One World
Review by Brian Tanguay
“I think this tradition of writing, of drawing out a common humanity, is indispensable to our future, if only because what must be cultivated and cared for must first be seen.”
So writes Ta-Nehisi Coates in the opening pages of The Message, his latest book of essays. Framed as a letter to former students, the opening piece focuses on the job of the writer, which is, above all else, to clarify. This is done by exploring the territory: “You have to walk the land. You have to see the elevation for yourself, the color of the soil. You have to discover that the ravine is really a valley and that the stream is in fact a river winding south from a glacier in the mountains.”
Coates follows his own advice, taking readers on his first trip to Africa, to Dakar in Senegal, which for Coates is a kind of Big Bang, and he describes staring back at America with the sense that he had returned home, but in the company of ghosts. Africa is both a real place and an imaginative one, a “glorious Eden we conjured up as exiles, a place without the Mayflower, Founding Fathers, conquistadors, and the assorted corruptions they had imposed on us.” Coates writes that he went to Senegal in silence and solitude, like a man visiting the grave of an uncertain ancestor.
And then it’s on to South Carolina in the heat of a moment when school boards are banning books, including his own, and decrying the evil of Critical Race Theory. Coates meets Mary Wood, a public school teacher who had been forced to drop Coates’ most well-known book, Between the World and Me, from her lesson plan because it might cause some students to be discomforted. Coates attends a school board meeting with Mary and a group of her supporters, who, on this occasion, manage to prevail.
The bulk of the book, the part that has generated the most controversy and media attention, starts on page 115. It’s here that Coates describes his ten-day trip to Palestine. (This trip occurred before the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas.) He visits Jerusalem and the Hebron Hills, and relates standing on Al-Shuhada Street, once the main market street of Old Hebron, where Jewish settlers move as they please, but Palestinians are barred. Coates’ local guides point out all the security cameras, and he’s amazed by the number and variety of checkpoints, fixed and roving, including one where he’s stopped by an Israeli soldier and interrogated about his religious affiliation. Upon hearing that Coates doesn’t have one, the soldier demands to know his parents’ religion, and then that of his grandparents.
“For as sure as my ancestors were born into a country where none of them was the equal of any white man,” writes Coates, “Israel was revealing itself to be a country where no Palestinian is ever the equal of any Jewish person anywhere. This fact is not hard to discern. Beyond my own initial impressions, there is the law itself, which clearly and directly calls for a two-tier society.”
On the roofs of many Palestinian homes in the West Bank, Coates notices cisterns for the harvesting of rainwater; the cisterns are almost certainly illegal because the State of Israel exercises control of the aquifers in the ground and the rainwater that falls from the sky.
To be clear, nothing in this hundred-plus page section is that different from what has been reported in the London Review of Books by Tom Stevenson and Adam Shatz, by Spencer Ackerman in The Nation, or by David Shulman in the New York Review. Coates observes and ruminates about the apartheid apparatus he sees with his own eyes, as well as what he learns from former members of the Israeli military. His critique is of nationalism, of one people using systems of power — civil, legal, and military — to oppress and dispossess another; this critique is similar to that advanced by the Palestinian scholar Rashid Khalidi in his book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.
It’s a testament to how thoroughly and decisively Israel has prevailed in the war of narratives that Coates’ observations have sparked such controversy, and it begs the question, why? In an interview with CBS, Coates was confronted by journalist Tony Dokoupil, who asserted that if the cover of The Message was obscured, and the identity and reputation of its author hidden, the book might easily be found in the backpack of an Arab extremist, a terrorist. It was, frankly, an outrageous statement for which Dokoupil was later chastened by his employer, but it goes to show how unsettling it is for many in the West to be confronted with a narrative that doesn’t reduce the Palestinians to an abstract. We’re simply not accustomed to perceiving the Palestinians as human, as having legitimate claims to self-determination.
The argument Coates is making is that when it comes to Palestine, the West and its media outlets have so narrowed the aperture that the Palestinians are practically invisible. Because Coates writes in the tradition of Harriet Jacobs, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin, he seeks, as they did, to redraw boundaries and give voice to those ignored or marginalized by cultural gatekeepers. When Coates compares and contrasts what he witnessed in the West Bank with America’s racial history, with Jim Crow segregation, we should be discomforted, unsettled, and haunted — and perhaps even inclined to expand the “brackets of humanity.”
To write in this tradition — to make visible what others wish to remain invisible — requires courage and empathy. Ta-Nehisi Coates embodies both.
