Up First from NPR - Ta-Nehisi Coates On Why Books Scare People

Episode Date: October 13, 2024

Author Ta-Nehisi Coates is no stranger to controversy. Over a decade ago Coates wrote his thought provoking article in The Atlantic magazine titled The Case for Reparations. The article sparked a global conversation and led to Coates testifying in front of congress about reparations. Now Coates is back with a new book of essays, one of which takes on the conflict in the West Bank. Today on The Sunday Story host Ayesha Rascoe talks to author Ta-Nehisi Coates about his new book, The Message and why some people fear books so much they lead efforts to have them banned.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

I'm Aisha Roscoe and this is the Sunday story from Up First. Every Sunday we do something special, going beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story. A decade ago, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates ignited a national conversation with his article in the Atlantic titled The Case for Reparations. A year later he released his book Between the World and Me which explores the realities of being black in America. Now in his new book The Message he takes readers on a journey to three places Africa, the American South, and the Middle East.

He starts in Senegal, where he visits the Door of No Return, a memorial to the victims of the Atlantic slave trade, then to South Carolina, where his previous book has been the subject of book bans, and finally to the West Bank, where he found himself reckoning with his own understanding of the conflict there. Ta-Nehisi Coates joins me today. Ta-Nehisi, thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. You start out talking about this book almost as if it's an overdue writing assignment. You promise an essay for a writing workshop

and you never got to it. Instead, it feels like the world got this book. Is that really what happened? I did have an overdue writing assignment, I definitely did. What it was supposed to be was the chapter on Dakar, actually. That second semester I was at Howard. I traveled to Dakar, Senegal.

And I had told them, you know, when I got back that I was at Howard, I traveled to Dakar, Senegal. And I had told them when I got back that I was working on this thing and they were submitting their essays. And so in the spirit of workshopping, I would submit mine and I never got it done. So. You never got it done. When did you know that you would do this book?

I've been meditating for some time on the power of literature and art. And I've felt for some time that people have a very, very narrow view of politics, and that literature and art actually influence our politics more than we think. I think we forget that, for instance, the infamous Charlottesville rally began with a statue. You know, and you can say statues are not very important, but why were these people so inflamed

that you had a situation where it rose to the level of the White House and the president at the time, and you had somebody that ended up being killed? What was it about that? And so I maintain that our culture, our arts, our monuments, our memorials, our stories, our movies, our television shows, that they actually have a lot to say about our politics and a big

influence on our politics. When you say politics, like when you were looking for this book, did you look for it to be a message ahead of this specific presidential election? I would imagine, I'm a guess you might say you wanted it to be bigger than that, but people are thinking about the election. They are. I didn't know. I really didn't know at the time. I didn't know what the situation would be.

I certainly did not know we would have a first black woman and a Howard alum of all people actually running for president. So that I was not aware of. But were you thinking about maybe Biden, Trump? running for president. So that I was not aware of. But did you, what were you thinking about, maybe Biden, Trump? Were you thinking about that politics? Or you were thinking of a, what type of politics? But it is, but I should, ultimately it is that,

it is that kind of politics, ultimately. It's just not just that. Okay. What I maintain is that there is a moment where all of us go into, hopefully all of us, go into a voting booth and we make a choice between candidates. And oftentimes I find that people are somewhat frustrated by the choices they have. Well, they're choices that are being made even before you go into that booth.

And my argument in the message in part, one of the arguments is that a large part of that is around what we think of as issues and people, who we can actually find viable or who we believe belong within the range of choices that we have. I remember when I was writing the case for reparations, what I thought about all the time, over and over again, was this Dave Chappelle skit about reparations, where black people get reparations and they go out and they blow it on a bunch of stuff.

And I thought that was funny, obviously, but when I thought about writing, one of the things I thought was, like I have to move reparations out of that idea in the imaginative space, that it's just something, just kind of a cash giveaway to black people, which they will then go and waste. I was thinking culturally even then,

even though I was thinking about a political issue. Well, in the book, it also seems to, obviously it's about culture, but you take it into like a kind of politics of place or the art of place, culture of place. And maybe I'm trying to sound deep when I said that, but do you know place can be very important. You go to Senegal, you go to South Carolina,

you go to the West Bank in Eastern Jerusalem, Palestine. What is the connective tissue that you found between those places? Well, there's a meta aspect to the message where, you know, on the one hand, it is making an argument, but on the other hand, it tries to demonstrate that argument also. And one of the arguments that's made very early in the book is that I believe that the most powerful writing is that writing that clarifies that writing that that makes the world tangible? Writing is an abstract art form, you know what I mean? You're talking about words.

