Henry Abbott

It’s an odd thing for a writer to come down against the idea of complexity.

Writing lives, as Adam Shatz observed, “in the verbs, not the nouns … in the distance, sometimes the chasm, between words and deeds.” Complicating a subject is, in many ways, the bread and butter for writers. And yet in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s compelling new book, “The Message,” he argues that sometimes calling something “complex” might be a way to obscure, to deflect and even to free ourselves of blame.

This is especially true in how we talk about the Israeli occupation of Palestine, Coates writes.

“The Message” is divided into three sections of uneven length, and, I would argue, uneven tone and quality. The first is about Coates’s trip to Senegal, where he explores the legacy and the scars of slavery; the second concerns his visit to South Carolina where he encounters a public school that wants to ban his books because they make white students feel “uncomfortable”; the third and longest section is about his visit to Palestine. I will let you guess which one has earned the most press.

In “Between the World and Me,” the book that made Coates a household name, Coates writes a letter to his then-teenage son about how America has always tried to kill Black bodies. Coates again uses the epistolary form in “The Message,” although this time he is addressing his journalism students at Howard University.

Coates has said in interviews that “The Message” is a book about writing, but almost all of its coverage has made it out to be about everything but writing. That is a shame, because Coates’s advice on writing is one I think we should all heed.

The book begins with Coates, his students all huddled around him, extolling the virtues of writing “in service of that larger emancipatory mandate.” The scene gave me chills, if only because over the last year we have seen journalists, especially American journalists, go to great lengths to find language to downplay the genocide unfolding in Gaza. Here then, in contrast, is a towering figure like Coates telling his students that our duty as storytellers, above all, is to keep it simple, to call it what it is.

Coates writes, “There has to be something in you, something that hungers for clarity. And you will need that hunger, because if you follow that path, soon enough you will find yourself confronting not just their myths, not just their stories, but your own.”

In “The Message,” Coates does just this: challenging ourselves and himself to re-write the stories that many of us were told were true. In the Senegal chapter, my personal favorite, he talks about being overcome with emotion when he visits the continent of Africa for the first time and sees the booming skyscrapers of Dakar. Much of the project of dehumanizing Black life in America, Coates reminds us, has been an effort to cast Africa as an uncivilized wasteland. Coates has always known that story to be untrue, but to witness the fallacy of that argument in person, by being in Africa, is an entirely different experience, and Coates writes of his experience in Senegal with tenderness and eloquence.

Coates then moves on to South Carolina, where he tries to figure out why some schools want to ban his book. It’s a moving chapter, if only because it is there that he expounds on the central thesis of the book, the idea that to be a better writer, and to be a better human, one must always be revising one’s definition of the self, of history, of place, even of the “sacred.”

The book finds its energy, and its footing, when he travels to Palestine. Coates acknowledges that while he was aware of the Israeli occupation, he did not know the extent of Israel’s wanton disregard for Palestinian life. The experience fills him with anger, not just at himself, but at his fellow journalists who conceal the reality of the occupation and refuse to listen to Palestinian voices.

He writes, for example, of seeing Palestinian homes with water tanks because Israel has cut off their water supply. In the distance, Coates observes Israeli settlers lounging poolside.

What makes this chapter unique are the parallels Coates makes between the abuses Palestinians are subjected to by Israel and America’s treatment of Black people. Coates concludes by saying that when you see something—especially an injustice on the scale of the Israeli occupation—it should demand that you speak of it in the clearest way possible.

Parts of the book, I should note, left me wanting for more. In the chapter on Senegal, Dakar becomes the backdrop for Coates to ruminate about his life. It is no doubt moving, but I would have liked more insight into what he saw there. And the chapter on Palestine felt at times not congruent with the casual, folksy “you” form the book employs. I also wanted Coates to wrestle more about why he, one of America’s leading intellectuals, has remained silent on Israel’s occupation for so long.

There is, of course, a cost of speaking up for Palestinian rights, as we have witnessed at colleges and universities over the past year. Even a person of Coates’s stature is not immune. Last week, a CBS journalist told Coates that his book is one that might be found in the backpack of an “extremist.”

In some ways, Coates’s mistreatment by a CBS news anchor proves the very point and purpose of “The Message” and brings us back to the advice Coates gives his students in the opening scene: Sometimes you have to tell a story not despite the fact that it will scare someone, but because you have no doubt it will.

Zahir Janmohamed is an assistant professor of English at Bowdoin College.