, a litany of injustices committed against the Palestinian people excused as simple happenings – that Coates learns wisdom’s full weight.