So how can you use words to make people feel what you feel? To make them feel like they saw what you saw or experienced what you experienced. And in my experience, and perhaps this is just because of my training as a journalist, and maybe you'll see some of this yourself, that is very hard if I have not gone through some aspect of the experience myself. So if I have not gone to the place, but I want to write about the place,

a lot of times I have found myself getting into trouble like that. And so for the message, I wanted to make sure that even as I was writing about something that can sometimes seem abstract, writing, it's relationship to politics, abstract, writing its relationship to politics, culture its relationship to politics, that I myself was not being abstract as a writer. Be a vessel for that.

Yes. Now, I was very fascinated by your journey to Africa, to Dark Core. You talk about, in that essay, you talk about the stories that black people were told about their origins, their inferior, all of this, and then the stories that we tell ourselves to counteract that. You know, where the descendants of royalty, where, you know, all of these things.

But then you kind of reject all of that. But then when you get to Senegal, you get to the door of no return, even though you know kind of reject all of that. But then when you get to Senegal, you get to the door of no return, even though you know kind of the truth of it, that likely few enslaved people actually went through that door, you're moved to tears when you're leaving that place. What happened to you there?

I'm still trying to figure that out. Well, yeah, because I was shocked, because as a writer, you kept saying in that essay, you didn't have words. I'm like, how you don't have words? You're a writer. Yeah, yeah. I still... Well, what happened... You know, it's so funny, you know, it's like I always tell my students not to say that, but, you know, the message is in many ways an incomplete work. And I think in Africa and in Dakar, like that is where the incompleteness shows itself the most.

I am on the one hand of the mind, and I conclude at the end of that essay, that in fact, to base your self-worth as a people, to base your self-esteem on being black or being part of the African diaspora or part of the black diaspora, or part of the black diaspora, on the same metrics of the people that enslaved you, on the same metrics of the people that ethnically cleansed and genocided this continent is a mistake. That the worth of a people do not live,

or the worth of any people, any people in this world, cannot live in stone, it cannot live in monuments, it can't even live in great works of writing. That it is in fact self-evident, that it's within the bones, it's within the flesh. And so all of this conversation about who we are the descendants of, our need to put ourselves in the shoes of people that did quote unquote great things or made great works is to in fact to repeat the mistake. And so once you abandon that, what are you left with? What is your relationship to this country?

What is your relationship to this continent? And that was really what I was in pursuit of. And what is it though? Because I think it is so complicated as a black American born in this country to go to Africa and to feel, I think often, I haven't been, but I know people will feel a connection. But then there's this push in the pool

because people will say, wait, but you're not from here. You don't know your home here. And I'm sure you've heard of the diaspora wars. You know this. There are black Americans who say, I'm not African. I've never been there. That's not me. So I guess, how do you reckon with all that?

And what is it to us? What is Africa to you? Yeah, I can't make anybody feel a certain kind of way, you know, and I wouldn't ask anybody. If you don't feel a connection to Africa, that's certainly, you know, your right, you know, and your ability.

There's some of us that are, you know, well, basically all of us who are the descendants of slaves, you know, who have ancestry in the South of this country, and we don't feel that either, you know, some of us. So, you know, I think that'll be up to every individual person, and by the same token, I didn't go there looking for it acceptance necessarily or like a kinship or something like that Well, maybe kinship, but not necessarily acceptance But you know I don't know I didn't show up yet

You know like like you had break out the drums for me and say welcome home, brother You know I didn't need that I didn't need that you know What I will say to you is what I found, probably the most concrete thing I found was two things. The first thing is, and this is Alpha One trip, you know, I do want to say that. This is the site of my creation as an African American. My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers were taken from this place.

And on the water, and then in the plantations of this country here, we were genocided and created into a new people. But the process begins there. The great epic that I rooted myself in, the great black American epic, the great black diasporic epic, I was at the origin point.

That was deeply moving. That was incredibly, incredibly moving. So moving that, you know, what I would say is if there was one flaw in the trip I took, I don't know that I saw the people. I certainly didn't see enough of them. What I saw was ghosts. You know what I mean?

