Coates - The Message

Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Message was controversial from the moment it came out. Predictably, it was condemned by pro-Israel factions because it asserted that apartheid had been imposed on Palestinians for decades.

The Message is as much about what writing is as it is about the three settings it describes - Senegal, South Carolina, Israel and the West Bank. Coates begins The Message by describing the critical importance of writing. Returning to his childhood experience, Coates describes not doing well in classrooms that required order, attention, and dutiful learning. But to his credit and our benefit, he turned this "not quite right" for conventional learning into inspiration for his artistry as an author - thinking outside the square box, unwilling to sit still when curiosity calls for disruption. Calling others to write, he urges the type of writing that attempts to draw attention to our common humanity and the struggles that are part of it.

Coates demonstrates that hardship is the stimulus for many writers' greatest works by relating the depravation of African Americans in the U.S. to that of Palestinians. Both experiences have been catalysts for profound insight. "A literature fueled by a profound human experience must necessarily burn at a high flame, and thus a 'material handicap' is transformed into a 'spiritual advantage,' putting in the hands of the oppressed 'the conditions of a classical art'" which is a condition "as true for those laboring under the shadow of enslavement as it is for those laboring under the shadow of apartheid" (p. 228).

Describing his travel to Senegal, a place that at first felt very foreign but then became all too familiar, Coates reflected on the irony of how hard people who subjugate others must work. The "plunderers are human beings whose violent ambitions must contend with the guilt that gnaws at them when they meet the eyes of their victims" (p. 28). The construction of race in early American experience was an essential tool to put those of African descent in a position that denied them their humanity. The further irony is that the denigration of Africans and the denial of the value of their culture spawned imagination of an idyllic Eden-like place that became the bedrock of hope under inhumane circumstances.

Upon visiting Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, Coates grew to acknowledge the very real contemporary existence of an apartheid state. Apartheid is defined in international law as "inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them" (p. 215). It depends on how one reads this section of The Message, but I did not see blame in calling out the policies and social conditions that Palestinians experience. Coats instead describes in considerable detail how Israel came to be in the aftermath of  pogroms, concentration camps, and the annihilation of 6 million Jews during WWII. The promised land to which European and then Jews of other national origins would flee was sanctioned by an international coalition embarrassed and frightened by what the world had just witnessed. And, the new freedom of a Jewish state, and the Zionist movement within it, was the source of power that allowed expansion of Israel into territories that were promised to Palestine and resulted in imposition of conditions that, if experienced anywhere else in the world, would have immediately drawn condemnation. Of course, "Every single empire in its official discourse has said that is is not like all the others" (quote from Edward Said, p. 139). The results are undeniable - "Palestinians living in Israel have shorter lives, are poorer and live in more violent neighborhoods" and their movement is controlled by "'admission committees'... that "are free to bar anyone lacking 'social suitability' or 'compatibility with the social and cultural fabric'" of Jewish areas. Zionism's claim to Israel as their homeland is clearly a form of colonialism and is confirmed in one of the ideologies' founders, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda who pronounced, "The land of our fathers is waiting for us; let us colonize it" (p. 158).

The analysis provided by Coates is reinforced by Isreali historian, Ilan Pappe. The settler colonialism of Jews in Israel depended on Zionism and its declaration that Palestine was the home for its people. Jews arriving in Palestine in the early 20th century knew that they needed to push Arabs out and that domination in economic terms was essential. This domination, and a romantic nationalism based on establishing a Jewish state, emerged after the partition accelerated and as Jews fled Europe and its legacy of anti-Semitism. Pappe's conclusion is that decolonization of Palestine is inevitable, but only when a one-state solution is negotiated.

Coates connects his cultural origin from Africans brought to America against their will and condemned to an unequal and lesser status with the plight of Palestinians where none "is ever the equal of any Jewish person anywhere" (p. 125). Coates makes the point that the structure, stratification, and changeless destiny of Palestinians is as clear in the West Bank and Gaza as it was in South Africa and America before civil rights.

As I drafted this summary, I pondered the connection between assertions by Coates that "Politics is the art of the possible, but art creates the possible of politics" (p. 105) and Pablo Picasso's "prosperity is a hypothesis - an artist works with what he has here and now" (Picasso Museum, Malaga, Spain). These assertions, starting with reality in order to envision possibility, captures the essence of Coates' The Message. In an era where Israel is perpetrating atrocities akin to those to which Jews were subjected under Nazi persecution, we must start by considering the potential that Israel's "right to defend itself" has gone too far. Then the stalemate in negotiations between Hamas and Israel can be broken and the long-envisioned possibility of a two-state solution will be possible.