Ta-Nehisi Coates stumbles in his bid to 'save the world'

'The Message' is useful, and also frustrating.

I wrote about Ta-Nehisi Coates a few weeks ago after he was profiled in New York magazine. Now I’ve read the book that sparked that profile.

There's a scene relatively early in "The Message" by Ta-Nehisi Coates that has nothing to do with the Israel-Palestine conflict, but has everything to do with oppression, and gets at why I find this book a bit maddening.

The moment comes during an essay about Coates' visit to Senegal, his first visit to Africa after achieving success as a Black writer in America. It culminates in a visit to Gorée, the place where -- reputedly -- thousands of enslaved people left the continent, shipped overseas, never to return home.

Only: That's not how the history actually happened. Coates knows this. And he's fine with it. He's moved anyway.

He writes:

"Here is what I think. We have a right to our imagined traditions, to our imagined places, and those traditions and places are most powerful when we confess they are imagined."

Why is this interesting, much less maddening?

But the book culminates in his trip to Palestine, and to Israel, a country that was born from the worst crime in human history -- the Holocaust -- a project that was explicitly about transforming the Jewish people from an oppressed minority, victims, into a powerful people.

There is myth-making that goes on here, not all of it savory. Coates spends a bit of time considering the career of author Leon Uris, and his bestselling novel, "Exodus" about modern Israel's first days. He also visits the City of David, more or less an archaeological theme park -- one that rather conveniently pushes Palestinians off their own land -- that lays a lot of groundwork for the Zionist project.

Coates is unimpressed. He keeps pressing his hosts for information about the historical accuracy of their claims that the "City of David" really is the city of David.

He writes:

"Pressed on the historical accuracy of the City of David's very name, the official was unmoved. 'We've yet to find a sign saying 'Welcome to King David's palace.' Maybe that will be discovered, maybe not."

Coates' contempt for this response is clear. Taken together, these two passages seem to offer a message: Myths for me. Historical accuracy for thee.

"A system of supremacy justifies itself through illusion," he writes, even as he seeks his own illusions.

This matters, I think.

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"The Message" is focused on the realities of Palestinian life under the Israeli occupation -- though as Coates acknowledges, it's done at a remove and can feel clinical at times -- but it's frustrating. The author has famously said it's the job of writers to "save the world" but here he offers us a look at the world without offering much in the way of "what then?" How shall the Palestinians be saved? And how can they do it without repeating the journey from victimhood to victimizer? How to disrupt the cycle instead of perpetuating it?

That should be the goal, right?

Right?

Coates is righteously angry about systems of oppression. He is correct. Even if you understand the instinct that lead Israelis to what looks like a decision to be murderous oppressors rather than be murderously oppressed, even if you look at the world and see that violent antisemitism is still a powerful force that Israelis are right to be wary of, even if think it's understandable that they see their very survival at stake, it remains the case that their solution involves inflicting massive injustice -- and, often, death -- upon tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians. Even here, I am understating, because I can't properly depict the magnitude of that injustice in just a few words.

The gaping hole in this book -- as many reviewers have noted -- is October 7. It's certainly something Coates could have included were he inclined. One naturally concludes that he decided not to do so because it complicates his narrative, because it suggests (to use TNC's framework) that groups like Hamas have created their own myths that justify terrible violence in the hopes -- and I am being charitable here -- that their own people's victimhood can also be transmuted into strength.

Maybe all this is inevitable. But Coates repeatedly invokes the power of words to summon a better world. So it seems to me that he has created an imperative to actually do that summoning.

Instead, he chooses sides: The Palestinians. And I think that's incredibly natural, incredibly human, and perhaps even useful to some extent -- he's right we hear precious few Palestinian voices in American media, he is right to highlight what it's like to live as a subject to this system -- but it is also incredibly at odds with the utopian "emancipatory project" that he says he seeks.

What good is an an emancipation if it simply a zero-sum game that ends with enslavement of somebody else?

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It's not clear that Coates has even a glimmer of answer here. Instead, when asked about October 7 in interviews for this book, he has mused about the possibility of joining the Hamas attackers -- out of a deep sense of rage at Israeli injustices. He sees the cycle of victimhood and oppression, and also seems to recognize that he is not immune to it.

Man, that's depressing.

How do you decide who gets to have "imagined traditions" and who must hew to historical accuracy? How do we keep those imagined traditions from curdling into justifications for evil? How do we obtain justice without become unjust ourselves? How do we not simply pick sides, but work for an actually better future?

I'm not sure that Coates is trying to answer these questions. Maybe he doesn't see that as his mission. And maybe I'm rambling here a bit.

There's a passage near the end when Coates -- the son of Black nationalists and inheritor of their traditions -- suggests that maybe the emancipatory project is somehow impossible. Zionism, he concedes, "was conceived as a counter to an oppression that feels very familiar."

He writes:

"Israel felt like an alternative history, one where all our Garvey dreams were made manifest. There, 'Up Ye Mighty Race' was the creed. There, 'Redemption Song' is the national anthem. There, the red black and green billowed over schools, embassies, and the columns of great armies. There, Martin Delaney is a hero and February 21 is a day of mourning. That was the dream -- the mythic Africa my father cannot get back to. I think it's best that way -- for should that mythic Africa have ever descended out of the imagination and into the real, I shudder at what we might lose in realizing and defending it."

This is wise. Also incomplete. Myths are easy. Reality is hard. And a writer who wants to save the world, in the end, doesn't even point vaguely in a better direction. All he can do is summon dreams better left unrealized.