Message, Received
Ta-Nehisi Coates has a habit of returning to his origins. A Gen X child of post-Civil Rights Act gains, he was moulded by a generation of Panthers and autodidacts, organic intellectuals and socially engaged artists. This is a legacy defined by both militancy and ambivalent integrationism. Like many, Coates inherited these contradictions, his father’s life serving as an embodiment of broken and unfulfilled promises. Coates paints a portrait of the man, a Vietnam veteran and stalwart publisher and purveyor of Afrocentric literature, sitting sideways in a chair, his legs crossed, always with a book in his hand. His father belonged to an upwardly mobile strata of Black society which thought very seriously about their obligations to the wider community, even as they shakily rose in social or economic status. In many cases, the issues that plagued the “wider community” were never so far removed that they could be ignored. There was always a cousin languishing in prison, a down-and-out childhood friend, a struggling elder. Precarity never became a distant abstraction. The hood was everywhere, its breath tickling the back of your neck. In “The Message”, the latest prophetic offering from Coates and his first nonfiction book in a decade, he has to go abroad to revisit this lesson. The result is three essays, stretching across Senegal, South Carolina, and Palestine.
Black intellectuals born, raised in, and tethered to the Global North are practiced in the art of self-deception. Many know, on an elemental level, the limits imposed on their avowed radicalism. The leash is tight, and it’s easier to stick to sloganeering and selling revolution. In too many hands, blackness is a brand identity, one conveniently wedded to all that is oppositional, revolutionary, subversive. Why stretch your critical capacities when you can be rewarded for your ignorance? When you can ride the coattails of a radical tradition that predates you, distorting it as you please? Meanwhile, Africa remains a continent under siege, economically and politically held hostage by the very order which celebrates the market-friendly fluff we peddle as thought. (I would argue that the reluctance to name a thing a thing, to see what is happening in Palestine for what it is, begins with the disappearing of Africa from our imaginaries). I’m uninterested in halcyon glorifications of bygone eras, but it sometimes seems that Black thinkers and writers of the past were more compelled to abandon their home comforts and explore their ties to a world beyond the US and Europe than their present-day counterparts. (Coates writes about his travels with gravitas, an embarrassingly rare approach in the mainstream. But then again, we are plodding through the muddled aftermath of Afropolitanism and Travel Noire). Throughout the 20th century, whether you were motivated by the spirit or social pressures of the times, packing up your whole life on a gamble and seeking an elsewhere was like a rite of passage for a certain cultural milieu. Relocating to Africa and/or the Caribbean was a headlong dive into doubt. Your assumptions and underdeveloped theories would be shattered. For once, the American would be on the back foot. Yes, many were searching for an idealised vision of Africa, the emotional catharsis of return. But just as many others wanted to blast apart their own apathy. Ted Joans, the surrealist and “tri-continental poet” springs to mind. In a 1975 interview, Joans spoke of the necessity of seeing ourselves as “overseas Africans.” His work commitments across Europe subsidised the life he had created for himself in Tangier and Timbuktu. Even back then, his disillusionment with his compatriots treating Africa as an intellectual pit stop was evident. (“We can’t continue to get on a plane in New York, land in Dakar, stay at the Hilton, visit a market, buy some cloth, pose for a few pictures with some African sisters, then go home again, thinking we’ve been in Africa.”) Extraction knows no colour. Joans knew that, and he was forceful about the need to “distinguish between illusion–often our own– and reality.” Encounters with elsewheres have a way of disrupting our insulated realities. Joans recalled the scholar, publisher, and free-jazz pioneer Haki Madhubuti being struck by the poverty in Algeria, newly sensitized to his place and portion in the world (“The Man sure has spoiled me, and I’m from the ghetto.”) Perspective opens the doors to humility. It illuminates the dark nooks of disregard.
Consider a blind spot the size of Africa. A blank space where Palestine should be. Stand at the edge of the Atlantic and gawp, while you miss the bodies dotting other waters. Prominent Black intellectuals submerge themselves in histories of racial domination in the Global North, divorcing Africa from their analyses, even as it permeates the iconography they deploy. They crowd out the rest of the Black world with their pain. More bombs were dropped on poor Africans during the presidency of Obama, a Kenyan American born in Hawaii, than during the preceding Bush administration. Coates, like many high-profile stateside interlocutors, has shown a reluctance, or inability, to confront the suffering of Africans at the hands of American power, a gap in his thinking which Palestine unsurprisingly also fell through. Pablum is circulated. The War on Terror rages on. AFRICOM consolidates imperialism across the continent. Watts. Cobbs Creek. Gorée. Dadaab. Rafah. Everywhere, violence reduces entire lifeworlds into catch-all bywords for generational suffering. Black writers survey the scene. Theirs is a path of incentives and coercions, the carrot and the stick. They make their choices.
