Azrael
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- Feb 5, 2010
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"Sound" as in based on a reading of the book.
And for undercutting Coates on the basis of his authorial approach.
Kang:
Many of Coates's fans and detractors will not separate the symbolic importance of "The Message" and its attendant viral moments from the text itself, but I am talking here about his prose because I believe Coates is very serious about the act of writing, which means that any respectful evaluation should start with the words he commits to the page. Part of the appeal of Coates's old blogging days was that we, the readers, felt like we were learning history with him, which, in turn, made for studious comment sections and conversations that felt alive with all the newfound democratic power of the Internet. He was accessible, forthright about what he didn't know, and willing to admit his faults. Coates is still a courageous and important figure, but, on a formal, stylistic level, it's hard to reconcile the humility required for critical writing with the grandiosity of his recent prose, which too often feels turgid and sanctified. The blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates would have read ten books about Israel and Palestine and reflected on each in his inimitably brilliant way. The oracular Ta-Nehisi Coates would have you believe that there is some great truth to be gleaned from a writer discovering late in life what so many others, including countless Black activists and thinkers, already knew.
The war in Gaza is not about Coates's epiphanies or the guilt he feels about what he wrote in 2014. Writers, I believe, should be given the grace to change their minds and certainly shouldn't be so obsessed with their signalled stances that they feel the need to atone for bad takes, especially when the act of repentance ends with an unsatisfying, American-centric call for more representation in U.S. media. Do the hiring practices of a handful of élite outlets really measure up to the stakes and moral seriousness of the decades of conflict that Coates describes? There are times when American journalists and prestige outlets are the least of our concerns, when our words do not matter, much less why we write them. The "Reflections on Gandhi" Orwell was correct: all saints, especially those claiming moral clarity, should be presumed guilty before they are found innocent.
Sehgal:
Coates makes the case that his white colleagues and bosses stood in the way of his seeing a more complete picture. But his critics on the left, many of them of color, have long pointed out these very blind spots in his work—the parochialism of his politics and his reticence where Muslim, and particularly Palestinian, death and suffering were concerned. Such writers as Pankaj Mishra and Cornel West have remarked on the "missing interrogations" (Mishra's words) in Coates's writing about President Obama. As West points out, "Coates praises Obama as a 'deeply moral human being' while remaining silent" on drone attacks, the nearly thirty thousand bombs that rained down on seven Muslim-majority nations in one year alone, and Israel's killings of five hundred and fifty Palestinian children in fifty days during the 2014 Gaza war. It can be difficult to hear one's critics, but consider, too, how many of Coates's intellectual heroes were fluent and consistent in their criticisms of Israel, from Malcolm X to Toni Morrison. The historian Tony Judt, whose work has been crucial to Coates, gave an extensive interview about Israel in 2011—in The Atlantic, Coates's own magazine, no less. To look back over Coates's blog is to encounter a writer who knew that a reckoning was coming; in one post, he listed the subjects and books that were on his mind, all that was left to read. "My whole project suffers from a kind of bias," he wrote in 2015. "I haven't yet grappled with Israel."
The story Coates wants to tell in "The Message," however, is one of sudden epiphany. "The light was blinding," he writes. "But when it cleared I had new eyes, and I could see my own words in new ways—and the words from which they were derived." That epiphany is a mainstay of Western writing about Palestine—"apparent blindness followed by staggering realization"—as the British Palestinian novelist Isabella Hammad points out in her new book, "Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative," noting that "the pressure is again on Palestinians to tell the human story that will educate and enlighten others and so allow for the conversion of the repentant Westerner, who might then descend onto the stage if not as a hero then perhaps as some kind of deus ex machina."
The blinding light that Coates saw revealed his own words to him. In the shadows remain the very people his story attempted to aid. Magazine profiles promoting the new book feature photographs of Coates in Palestine, diligently writing in his notebook with the city of Lydda, the site of a brutal mashacre, in the background. On the morning talk shows, he looks resolved, if uneasy, as his face fills the screen. ♦
