Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Temptations of Narrative

It is a truth only fitfully acknowledged that whom the gods wish to destroy, they first give an opinion column. “A live coffin,” a former newspaper colleague of mine once called hers. (She quit.) Such a space seems an impossible remit, created to coax out vague, vatic pronouncements as the writer, mind wrung dry of ideas, sets about a weary pantomime of thinking and feeling, outrage and offense.

Few writers have seemed as aware of the hazards of professional opinion-mongering as Ta-Nehisi Coates. “Columns are where great journalists go to die,” he once wrote. “Unmoored from the rigors of actually making calls and expending shoe leather, the reporter-turned-columnist often begins churning out musings originated over morning coffee and best left there.” And yet few writers have been pressed so needily into service as pundit, as prophet. Coates was a staff writer for The Atlantic and the author of a memoir of his childhood, “The Beautiful Struggle” (2008), when he exploded into the public consciousness with “The Case for Reparations,” a 2014 article for that magazine, which documented the long history and devastating reach of racist housing policies, and argued for restitution to the descendants of enslaved Black Americans.

Where “The Case for Reparations” advanced Coates’s claim with shores of evidence and stately, prosecutorial logic, his next book, “Between the World and Me” (2015), addressed to his fifteen-year-old son, followed the arc of feeling. “All our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth,” he wrote. “You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.” Toni Morrison anointed him heir to James Baldwin. Vanity Fair declared him “our most vital public intellectual.” There was some hyperbole, but also genuine awe of Coates’s range, his ambidexterity: the skill with which he synthesized acres of scholarship with deep reporting, the music and organization of his prose, the delight in ideas along with clear argumentation and unabashed, open emotion.

A collection of his Atlantic articles, “We Were Eight Years in Power” (2017), followed, then a novel, “The Water Dancer” (2019), set on a Virginia slave plantation. The main character, Hiram, seemed like a Coates stand-in, a man who has a preternatural capacity to remember and becomes the keeper of his people’s stories. Like Hiram, Coates was called to perform. At readings, teachers asked him to give their students hope. White columnists wrote him open letters, processing their own feelings about race, alternating between flattery and belligerence. Coates resisted. “The best part of writing is really to educate yourself. I don’t want to be anybody’s expert. I came in to learn,” he said in an interview with the Times. His writing depended on error, he insisted; it required space and privacy for the awkwardness and thrill of working out new ideas. He sought out projects that permitted him to be a student again, to learn new forms. He revitalized the Black Panther comics for Marvel and through the hero T’Challa brooded on the nature of power and public persona—is it skill that sets T’Challa apart or his mystique, his reputation? Coates co-founded a film-production company; he scripted a Superman movie. In 2021, he took a faculty position at Howard University to teach writing.

His new book, “The Message,” is addressed to his students. It is shaped like an extended craft talk on the uses and abuses of narrative, stretched over trips to Senegal, South Carolina, and Palestine—but, at its heart, it is a mea culpa. In “The Case for Reparations,” Coates invoked German reparations to Israel after the Holocaust as a model, disregarding what those reparations enabled. He now acknowledges that they allowed Zionists to displace some seven hundred thousand Palestinians, forbidding them to return to their land and property.

More than twice that number of people have been forced to leave their homes during the past year, in the war following Hamas’s attack of October 7th, in which twelve hundred were killed and two hundred and fifty-one taken hostage. In the subsequent Israeli onslaught, more than forty-one thousand Palestinians have been killed, and about a hundred thousand more have been maimed and mutilated. Countless others are missing. Israel has obliterated whole families; targeted hospitals, schools, and aid workers; and stopped passage of food, water, and medicine. For a year, Palestinians have live-streamed their own annihilation: parents mourning children, children mourning parents, amputations and C-sections performed without anesthesia, a NICU filled with the dead bodies of Palestinian infants. How, the reader wonders, will Coates use his talents now, his moral clarity, his reporting; how will he use his celebrity, and whatever platform or protection it implies? Is there something that only he can see, something that only he can say?

George Orwell’s essay “Why I Write” provides an epigraph for “The Message”: “In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.” It is an unsettling omen, this sentiment so uncharacteristic of Coates, who has always insisted that he is an artist, not an activist. He will no longer resist the role he has been assigned. He will be conscripted by the great emergencies of his age, a superhero reluctantly donning his mask, stepping into his destiny.

And there he is, doing the press rounds, sharing statements of support for Palestinian rights and Palestinian liberation that are forceful, clear, compelling, and still relatively rare in mainstream media. But the book he is promoting feels strangely out of step, slipshod and assembled in haste. “The Message” is stitched together with haphazard reporting, and it suppurates with such self-regard that it feels composed by the very enemy of a writer who has so strenuously scorned carelessness and vague pronouncement. It is a public offering seemingly designed for private ends, an artifact of deep shame and surprising vanity which reads as if it had been conjured to settle its author’s soul. The precepts on craft and narrative gather underfoot, tangled and unheeded.

When Coates was a child, his mother, a schoolteacher, would make him write essays whenever he got into trouble, explaining how and why he had erred. Revision and self-critique can be seen as a native form, a beat. “We Were Eight Years in Power” follows this model. Each essay in the collection is framed by an introduction in which Coates revisits the making of the piece, often to analyze its flaws. He examines, for example, his big break: a 2008 profile of Bill Cosby. For years, Coates had been hearing rumors of Cosby drugging and raping women. Why had he failed to follow up on these reports, why had he minimized the charges that had already come to light? It was his first assignment at The Atlantic, he notes with chagrin; he wanted to write the story his way.

As I reread this essay in a library copy of “We Were Eight Years in Power,” I noticed that a previous borrower had lightly circled certain words in pencil. On page 10: “unsullied” and “sublime.” On page 71: “stratagem,” “sable.” On page 73: “ennobling.” Someone once used this book to learn English, or to perfect it. These little labors felt moving, and apt, in the context of Coates’s own lifelong project of passionate autodidacticism, of learning in public. The blog he once kept for The Atlantic felt like his writer’s notebook cracked open for all to see, showing his thinking; his commentators tested his ideas, suggested additional reading. He has always been fuelled by a sensitivity to language and a greed for narrative, which he traces back to childhood. In “The Message,” he describes the enchantment and escape he found in Sports Illustrated articles, the rapper Rakim’s lyrics, and “Macbeth.”

A story can explain the world as well as distort and occlude it; Coates impresses on his students narrative’s risks and temptations. In his section on Senegal, he considers the origin myths of colonialism: “For such a grand system, a grand theory had to be crafted and an array of warrants produced, all of them rooted in a simple assertion of fact: The African was barely human at all.” In his section on South Carolina, where his books, among others by Black writers, have been pulled from school curricula for making students “ashamed to be Caucasian,” he considers how American history itself is being rewritten, scrubbed and sanitized. “I am trying to urge you toward something new,” he writes to his students, “not simply against their myths of conquest, but against the urge to craft your own.” He is familiar with this longing; he knows how it can be stoked by the theft and erasure of one’s own history. He recalls it in the Black-nationalist literature that his father loved: “I’d seen it all my life in the invocations of great kingdoms and ancient empires—a search for provenance and noble roots.” The discipline of his craft, of journalism, can be a check, as he imparts to his students the lesson “to walk the land, as opposed to intuit and hypothesize from the edge.”