In “The Message”, Coates stretches a central analogy, casting black people as victims of the West, “a people held just outside its liberal declarations, but kept close enough to be enchanted with its promises.” We are the disinherited builders and inhabitants of a beautiful, crumbling house. Coates admits to knowing that the house is haunted, that “there is blood in the bricks and ghosts in the attic.” Such judgment, however, rests on the assumption that we all share similar conditions under the same roof. The contemporary African subject surviving below the breadline isn’t even inside the house. Their absence is unremarked upon. Other Black people, by way of their affiliations and the breadth of their political horizons, are unwelcome. The halls of power aren’t open to all. Throughout the book, Coates shifts between two poles, at turns picking apart specious myths of consensus, and at others reverently attributing a kind of in-built oppositionality to blackness, invoking the black radical tradition and basking in the warmth of its shade. It’s hard to discern where he lands, but he’s ultimately awed by our “collective power” and spiritual endowment, the bonds uniting a “family divided from each other by centuries.” Complacency is to be expected when we assume that we want the same things, crave the same freedoms, or that even being trapped in the same house makes us co-conspirators. If only it were that easy.
Travel doesn’t necessarily broaden one’s horizons. The traveller is fascinated by the crushing mundanity the local endures. In my early twenties, I visited the city-state of Singapore, and was awed by South Asian poets writing against their linguistic and cultural exclusion from a Chinese-dominated society. It was an entirely unfamiliar context, one that made me feel like an idiot. I haven’t exactly become attuned to Singaporean politics since then, but such experiences have a way of restraining your ego. Though Coates dedicates chapters to his transformative trips to Senegal and Palestine, he doesn’t suspend his skepticism of travel as a gateway into a heightened sense of wisdom or morality. “As it happens”, he writes, “you can see the world and still never see the people in it.” James Baldwin, whose influence haunts Coates, left New York for Paris in 1948 when he was only 24 years old. With few possessions and only $40 in his pocket, Baldwin lived among “les misérables”, mainly the impoverished Algerians rug-sellers and peanut vendors of Paris. Their lot was grim, and Baldwin followed them into teeming cafes where they gathered, licking their wounds. Baldwin was quick to spot patterns. “The Arabs were together in Paris, but the American blacks were alone.” Despite their dire circumstances, Baldwin admired the bloody coherence of the Algerians, the way they clustered together even in their alienation. Baldwin’s thorny kinship with the Algerian underclass triggered strange reactions in the Frenchmen he spoke to. With generous smiles, they would insist that he, as an African American, was different. Unlike the Arabs, he was “civilised”, a long-coveted accolade that, as Baldwin dryly reflected, was a surprise to him, a gift that had been “delivered too late.” More than half a century later, Coates moved his family to Paris, that shining city on the hill for Black America’s traumatised literati. He fumbled towards similar conclusions. Coates had only received his first passport as he was writing his seminal 2014 essay “The Case for Reparations”. France would be a different landscape, one where he was not a problem, nor a walking embodiment of national guilt. In his 2015 book “Between the World and Me”, Coates distinguishes himself from the Roma children he sees begging in the streets, from the embittered Algerian cab driver who hates the very Paris that has so ensnared Coates. He knows he is uniquely shielded. Still, overcompensation riddles the advice he pens to his son. There’s a reflexive need to redeem one’s self. He desperately needs to align himself with the struggle, even as it recedes in the rear-view mirror. “Remember your name”, he urges. “Remember the broader consciousness that comes with that.” The world is full of people who aren't allowed to forget. They don’t need reminders.
“Harlem, I am not an outsider. I know your contempt, I know its wholesome bread. Famine strikes in sudden thunder. Prisons ignite in storms of violence. I see your fierce encroaching under the asphalt in pipes and masks, in the piles of trash held in the cold air’s embrace, in banished steps shod in the history of the wind.”