What I saw was visions of myself and to some extent America. But by the same token, I mean, it's very, very hard to capture a place or capture the complexity of a place, you know, in one trip in three or four days. And obviously, you know, that trip and that writing that I mean, I really have think a lot about that, I think, and thinking about the connections to the continent. You got to go. I got to go one day.

I got to go. You also go to South Carolina. You talk about a teacher who risked her job to keep teaching your book Between the World and Me. And this is where you get into book bands and censorship. And I mean, that's kind of like politics having an impact on art, art impacting politics. But you say in one passage that much of the hoopla about book bands and censorship gets it wrong. What do we get wrong?

Oh, so much. I mean, I can't remember what exactly I was talking about in that passage, but I think the first thing I would say off the top is that I, as the writer and the author of the book, I am not the victim. You that I as the writer and the author of the book is not the, I am not the victim. You were saying that, you were saying it's not personal. So you don't take it personally.

It's not, you are not being victimized. I don't, I don't. And I'm also not the person that's gonna suffer. I mean, every time one of these articles come out, I mean, to be frank about it, I sell more books. So I think like my personal offense, you know, and to make it about me misses the point. The people that are hurt, the people that are really hurt are the children and the students

there. And they're not necessarily hurt because they need to be exposed to, you know, my voice or my books, you know, or whatever, or they need to adopt my politics or my particular view of the world. But I know that the seed of me as a writer is so much varied literature in terms of its type, genre, perspective, et cetera. And what all of that literature had in common was to open the world for me.

And to say that I was free to find my own politics, my own views, my own future. I did not necessarily have to even believe, my own views, my own future. I did not necessarily have to, you know, even believe everything that was said within my own house. But see, that scares people. That really, really, really scares people because there is a style of parenting that says your job is to inculcate your child with your particular beliefs and not have them deviate in any real way.

And the danger of writing, I mean the danger of the wider world period, but because of the way writing works and how many wider worlds it can expose you to, is that you might lose control of that. Is there a reason why you think writing catches it more than even other- Yes. Forms of media? Because you would think with the internet and all these things, that would be much more dangerous than the writing.

No, the writing is extremely dangerous. And the books in particular are very dangerous. And again, this is like one of the reasons why I wrote the message, because I don't think we perceive this. In fact, I think the people who are in favor of book bands understand the power of books much, much better than those that oppose them. Books are an intimate art form.

You know, I write about this in the message. Books are intimate. It's a one-on-one connection. So that kid in South Carolina, that 15-year-old, 16-year-old kid is taking Between the World and Me, or whatever other book they're reading, they're taking it into their bedroom, and they're having a connection with them that nobody else can actually perceive. Even if you took the book from the kid and read it yourself, you would still not have the same

interaction because the way books work is they are necessarily a union between the imagination of the reader and the words that are on the page. Everyone's experience with a book is different. It's extremely intimate. What you visualize, what you connect to, what it reminds you of, all those things. I mean, haven't you heard somebody say, oh, they saw the movie that was based on a book, and it was like, ah, I didn't like it. It wasn't quite what I saw.

It wasn't what you saw, yeah. That wasn't the act. I didn't think they would look like that. I didn't think they would sound like that. The writers of books have the ability to achieve an intimate Connection with every single reader and you start talking about people's children. I mean people start to feel that kind of way about that Do you I mean I guess do you fear the the book bands and what they are trying to or what is being? accomplished through these sorts of actions

Do I fear the book bands do you yeah, do you fear them? Do you feel like? or what is being accomplished through these sorts of actions? Do I fear the book bands? Yeah, do you fear them? Do you feel like... I don't know if I fear them. I don't know that I fear them. But I do think people's worlds can be closed. And I guess I fear that. More than I fear the book bands, I fear an effort to close the minds of young people in this country. When we come back, we discuss the part of his book that has everyone talking. Stay with us.

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Listen to the NPR Politics Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. The longest essay in the book is on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And that's the one that's going to get the most attention. It's likely the one that will have the most impact on you. Why did you choose to delve into this topic, which is one of the most, if not the most, fraught topic of public discourse today? Well, the fact was probably my most celebrated work of journalism is the case for reparations. And whether I liked it or not, or whether I thought much about it or not, I had already delved into it. That essay has a section in which it talks about

reparations from the state of Germany to the state of Israel as recompense for the survivors of the Holocaust, or those fleeing the Holocaust, in fact, fleeing Nazi Germany's existential violence to Israel. Reparations for that is used as an example. And I was roundly and sometimes loudly critiqued for using that as an example. And I had to reckon with that. There's a way of reckoning where you release a statement or maybe you make a speech somewhere, you know, maybe you talk about it. Um, but I'm a writer. And just like I had written that section, it felt only right to reckon with this in my writing.

