The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates review – a politically-charged meditation on the power of stories | Essays

In 1982, when American vocalist Melle Mel was asked to rap about the social deprivation and violence running rampant in inner-city neighbourhoods, he initially declined. At the time, hip-hop was focused on rhythm and rhyme – hip-hop for hip-hop’s sake. Melle Mel led the group Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, known for their party anthems, and for “boasting how good we are and all that”, as he told one interviewer.

Eventually, though, he relented, and The Message became an instant classic. The song exposed the harsh realities of African American life, including police brutality, poor housing and systemic racism in education. While Ronald Reagan’s administration promoted the myth of the “welfare queen”, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five rapped about who was really being harmed by the government’s brutal reforms: “A child born with no state of mind / Blind to the ways of mankind.”

The seven-minute song marked a pivotal moment in hip-hop: the genre subsequently existed not just to entertain, but to enlighten. Journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates has returned after a near decade-long absence from nonfiction with a book that has the same title and the same mission – and it is one he succeeds amply in.

Coates’s The Message grapples with the question of whose stories get told, and how that forges our reality. As he writes halfway through: “Politics is the art of the possible, but art creates the possible of politics.” Known for his searing critiques of racial injustice, he came to wider attention with a 2014 essay The Case for Reparations, followed by a 2015 book, Between the World and Me, written as a letter to his son. According to Toni Morrison, he filled “the intellectual void” left by James Baldwin’s death.

The Message starts with a reflection on Coates’s obsession with words. Aged five, he recited Eugene Field’s poem The Duel over and over: “The gingham dog and the calico cat / Side by side on the table sat”. As a young adult, he was captivated by rapper Rakim’s use of alliteration in his 1990 classic Let the Rhythm Hit ’Em: “I’m the arsenal, I got artillery, lyrics are ammo / Rounds of rhythm, then I’mma give ’em piano.”

As a student at Howard University it dawned on him that words, however beautifully arranged, “must serve something” beyond themselves: “They must do the work of illuminating, of confronting and undoing,” he writes. In his view, language – its arsenal, artillery and ammo – must be “joined to politics”. This linguistic responsibility falls particularly on Black writers, and writers of all “conquered peoples”, he says.

For Coates, who now teaches in the English department at Howard, The Message represents a return to the epistolary form. The book is addressed to his students. He tells them he has been travelling since he last saw them; to Senegal, South Carolina and Palestine. He turns the tables by submitting three essays for them to review, adding that they are also addressed to “young writers everywhere whose task is nothing less than doing their part to save the world”.

For understandable reasons, media coverage since the book’s US publication has focused mostly on Coates’s essay about his trip to the occupied Palestinian territories, which constitutes half of the book. But there are two other, equally compelling stories, of Coates’s first trip to Africa and his experiences in South Carolina, where a teacher had been forced to drop Between the World and Me from her classes after claims it might contravene a law against the teaching of “critical race theory”.

In Dakar, Coates confronts a disorienting mix of nostalgia and sadness. The Black Power movement he grew up among fought against the dehumanisation of Black people by emphasising their inherent dignity: “We were born not to be slaves but to be royalty”, sums up this “vindicationist” tradition. His own name, derived from the ancient Egyptian name for the kingdom of Nubia, is “an artefact of a forgotten world and an aspiration for one yet to come”.

But in Senegal’s capital there are no “black pharaohs” or “great kingdoms and ancient empires”. Instead he registers disappointment at seeing a beach filled with rusting exercise equipment, imagining it to be a sign of “collective dysfunction”. He checks himself, though, and the next day resolves “to see the reality of this home that I did not know”, losing himself among the bustle, the streets and fabric shops, the life.

“When we root our worth in castes and kingdoms, in ‘civilisation’,” he reflects, “we have accepted the precepts of those whose entire legacy is the burning and flooding of a planet.” He challenges his students – and readers – to consider what we give up when we centre mythic grandeur, since “human dignity is in the mind and body and not in stone”.

In South Carolina, Coates meets Mary Wood, the English teacher whose attempt to use Between the World and Me in class met with furious complaints. He watches as Wood’s supporters – parents, students and community members – rally to defend her right to teach the book at a school board meeting. A few weeks prior, the same meeting had been filled with parents demanding that she be fired.

These antagonists are not, despite what they say, trying to spare their children “discomfort” and “anguish”, Coates argues. They are deliberately standing in the way of enlightenment, trying to prevent the breaking down of racial boundaries – the structures that determine who is seen as human and who is not.

In the final essay, Coates undergoes his own moment of enlightenment in Palestine. As he tours the West Bank, he sees a system that bears a chilling resemblance to Jim Crow, with “separate and unequal” at its core. Israel’s illegal settlements boast country clubs with swimming pools while Palestinians must resort to makeshift rooftop cisterns to collect rainwater. He is astonished that there is “still one place on the planet – under American patronage – that resembled the world that my parents were born into”.

At a checkpoint, he watches as “soldiers stand there and steal our time, the sun glinting on their shades like Georgia sheriffs”. He visits another settlement where, every 30 feet, he sees a leashed, barking guard dog, “a wall of hell hounds that seemed to me drawn from my Montgomery nightmares”. He feels betrayed by his colleagues in journalism, accusing them of sanitising “open discrimination” in their coverage of Palestine.

Weeks after returning from Senegal, he speaks to his father, who has just read about an 18th-century rebellion led by enslaved people in Guyana. To his disappointment, the leaders of the failed rebellion turned on each other and ultimately collaborated with their enslavers.

It is this conversation Coates remembers near the end of his trip in the West Bank, in a haunting coda to the work. He acknowledges the affinity between Zionism and visions of Black liberation. “Israel felt like an alternative history, one where all our … dreams were made manifest.” Though his father lamented the failure of such grand designs, he is chastened by what he has witnessed. “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 realising and defending it.”