— A Grave for New York, Adonis
Do we need to visit a place to be convinced of its pain? Must we observe the subjugation of a people to stand with them? Do their greatest minds and spirits have to spend lifetimes attempting to convince us of what is plainly obvious? On the last day of his trip, Coates visits Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center and Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. He reflects on what happens when “murder turns to wide seemingly unending mass”, when human lives are churned into numbers and ashes. He is overwhelmed by the darkness before him, grappling with its size, its shape, its weight. An account of the Struma disaster is particularly harrowing. 769 Jewish refugees on a creaking ship escaping persecution in Romania sought safety in Turkey. They were denied entry into Mandatory Palestine, then under British control. The Turkish authorities allowed only nine passengers to disembark, eventually towing the ship out to the Black Sea. There, they were abandoned, until a patrolling Soviet submarine torpedoed the ship. There would be only one survivor. Images of death camp survivors dragged off ships by British soldiers leap from the archive. Many would be returned to the charnel houses of Europe, the very countries they had fled from.
I’m reminded of an article I read years ago on the exclusion of German Muslims from the country’s Holocaust memory culture. When some German Muslims took part in government funded programmes and trips to former concentration camps, Holocaust educators were disturbed by their “inappropriate” reactions. The participants, some of whom were recent refugees, were overcome by a sense of distress and horror. They were visibly shaken by what they saw and heard. Some directly voiced their fears of how quickly a society could turn fanatical, and how this kind of hatred could resurface in the present. One mediator even quoted Primo Levi: it happened once, so it can happen again. These reactions enraged the guides, who preferred a calcified, routinized approach to memorializing the Holocaust. One even admitted to the root cause of her irritation at the Muslim visitors. “There was a feeling that they did not belong there and that they should not be engaging with the German past. Somehow their presence at the camp did not fit.” To these guides, empathy was a bordered terrain, and they alone decided upon its limits. Never mind that some of the participants had personal experiences of refugeehood, ethnic persecution, and exile.
Some processes of identification are actively discouraged. How is our empathy disciplined? Our intuition blunted? Compassion is yet another regulated zone. In the wrong hands, it becomes a weapon. We are curtailed in who we are allowed to identify with, a lesson Coates is steadily learning at the hands of his industry colleagues. Pick apart the bones of history, but don’t let it alert you to the present. Denounce fascism, but only up to a point. Decry atrocities only when they are committed by your ideological opponents. Excuse them when they’re perpetrated by your own. Rattle against the cage of your cognitive dissonance. Cling to your people, and carve out an ethics from that desolate isolation. In “The Message”, Coates tests the boundaries of sanctioned empathy, unable to resist the tug of familiarity he feels upon witnessing a segregated, power-drunk society.
“I wanted to see for myself what was happening. I wanted to face the violence reported by the newspapers and supported by my taxes: to make my witness to this First World dream before it buckled into yet another nightmare colony, another "vacation paradise," another "vital" outpost of the big guys. I wanted to get real: to put my life, as well as my words, on the line.”
— NICARAGUA: Why I Had to Go There, June Jordan
As a youth, Coates describes vaguely hearing about the “issue” of Palestine. Reels on World News Tonight served as early introductions to the “conflict”, but that was only background noise. The young Coates dreamed of becoming a poet, and his father handed him a copy of “Born Palestinian, Born Black”, a 1996 collection by the Palestinian American poet Suheir Hammad. June Jordan was an influential figure for Hammad, who was drawn to Jordan’s poems dedicated to the victims of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, the kind of poems which earned Jordan death threats. Saturated with the rhymes and rhythms of hip-hop, Hammad’s poetry circles the ghetto, barrio, haara, refugee camp. Brooklyn-raised in a neighborhood ravaged by crack and Reaganomics, Hammad grew up with teachers telling her that Palestine didn’t exist. This was a denial of not only her selfhood, but of the story of her family, of a pregnant grandmother who had carried her father out of their hometown of Lydd. I often think of Hammad’s poem “Daddy’s Song” and how deftly it traces a tortured thread from Sam Cooke’s Mississippi to a Palestinian refugee camp. She dedicates her poem to a father born by a river, in a little tent. A man who’s been running ever since. More than a tribute to her community, this poem captures cycles and reverberations of displacement across shores. It’s an ode to those who have never had the luxury of staying still. Hammad saw herself, Cooke, Malcolm X, June Jordan, and all the other hip-hop laureates, artists, and dreamers who had shaped her, as part of this light-footed lineage. Even post-Gulf War and post-Oslo Accords, these connections came so naturally to her, and in her writings they thrummed with sensitivity. Her debut was published by Harlem River Press under the auspices of Ishmael Reed, another writer who understood the meaningfulness of these connections. (Years later, Reed would recount his own daughter being called a “dirty Arab” in the wake of 9/11). Like Coates, I first encountered Hammad’s poems as a teenager. They had the feel of the truth washing over the body, bathing it in a necessary kind of clarity. “Born Palestinian, Born Black” was published when Hammad was 23 years old, and even at that age, she was confronting life in the occupied territories, both at home and abroad, in dialects that had been “silenced too long”. Here was inseparable from Over There. To erect walls between these realities would be an act of self-rejection. I’m convinced that it’s easier to recognize these connections when you are torn apart by them, when you are indebted to those dispersed, scattered, and targeted by the tentacled reach of empire. June Jordan didn’t need to visit Palestine to realise how pivotal Palestinian dehumanization, and our tolerance of it, was to the project of ethno-fascism everywhere. Coates also name-checks The Last Poets as formative influences, which I find striking. I have no idea how you can listen to trenchant works like Black Soldier and have a spotty outlook on militarism. I guess listening doesn’t actually mean receiving the intended message.
