Every story is imbued with the biographies of those who hear and repeat it. And so each story gets distorted some. We can lose the author’s original intent.
It’s fitting then that I came to assume that Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new collection of essays published in the fall — one year after the Hamas attack on Israel — was exclusively about the Israeli-Palestine conflict. Notably including a CBS Morning interview, what I heard about the book was centered on the conflict.
Instead “The Message” is a curated archive of private reflections and political commentary informed by short trips Coates took to several locations to reflect on race, justice and U.S. foreign policy. Just the final chapter features a few days he spent in Israel and Palestine. The book’s overall message is less about any single conflict and more what he describes as a moral responsibility of the writer to speak plainly in moments of great public consequence.
Below my notes.
My notes:
- Orwell: “In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.”
- His first chapter: journalism is not a luxury
- James Baldwin: “Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life”
- The goal of writing is to “haunt” — to have readers think of your words before bed
- Frederick Douglas: the “icy domain” of freedom “in the hazy distance” over the horizon
- “Genius’ may or may not help a writer whose job is above all else to clarify”
- Audre Lorde: “the quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live”
- Sonia Sanchez: let my feet grow in the new dance of growth (rebirth)
- Josiah Nott is one slaveholder who also put time into justifying why slaves deserved it (like so many who seek to justify other injustices)
- French invading Egypt in 1799 set off Egyptology in which racists had to justify Egypt’s greatness with African stereotypes
- St Clair Drake: “vindicationist tradition” of modern blacks reclaiming Egypt and other black history
- Toni Morrison: physical beauty is “probably the most destructive idea in the history of human thought”
- Senegal’s Goree is an “imagined place” (didn’t play as big a role in slave trade as once thought) and we all can have imagined “ those traditions and places are most powerful when we confess that they are imagined.”
- Of Black people: “We know the beauty of this house – it’s limestone steps, it’s waines coating, it’s marble baths. But more, we know that the house is haunted, that there is blood in the bricks and ghosts in the attic. We know that there is both tragedy and comedy in this condition” 59
- Paulo Freire: “banking” system of education in which students are judged by receiving and storing, not critiquing info
- Ezra Pound, a known bigot, wrote that “the monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead” and so the author asks what does it mean that “the shape and rhythm of words” is well done? ((As this reminds of the “art of monstrous men, my friend Patrick points out this reminds of this Terrance Hayes poem: “How, with pipes of winter lining his cognition, does someone learn to bring a sentence to its knees?))
- “Great cannons angle toward great power, and the great privilege of great power is an incuriosity about those who lack it. That incuriosity is what affects the dullest critics of safe spaces and the like”
- “I don’t really worry about the young, who’s excesses are confined to lecture halls and quadrangles, so much as I fear the old, whose tyrannies are legislative.”
- Jamal Khashoggi liked Arabic proverb: say your word then leave
- Of his books banned
- “I understand the impulse to dismiss the import of the summer of 2020… But policy change is an endpoint, not an origin. The cradle of material change is in our imagination and ideas.”
- Noura Erakat: We have all been lied to about too much
- The Book of Names gives like a star In a night sky, a clear fixed point in the endless; “it clarifies”
- Of highlights at Yad Vashem Holocaust museum about heroism, he writes: “I felt guilty for needing these rare moments of narrative relief, if only because writing has taught me the virtue of facing horror with no demand for a cheap and easy hope”
- His writing path to his big Reparations Atlantic story, in which his feelings and ideas and words matched to convey an idea: “ the persistence of our want was matched exactly to the persistence of our plunder”
- But complexity he later learned was the reparations model he had was of Germany to Jewish state, not to people: “I was seeking a world beyond plunder – but my proof of concept was just more plunder.”
- “You can see the world and still never see the people in it. Empires are founded by travelers, and the claim of some exclusive knowledge of the native is their mark.”
- Edward Said: “Every single empire, and it’s official discourse has said that it is not like all the other others”
- Stories of enforced occupation in the territories
- Amos Elon: archaeology in Israel is “almost a national sport “in pursuit of “the reassurance of roots”
- Or as Ben-Gurion called it ”the sacrosanct feed to Palestine”
- Early Zionism sounds familiar, but became part of white project
- Yad Vashem is “convenient for the state project” of Israel
- Deir Yassin massacre: he closes his book speaking to Hassan Jaber
- Harriet Jacobs and Ida B Wells shout out and WEB Dubois as using the reporting and narrative to correct and redraw the “boundaries of the world”
- “Great wealth has almost the same relationship to creating great writers as it does great basketball players” the “material handicap is transformed into a spiritual advantage” 229
- Maha Nassar: 1979-2019, less than 2% of opinion pieces discussing Palestine had Palestinian authors
- Author says that’s neither conspiracy nor a coincidence — it’s not always what’s said is wrong but what’s not ever said
- A story told only by the colonizer: Palestine needs “new messengers,” and this is part of the message, that the story is forever incomplete