Back in 2007/08, I was a regular reader of Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish at The Atlantic and, when I finished his articles, as I often did (I was working a particularly dull desk job at the time that afforded me plenty of time for reading), I’d read other writers’ pieces on the site. Ta-Nehisi Coates was one of these writers and I enjoyed his work much less than I did Sullivan’s - everything was race-related to Coates and, worse, his writing and points were both forgettable and vague.
A few years later I encountered him again incongruously in the comics world, where I read his equally poor Marvel superhero output - again, those stories were heavily race-focused (Black Panther and black Captain America aka Falcon), and I could barely tell you what they were about then let alone now! Awful stuff.
But Coates’ star has been rising steadily over the years regardless and apparently he’s quite popular now. I heard some good things about his latest book, The Message, and decided to give him one last try - yeah, he hasn’t changed in 17+ years. The Message is race-focused again, the writing is very low quality, the essays are either fluff or obvious, and the book as a whole was boring to read.
He frames this book as if he’s talking to a class for some reason, then says he wasn’t much of a student and still has trouble writing (believe me, it shows!). He goes to Dakar and finds it quite a pleasant place, contrary to what he was expecting for an African city. Then he goes to South Carolina where a school is trying to ban his books and a teacher is standing up to the decision. Nothing happens there - it’s just a silly paper tiger - and his books are safe.
That’s literally half the book. It’s terrible!
The second half is only slightly better and this half is entirely about his visit to Palestine/Israel for a literature festival. Assuming you haven’t bought into Israeli propaganda and know a bit about the issue, Coates isn’t going to blow your hair back with anything he says here.
And propaganda is his main point here, or The Message if you like: in the same way that American racists justified their treatment of black people during Jim Crow through a series of lies they pretended were facts, Israelis have convinced themselves of their right in treating Palestinians in the way they do. Wait - are you telling me that propaganda is self-serving lies?! What an incredible point to make.
He goes on to iterate that the Israeli government and military have created in Palestine an apartheid state that’s worse than Jim Crow ever was in the US (the South never controlled black people’s water - the Israelis control the Palestinians’). What’s been happening in Gaza these past few years is genocide, and long before that the Israelis have been brutally oppressing Palestinians for decades now.
To be fair to Coates, he does go into specifics as to how badly the Palestinians have been treated so this part of the book is informative - though very depressing - in that regard. It’s genuinely tragic that the legacy of the Holocaust is that the Israeli government/military went on to take the roles of the Nazis and continue their immoral behaviour on a different group of people.
But that’s all there really is to The Message: half a book of pointless inanity and half a book stating the obvious on the whole Israel/Palestine issue. Very underwhelming. I agree that writing is powerful but this writing certainly isn’t.
I don’t see what Coates’ fans seem to see in him. I don’t find him to possess an original mind, his words leave no impression behind, the constant circling back to race is tedious, and his anecdotes aren’t wise or interesting, they’re just blandly forgettable.
Here’s my message: Coates is a shallow thinker, a weak writer, and his books aren’t worth reading!
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