“Since it is clear that a given sum of government money could go either for a poetry magazine or a napalm canister—and only chance bookkeeping decides between them—there could be no pride in such an award or in such editing.
I refuse to participate and I don’t want the money.”
— From Robert Bly’s 1967 letter to the chairman of the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities
In the summer of 1960, Amiri Baraka, then still known as LeRoi Jones, visited Cuba as part of a trip organized by the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, an activist group in support of the nascent Cuban revolution. (Incidentally, Baldwin was also an active member of the FPCC). Like Coates, Baraka was skeptical, intending to travel independently, stray from the beaten path, and absorb more than the official tour itinerary. He also wanted to maintain his position as a neutral “observer”, but found himself profoundly changed by the trip. Meeting soldiers, campesinos, students, and artists, Baraka was confronted by how little he knew. The practiced cynicism he arrived with was dismantled by the force of this realization. Havana’s poets nearly left him in tears. They ambushed him with questions he couldn’t adequately answer. He stuttered that he wasn’t interested in politics, only to be called a “cowardly bourgeois individualist” by an irate Mexican student. I doubt Coates ever faced a confrontation that hostile in Palestine, but Baraka’s encounters do prove that, sometimes, we need the truth of ourselves spat back in our faces. Baraka would go on to liken the art produced by his ilk to “bright flowers growing up through a rotting carcass”, deformed and celebrated by a “free world” of bankers, political pawns, and grasping industrialists. The residue of lies, “that thin crust we cannot even detect in our own thinking”, began to lift in Cuba, and Baraka, ever the poet, found this to be both an ecstatic and frightening experience.
“Pray that we are not part of the Western Empire, in soul.
In Our Terribleness
We know exactly
Who we are.”
— In Our Terribleness, Amiri Baraka
In Palestine, Coates sees it all. Six days in, and he felt like he'd been there for months. Checkpoints, pointed guns, bureaucratized sadism, segregated streets, segregated water supplies, differently coloured license plates, drones, observation towers, destroyed villages, sprawling settlements. The levers of the occupation in full function. A rule by the ballot for some and the bullet for others, as he describes it. Coates observes that Palestinians living in Israel have shorter lives, are poorer, and live in more violent neighbourhoods. One could also add that Palestinian and African American men have a similar life expectancy. Or that, in Britain, the manufacturing firm Arconic responsible for the highly flammable cladding which led to the Grenfell Tower fire also produces materials for Israeli fighter jets. The sky may be thick with smoke, but it’s still possible to read the signs.
Coates speaks to writers, scholars, journalists, and activists. Back home in the US, he sits with an elderly survivor of the Deir Yassin massacre. He wants to know as much as possible, listen to as many people as he can, to make up for all the time he has lost to lies. An admirable sense of shame flows through these essays. Coates admits to failing, to faltering where he should have prodded and questioned. Writing, for him, has the power to “expand the brackets of humanity”, and he now recognizes that the void of silence around Palestine has contributed towards a decades-long campaign of mass dehumanization. In his final essay, he admits to seeing Palestine and its people through “a kind of translation”, filtered through analogy. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Guilt-soaked acknowledgements and Damascene conversions shouldn't be the only things we have to offer. Contrast this need to keep a respectful distance, to centre and amplify Palestinian narratives, with the visceral recognition that a world that doesn’t see value in Palestinian life inevitably doesn’t see any in African life too. Dispossession is a shared fate. We just take turns on either side of the screen. I won’t be the first or last to note this, but one characteristic defining this era of political defeat is how feebly solidarity is imagined. The identity documents of countless volunteers tell another story. Sift through the archive of the Palestinian struggle and you will find them. Japanese, French, Norwegians. Bangladeshis, Sudanese. Fighters from all over the world, who made their way to Palestine, to a besieged Beirut, and defended the inhabitants of refugee camps. People don’t brave perilous routes for hundreds of miles or risk their lives for a goal as ambiguous and vacuous as ‘uplifting’ the voices of the oppressed. They do so because they recognise, as Ghassan Kanafani wrote, that striking one arm of imperialism anywhere is a blow to its collective body. “The corpus resists my analogies”, Coates writes, in deference. To me, he is resisting the implications of his own conclusions.
