The Message

“Haunt. You’ve heard me say this word a lot. It is never enough for the reader of your words to be convinced. The goal is to haunt— to have them think about your words before bed, see them manifest in their dreams, tell their partner about them the next morning, to have them grab random people on the street, shake them and say, ‘Have you read this yet?’”

Coates dramatizes the power of words here to help the reader and his primary audience understand the power of storytelling. The comparison between impactful writing and haunting is an example of metaphor.

“I think the only way I ultimately survived was through stories. Because as much as stories could explain my world, they could also allow me to escape into others.”

As a boy in Baltimore, Coates was subject to violence in the streets and misunderstanding in school. His identity was defined by key elements in his environment. Through the power of storytelling, Coates was able to escape and define himself in ways that later proved to be consequential.

“[W]e are charged with examining the stories we have been told, and how they undergird the politics we have accepted, and then telling new stories ourselves. The systems we oppose are systems of oppression, and thus inherently systems of cowardice. They work best in the dark.”

Coates defines the importance of storytelling as its ability to disrupt hierarchies of power that disadvantage the oppressed. The purpose of such writing is to reveal the working of that system. Coates is also describing the idea of history as a narrative constructed in the service of hiding that power dynamic. Coates casts the writer and journalist in a powerful role here and throughout the remainder of the collection.

“I’ve been traveling—Senegal, South Carolina, Palestine. But I’m home now, and with me I bring my belated assignment—notes on language and politics, on the forest, on writing. I’ve addressed these notes directly to you, though I confess that I am thinking of young writers everywhere whose task is nothing less than doing their part to save the world.”

Coates is speaking directly to his primary audience—students from his Howard University writing workshop—and charging them with the task of saving the world; such a charge shows his belief in The Power of Storytelling. This passage is also one in which Coates connects to his identity as a writer trying to his travel through different spaces. Direct experience of places as sources of truth fits in with his self-identification as a journalist.

“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.”

Coates explores The Political Impact of Historical Narratives on the representation of Africans. The underlying point is that these dehumanizing narratives are constructed in the service of determining a specific reality, one in which the powerful have a warrant for their oppression of Africans.

“That explains our veneration of Black pharaohs and African kingdoms. The point was to tell a different story than the one imposed on us—an understandable response, but one that I’ve never made peace with.”

Coates describes the “vindicationist tradition” as an effort by Black Americans to intervene in the historical narrative by recasting the oppressive narratives of racist historians like Josiah Nott. As a journalist, Coates is always suspicious of narratives that rely on feeling instead of fact. His objection here is that such narratives mythologize reality.

“My distant dream of Africa was fading as I sat there across from two Africans, two individuals who I had come to like very much as people—their ease, their humor. We were linked by related traumas of colonialism and enslavement. But even now I am wondering what was there and what I projected, and whether this feeling of having tracked down long-lost siblings was real or imagined.”

Coates describes his feelings as he talked with actual Senegalese people instead of retreating into his ideas about Senegalese people. Being in Senegal enabled him to see that while Africa is not home, it may be a place where he shares the experience of having been shaped by a particular history of oppression. Coates presents his effort to describe this connection with specificity, a problem that illustrates how difficult it can be to write narratives that use truth to counter the false narratives advanced by oppressors.

“‘I don’t think we are going to get back to Africa.’ My father did not mean this physically. He meant the Africa of our imagination, that glorious Eden we conjured up as exiles, a place without the Mayflower, Founding Fathers, conquistadors, and the assorted corruptions they had imposed on us. That Africa could no longer even be supported in his imagination.”

Coates relies on the words of his father to discredit Black Americans’ mythologization of Africa as a historical construct that doesn’t match up to reality. There is a certain wistfulness here in both Coates and his father that shows the difficulty of letting go of such narratives even when one knows them to be false.

“We are, Black people, here and there, victims of the West—a people held just outside its liberal declarations, but kept close enough to be enchanted with its promises. We know the beauty of this house—its limestone steps, its wainscoting, its marble baths. But more, we know that the house is haunted, that there is blood in the bricks and ghosts in the attic.”

Coates uses an extended metaphor comparing Western civilization to a haunted house. The ghost is racism and enslavement. The blood in the bricks signifies that Western culture is built on the plundering of enslaved people. The ornamental steps, wainscoting, and baths cover over the true foundation of Western civilization. Coates uses this metaphor to describe the profound alienation that Black Americans experience vis a vis both Africa and the West.

“[L]ike many people, I best remember a concept when I can analyze it and place it in the real world. In this, I am fortunate to have found writing, a form that must make the abstract and distant into something tangible and felt.”

These sentences encapsulate what Coates does as a journalist: use language and specific, concrete detail to shape people’s apprehension of reality. Here, Coates is referencing one of the powers of storytelling.

“History is not inert but contains within it a story that implicates or justifies political order.”

Coates represents history as in the process of being made through narrative. It is thus a construction that is shaped either by the demands of powerful interests or by those of disruptive interests, which is what Coates believes writers should be.

“But books work when no one else is looking, mind-melding author and audience, forging an imagined world that only the reader can see. Their power is so intimate, so insidious, that even its authors don’t always comprehend it.”

Coates is here describing The Power of Storytelling to act on the consciousness of readers. The importance of stories and narratives (especially historical ones) is such that they are contested by multiple groups—disempowered people, power interests, and artists, who are intermediaries between people and their realities.

“[W]e have the burden of crafting new language and stories that allow people to imagine that new policies are possible. And now, even here in Chapin, some people, not most (it is hardly ever most), had, through the work of Black writers, begun that work of imagining.”

Coates points out that many of the people out defending the reading of books that challenge the status quo arrived at the action through reading groups where people encounter unfamiliar ways of looking at the world. The act of reading—not just writing—is powerful.

