欧宝娱乐

Another excellent and thought-provoking read from Coates. Like Between the World and Me, it offers no easy solutions to the problems it highlights -- focusing mostly on the importance of further writing, further conversation and self-education to uplift the narratives of those who have been erased. As Coates says toward the beginning: "this tradition of writing, of drawing out a common humanity, is indispensable to our future, if only because what must be cultivated and cared for must first be seen."

Unlike Between the World and Me, The Message is more loosely focused. It reads somewhat like a writer's journal, as we hear the author working through new information and revelations, putting diverse experiences together to synthesize a new understanding, rather than arguing for one particular approach or resolution. This is not a criticism. It feels appropriate for the subject matters involved. As he suggests himself toward the end, this is an ongoing process both for the author and the readers: "I felt that I was still waking up, feel that I am still waking up, still searching for the right words."

The book reminded me of a triptych -- three separate panels that speak to one another but seem distinct until you look at them all side by side and begin to see the thematic connections. This approach was effective, though for me it took a little time and patience to figure out where the author was going with this book. The experiences he relates are difficult and messy and overwhelming, so his style makes sense.

The first 'panel' of the triptych is Coates' journey to Senegal. He shares all the powerful feelings this trip evoked, and ponders how a 'return to Africa' for African Americans is a potent but strange experience, looking for an ancestral home that may exist only as an ideal. He talks about how his own name Ta-Nehisi is meant to evoke a sense of connection with Egypt, which opens up all sorts of questions about how Egypt has been seen and appropriated over the eons, but his major revelation is that one can and must draw a distinction between having an ideal image of one's ancestral roots, without trying to physically find or reclaim them.

Coates says it better than I can, so it is worth quoting: "We have a right to our imagined traditions, to our imagined places, and those traditions and places are most powerful when we confess that they are imagined. We have a right to imagine ourselves as pharaohs, and then again the responsibility to ask if a pharaoh is even worthy of our needs, our dreams, our imagination."

The second panel of the triptych covers Coates' experiences with the American education system, from his own upbringing to the recent furor over book bans in schools that often focus on his own books. Here, he finds cause for both hope and despair. He describes an educational system that is about the passive reception and regurgitation of information rather than the development of critical thinking skills. It is a system meant to create certain kinds of citizens, who buy into the national narrative, and deliberately downplays or erases points of view that do not serve that narrative: "Great canons angle toward great power, and the great privilege of great power is an incuriosity about those who lack it." And again: "History is not inert but contains within it a story that implicates or justifies political order."

Perhaps most interesting to me was Coates' discussion of why books, in particular, are considered so dangerous to those who do not want the mainstream narrative challenged: "Film, music, the theater鈥攁ll can be experienced amidst the whooping, clapping, and cheering of the crowd. But books work when no one else is looking, mind-melding author and audience, forging an imagined world that only the reader can see."

Books challenge and engage the mind, creating a new reality between writer and reader to which both contribute, and which belongs to both. This is what makes them dangerous and powerful. They offer not just another point of view, but the possibility of creating one's one point of view:

"The danger we present, as writers, is not that we will simply convince their children of a different dogma but that we will convince them that they have the power to form their own."

The final panel of the triptych is Coates' trip to the Palestinian Literary Festival and his first experiences in the Levant. Here the thematic connections of the entire book become clear. Coates experiences what is like to move through this ancient land with Palestinians, then with Israelis, and he finds the experience and the disparities both shocking and chillingly familiar. In the treatment of the Palestinian people, he sees a direct extension of the American system of racial oppression, which has been veiled in a noble narrative of enlightened democracy and progress. Even as a journalist himself, he feels a deep sense that he has been lied to by the media, deceived in a way that leaves him feeling horrified: "I felt a mix of astonishment, betrayal, and anger. The astonishment was for me鈥攆or my own ignorance, for my own incuriosity, for the limits of my sense of reparations. The betrayal was for my colleagues in journalism鈥攂etrayal for the way they reported, for the way they鈥檇 laundered open discrimination, for the voices they鈥檇 erased."

Coates does a good job humanizing the issues by sharing his personal encounters with both Israelis and Palestinians. He points out the uncomfortable truth that being oppressed does not automatically make one more enlightened, but can in fact blind one to the oppression of others: "Your oppression will not save you, that being a victim will not enlighten you, that it can just as easily deceive you." There is a grim observation here about human nature: That those who have suffered from terrible oppression should know better than to oppress others. They should recognize, empathize, and work to eliminate such systems. Zionism, in this view, is and was exactly the wrong corrective for the Holocaust. As Paulo Freire puts it, speaking generally about human societies: 鈥淭he oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors.鈥� This also calls back to Coates' trip to Senegal, and the idea that a historical ideal of homeland cannot be expected to translate into an actual physical right of possession.

But Coates is also stunned to find how little he himself appreciated the Palestinian situation until he was there, on the ground. As attuned as he is to such injustice, he felt blindsided by the mainstream narrative:

"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鈥攖hey are establishing and monitoring a criterion for humanity."

Coates also points out that, unfortunately, people are motivated by self-interest above all else: "I doubt that anyone ever parts with power in the name of charity." This, too, is hard to argue with.

Again, Coates offers no easy answers. The power of this book is not in any game plan of what needs to happen, but in the honesty and personal pain of the author, his willingness to share his anguish and changing perceptions. Whatever one may think of Coates' insights, his self-reflection and interrogation of his own preconceptions is worthy of the critical thinking skills that our schools should be teaching, but so often do not.