The Message, by Ta-Nehisi Coates. This wasn’t really what I was expecting, based on the summary I’d read, but it’s always worthwhile to spend some time with Coates, and he had some great insights. It’s about how our stories about ourselves can affect our realities – very much in line with my own work on meta-narratives, although he doesn’t use that word and is writing much closer to his experience. He starts with some thoughts on writing and how important it is to him, then he takes us on three journeys. First he visits Senegal, where he spends some time by himself and some time with others, considering what it’s like to be on the very coast where some of his ancestors may have been stolen away from Africa. Then he heads to South Carolina, impulsively deciding to help a white teacher who wants to be allowed to keep teaching one of his books by showing up at the school board meeting – her supporters were many and the topic was dropped. Finally, he spends more than half of the book following up on his famous earlier essay on reparations, in which he’d blithely discussed the idea of German reparations to help found Israel. Now he heads to Palestine and Israel, spending considerable time both with Palestinians and with Israelis who are working against the evils of the settlement system, and delves deeply into the history of the region and the explicitly colonial intentions of the Zionists, while also commenting on the strangeness of history that allowed the Jews to shift from being “black” or otherwise Othered to “white” by having their own modern country as an outpost among “savages.” Very interesting and thoughtful.
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