And the way to reckon with it wasn't necessarily to sign a petition saying I support, you know, certain groups' rights or I support a certain perspective. The way was to go see it. You know? And to figure out what had happened, why I had used that example, whether I was wrong. If I was wrong, why was I wrong? And that's what that essay is largely about.

Do you feel like journalists are naive in their coverage of the conflict? I think we have a structural problem. I haven't been able to get these numbers, and maybe at some point I would, but I would be very interested, for instance, in the number of Palestinians who are working in the bureaus of major newspapers, major magazines, major stations in Jerusalem. I'd be very interested in that. I'd be frankly interested in how many black people are. I would like to know that I think we are getting

a certain perspective of the world, of that conflict, that originates in people who don't always have direct experience and what it feels like to be deprived of your ability to determine your future while another group of people who only live walking distance away have that power. What do you think that would show or do you think that the people who are affected by the policies are not the ones who are telling the story? Is that what you mean?

Well, here's what I would say. I am here talking about this book as a black writer and I'm being interviewed by black journalists and who went to the same school as I did. Yeah, I did go to Howard, I did. Yes, you did. school as I did. Yeah, I did go to Howard. I did. Yes, you did. Yes, you did.

Yes, you did. There is a kind of conversation that you and I can have that is very, very different than the conversation that somebody who doesn't have that experience has. That doesn't mean I'm not going to talk to anybody else. That doesn't mean I shouldn't talk to anybody else. It just means that there is a certain sort of perspective and a certain tenor to this conversation that comes out of our shared experience. I think we recognize that across journalism. I think we would say if the New York Times, the Washington Post,

did not have any black people covering race in this country, I think we would say that's a problem. Like I think we would say that that doesn't quite work for us, you know? And I think we have said that. I am asking that we exploit that same standard to Israel, to Palestine, to the Jerusalem Bureau. The same standard that we would hold anywhere else, not a new one.

And that doesn't mean that white people shouldn't cover race. It certainly, in fact, it absolutely does not mean that. It just means that other people should cover it too. Ultimately, what do you want the message of this book to be for those that read it? What do you want this to say about you? Because in the book, you said each of your books

represent a part of you and a version of you. So what does the... Your child. So what is the message? Is the message that child that went out and got kicked out of school because she took it too far? Or who is the message? I don't know yet, I don't know yet. I mean, that remains to be seen

because the book just came out. What I do know is this, it is a book that is concerned with the world that is not here and is not necessarily directly present in our lives. What I mean by that is the message is very, very much concerned with the tradition of Black writing and with the Black freedom struggle, and thus my ancestors who came before me.

And it is very, very deeply, deeply concerned with that generation of writers, Black, white, or otherwise, who have not yet come. And what I am trying to do is use this book to forge a link between those two worlds. That tradition means something. It represents something. It calls on us to do things and to say things

and to write things, and those things will not always be convenient. I think about the moment that I talk about this, I've talked about this before, before I took my trip to Palestine. And I was going with a friend who's a writer also, and I was thinking about how scared I was. Not that anything would happen to me, but I just had this feeling that I'm going to see something and when I come back, I will not be the same. And I didn't wanna go.

But I thought about Ida B. Wells with the price on her head going through the South reporting on lynching. And I thought about Frederick Douglass telling his story of enslavement while his own relatives were enslaved at that moment and he himself had a price on his head. And I said, me and my friend, we said to each other, what right do we have to our fears?

We have promises to keep. And this is a book about my promises that I have to keep to the stories I heard when I was over there and to, as I said, my ancestors who came before me and to the writers who are yet to come. Ta-Nehisi Coates, he is the author of The Message. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. This episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Martin

Patience and Andrew Mambo. It was edited by Ed McNulty and Liana Simstrom. The engineer was James Willetts. The rest of the Sunday Story team includes Justine Yan and Jenny Schmidt. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. I'm Ayesha Roscoe. Up first, we'll be back tomorrow

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