The Power of Writing

Ta-Nehisi Coates in his new book of essays, The Message, offers us an eloquent defence of why writing matters most as a political gesture. It is a compelling read, structured around four beautifully crafted essays on diverse themes – the true calling of journalism, the place of Africa in the world, the challenges of censorship and the Israeli state’s ‘apartheid’ vis-à-vis the Palestinians.

Coates breaks fresh ground on each of these counts in his own persuasive idiom. The essays demonstrate empathy, nuance and attention to facts in equal measure. Although the themes are substantive, the style is accessible and a pleasure to engage with.

The opening essay is titled ‘Journalism is not a luxury’. It advances a number of thoughtful propositions but I shall confine myself to three. The first is an admission by Coates that for writers emerging from a particular historical and intellectual crucible ‘…there can be no real distance between writing and politics’. Coates tells us something about his debt to Afro-American traditions of thinking. It was Howard University in particular that instilled in him the urgency and value of working towards an ‘emancipatory mandate’. The challenges and trajectories of these emancipatory projects could transform over time, but Coates recognises that there is always work to be done. The dismantling of ‘easy bromides’ and ‘national fictions’ remains an incessant task that journalists must dedicate themselves to. The Message needs to ring home in contemporary India.

Second, Coates argues that ‘…what must be cultivated and cared for must first be seen’. The task of the writer here is to render palpable what has oftentimes been hidden from view. Illustratively, ‘…it should do the work of illuminating, of confronting and undoing, the violence…’ witnessed from close quarters. Coates embarks on an interesting distinction between two kinds of writers. The first who can conjure worlds from ‘imagination’, the second who have to rely much more on tangible ‘knowledge’ to advance their claims. He lets us know that he belongs to the latter category and is keen to secure knowledge to excavate a truth. In other words, The Message here is not to hesitate to dig deep and get into the trenches whenever and wherever warranted.

Third, Coates also identifies another stellar quality of good journalistic writing, namely the capacity to ‘haunt’ the reader. Readers must feel an irrepressible urge to ‘…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?”’. This is a high bar for most writers, but when it does meet the criterion, it elevates your being. The best of journalistic prose embodies a visceral dimension.

In ‘On Pharaohs’, Coates embarks on a journey to discover his ancestry and the story behind his name. He travels to Dakar in Senegal and laments the many misplaced claims of western commentators with deep racial biases, who are bent on portraying Africa in unpalatable terms. Coates spends some time examining the anxieties of these racists in conceding that there is a Black Egypt or a Black civilisation. They cannot come to terms with Senegalese physical beauty. Nor can they extricate themselves from their unexamined premises of colonialism, enslavement, racial stereotyping and most sadly, the denial of humanity to the people of Africa. White supremacy, we learn from Coates, is not without ‘…its syllabus, its corpus, its canon’.

The Message also carries a riveting account of what transpired in Chapin, South Carolina when it comes to a book ban. A school teacher who is keen to expose students to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book Between the World and Me invites attention and flak for transgressing her ‘Advanced Placement English’ teaching brief. Coates offers us an alternate account of American history through the work of Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of The 1619 Project, which traces the origin story of the United States to slavery. Coates focuses on pieces of legislation like Executive Order 13950 which takes censorship to draconian proportions. The murder of George Floyd, the hostility towards critical race theory and the attempt to coral our future through regressive legal and political decisions, all secure the attention they merit in this narrative arc. For some readers, Coates’ own struggles with ADHD in school and the acknowledgment that ‘…all readers do not come to a text equally’ may indeed be liberating on a more fundamental plane.

The best is always saved for the last. Coates’ final essay, ‘The Gigantic Dream’, takes us on a journey from Yad Vashem through a variety of checkpoints in Gaza, the West Bank and Tel Aviv. What is fascinating in this account is the recognition of a common cause among Palestinian freedom fighters and radical Black activists in their evaluation of layers of oppression and their struggles to combat it. Imperialism authored by the United States with local chapters (Israel) is a running thread in this essay. It weaves its way through stories of Confederate flags, slavery, settler colonialism, the nakba, communal intimacy and the deliberate ‘erasures’ of Palestinians in a ‘Jewish democracy’ (Israel) and Blacks in another democracy (the United States). This is an invitation to take a leaf out and ask how Dalits, religious and sexual minorities fare in Indian democracy. Sceptical of the smokescreen of ‘objectivity’ in journalism, Coates reminds us of the vital need to recount ‘other stories’ that only writers with deeper political convictions can bring to bear from the margins of the world. These stories count and good writers, Coates would like us to believe, can offer us serious redemption in these unsettling times.

A final nugget from the book that is worth sharing. Coates claims that ‘…you can see the world and still not see the people in it’. This is a genuine possibility. If you listen to a more boisterous slice of the Indian middle class, it is not hard to discern that many have precisely accomplished this. They have learnt little from their travels and lapse into their ethnocentric habits of mind without self-reflexivity. The challenge is not to replicate this blindness in our classrooms. It is to ensure that a new generation of Indians learn to ‘see’ better than this and appreciate the nuances of political writing and its possible afterlives. The Message provides us an excellent vantage point for this self-reflection.

Siddharth Mallavarapu is Professor of International Relations and Governance Studies at the Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence. Views are personal.