“Novels, memoirs, paintings, sculptures, statues, monuments, films, miniseries, advertisements, and journalism all order our reality. Jim Crow segregation—with its signage and cap-doffing rituals—was both policy and a kind of public theater.”

Coates explicitly argues for the power of art—including writing—to shape the historical narrative. Here, he suggests that the imagery of Jim Crow segregation shaped reality in the South just as other forms of expression do, giving shape to a historical narrative that underwrote and continues to underwrite racism in Chapin.

“The statues and pageantry can fool you. They look like symbols of wars long settled, fought on behalf of men long dead. But their Redemption is not about honoring a past. It’s about killing a future.”

Art can also prevent people from seeing the reality of their situation. Coates notes that the statues of Confederates and South Carolinians who committed racial violence against Black South Carolinians still stand on the grounds of the South Carolina capitol. Coates highlights that these seeming symbols of the past help construct a historical narrative that has the ability to shape the present as well. The statues are thus a symbol for The Political Impact of Historical Narratives.

“[R]ace is a species of power and nothing else.”

Coates processes what he saw of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians through the lens of America’s racial politics. Initially, he tried to compare this treatment to Jim Crow in the United States. When that comparison didn’t quite work, he retreated to the general, a move counter to his usual preference as a journalist to retreat to the specific to understand reality. Still, Coates’s point here is that racism is fundamentally about wielding power over others, not about race itself.

“I want to tell you I was wrong. I want to tell you that your oppression will not save you, that being a victim will not enlighten you, that it can just as easily deceive you. I learned that here. In Haifa.”

One purpose of The Message and this essay in particular is to make atonement for Coates’s erasure of the Palestinian people. His point is that coming from an oppressed group doesn’t automatically confer on the writer or artist the capacity to see oppressive narratives for what they are. Just like laypeople, artists are subject to the same gravity.

“I am a writer and a bearer of a tradition, a writer and a steward. And what I felt sitting there on top of that hill, in residency with myself, was that if my writing had soared, my stewardship had faltered.”

Coates makes a distinction between the writer’s commitment to craft and the writer’s commitment to ethics—in this case, the responsibility to use writing to structure historical narratives that support liberation rather than undercutting it. That deep disappointment in himself is an important part of the persona that he presents in the fourth essay of the collection.

“But it is the journalists themselves who are playing god—it is the journalists who decide which sides are legitimate and which are not, which views shall be considered and which pushed out of the frame. And this power is an extension of the power of other curators of the culture—network execs, producers, publishers—whose core job is deciding which stories get told and which do not. When you are erased from the argument and purged from the narrative, you do not exist. Thus the complex of curators is doing more than setting pub dates and greenlighting—they are establishing and monitoring a criterion for humanity.”

Coates points out that the factors leading to the erasure of the Palestinian people and the endorsement of Israel’s national narrative about itself are institutional. This quote also describes the powerful role that journalism plays in constructing historical narratives. Coates implicates himself in this erasure as well, but that rhetorical move allows him to point out the equal guilt of everyone else in his profession.

“Writing all of this now casts the illusion that I understood how the pieces of knowledge connected— Avner’s stories, the byzantine lines of occupation, the bromides, the articles. But they came together in moments.”

Avner was one of Coates’s guides in Israel and a member of Breaking the Silence, an anti-occupation group consisting of former Israel Defense Forces soldiers. What Coates is describing is all the elements that go into a narrative that erases Palestinians. In doing so, he highlights the constructed nature of historical narrative and the negative impact of narratives crafted only from the viewpoint of the powerful.

“[B]etrayal for the way they reported, for the way they’d laundered open discrimination, for the voices they’d erased. And the anger was for my own past—for Black Bottom, for Rosewood, for Tulsa—which I could not help but feel being evoked here.”

Black Bottom, Rosewood, and Tulsa are places where racists used violence to eject Black Americans from their property and, in some cases, killed Black Americans. When Coates compares what is happening in Israel and Palestine to what happened at those sites, he is comparing Israel to American white supremacists and Palestinians to the victims of white supremacist violence. This is a controversial equivalence that represents Coates’s effort to wrap his mind around the idea of a historically oppressed people oppressing others.

“This effort that I saw, the use of archaeology, the destruction of ancient sites, the pushing of Palestinians out of their homes, had the specific imprimatur of the United States of America. Which means that it had my imprimatur. This was not just another evil done by another state, but an evil done in my name.”

Coates describes just how storytelling and the construction of historical narratives impact what is happening to the Palestinian people. While he was in Israel, Coates had to redefine his identity because of where he was as a Black American abroad. He is a member of a historically oppressed group who nevertheless has a national identity that makes him a participant, tacit or not, in oppression of others. In addition, calling out American collusion in the erasure of people helps Coates accrue the authority he needs to denounce that action.

“An inhumane system demands inhumans, and so it produces them in stories, editorials, newscasts, movies, and television. Editors and writers like to think they are not part of such systems, that they are independent, objective, and arrive at their conclusions solely by dint of their reporting and research. But the Palestine I saw bore so little likeness to the stories I read, and so much resemblance to the systems I’ve known, that I am left believing that at least here, this objectivity is self-delusion. It’s not that the facts of the stories are so wrong—though sometimes it is that—it is what is not said, the passive voice, the ceding of authority to military flacks, the elevation of factual complexity over self-evident morality.”

Stories, editorials, newscasts, movies, and television are all part of the cultural apparatus by which power interests construct historical narratives for their own benefit. In pointing out the constructed nature of that narrative, Coates is making the argument that there is nothing natural about the erasure or misrepresentation of Palestinians. He is also appealing to values—morality—to defend against the likely accusation that his story is too one-sided for a journalist expected to report objectively. Coates redefines, in this case, what it is to be a journalist.