We have to reckon with how our dreams, desires, anxieties, and aspirations stand in the way of Palestinians and their freedom. This is a terrifying proposition. Like anyone else, I nurse my own ambitions. I can see the barbed wire around the discourse, the net of red lines. Coates doesn’t say as much, but you can feel him trying to land. When he recounts the professional marginalization a Palestinian American journalist has faced throughout her career, it’s an opportunity to consider the reverse: the many careers and livelihoods preserved by remaining silent in the face of genocidal terror whilst performing all other expected liberal pieties. Compliance and complacency pays. Coates laments his lapses in judgement, but they reveal who, by their very presence, represents an existential threat in these elite spaces. The collective is rewarded for not noticing who is excluded. That’s been the modus operandi for Black writers and intellectuals for longer than I or anyone reading this has been alive. You get rewarded for your polished indifference, for not making connections.
Are we willing to disentangle ourselves, at least in spirit, from the institutions which have condemned Palestinians to continued devastation? Many Black intellectuals won’t even do that for their own, so my expectations are subterranean. Black writers are indispensable, especially when you need someone to make an example out of. As a renowned defector from the establishment, Coates is treading a rocky path. You can’t deny that he could have chosen a less troublesome one. I suspect many of us are also trying to make sense of the way ahead.
I don’t really think too much about my responsibility as a writer. I’m responsible for the pain I carry and where I put it. I’m responsible for my small patch of seedlings at the local community garden. I’m responsible for where my heart lies, for the nourishment of my own curiosity. In some capacity, I’ve been mentoring young people for most of my adult life. I tell them to trust their instincts, to sit with what their gut tells them. To be relentlessly inquisitive, but understand that, sometimes, you were right the first time around. Violence has punctured the lives of many youngsters. It’s too late to coddle them, but one thing you can do is listen to them. You don’t have to travel to the West Bank to meet a young person who has witnessed a friend die in front of them. You can find that right here in London. Young people can recognise how empire has ripped apart their homelands, they can hardly bear the carnage they see on television screens. They struggle to reconcile their guilt with their rage, finding it impossible to separate themselves from their elsewheres. They see right through the craven hypocrisy of the adult world. Some of these young people have relatives from Palestine, family and friends who breathed life into imposed silences. Some of these young people are poets in Palestine, like nineteen-year-old Batool Abu Akleen, writing from her tent in Gaza, furiously editing and translating even after being repeatedly made homeless by Israeli bombs. The kind of institutions Coates teaches at are increasingly producing some of these keen-eyed young people, a source of panic for their funders. I trust in the youth and their alive hearts. I have faith in them because they are deserving, and because I was once one of them. They may not be writing students at Howard. Maybe they won’t get to be writers, or ever be published, but we can always meet off the page.
A lot of stupidity is celebrated at the altar of lived experience. Coates stresses the need to “walk the land”, instead of intuiting from the edge. But experience can be a conundrum out of which you and everything you know has emerged. It takes a problem to recognise one. Intuition loiters throughout “The Message”, a signal Coates alternately heeds and rejects. I would argue that what is called intuition is theoretical fortification. Sparks fly when personal cosmologies meet the rigours of research and study. Intuition, though, might just save your life. Intuition is armour, instinct, street smarts, weltschmerz, discernment, clocking and checking, peeping game. We can’t afford to dismiss it.
Returning to the epistolary mode, Coates urges his students and young writers everywhere to fulfil their role in saving the world. Various obstacles will make that a difficult feat, including but not limited to: censorship, underemployment, market demands, industry arm-twisting, collegial loyalties, popular taste, mortgages and KPIs, dependents, simmering resentments, and, of course, their own tightly-held delusions. “The Message” won’t delve into all that. It’s not that kind of book. And anyway, the road ahead of the precocious young writer begins open-ended, with as little baggage as possible. Coates, however, like many of us, would do well to remember that it took the child to reveal the emperor’s nudity, his threadbare morality.