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A review by monitaroymohan
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates
5.0
Sometimes, when you get hold of a phenomenal book you have to read it twice. That’s what happened with me and 'The Message'. I got the audiobook from my library and as I listened to it coming to an end, I knew I needed to listen to it again, immediately.
Coates isn’t just a brilliant writer, he’s one of our greatest minds and he continues to demonstrate that in 'The Message'. His ability to draw a through-line between slavery and the ongoing attempted genocide of Palestine, needs to be studied. He is poetic and precise in his writing here.
The book begins with an essay on the racism that he and his family have lived under the shadow of in the US, through to the Trump presidency that laid the groundwork for the banning of books that supposedly made white kids 'uncomfortable'. The significance of these book bans, Coates explains, isn't about the present, it's about the future. These bans will have a legacy of curtailing the imagination and knowledge of the next generation of writers.
Coates also explores the idea of 'home' - for many African-Americans, travelling to African countries is like a calling. Coates' eyes are opened to a new way of being when he visits Senegal. Reading this book close on the heals of listening to Tawny Newsome on a podcast talking about her first trip to Africa and how she couldn't recommend it enough for others in the Black community, was fascinating to me. This is just one of so many things that slavery took away from an entire peoples - a sense of home.
But home can be contentious, and that's what the meat of 'The Message' is about - about how the Jewish people, after suffering the atrocities of the holocaust were given the chance to go 'home', except 'home' had people in it, and those people have been forcibly removed from their land. The plight of the Palestinians, and how Israel commits innumerable atrocities while claiming to be the most victimized people in the world, is a hypocrisy that is outrageous. Coates dives into the history of this colonialism, this racism, this western need to paint anyone who isn't them as savage and barbaric and worthy of nothing more than annihilation. It is horrifying. I come from and have connections to different parts of the world, so I didn't realize just how blinkered North America is about what is happening, and what has been happening in Palestine. I didn't realize that Palestinian voices have been literally silenced in the US and Canada for years - not just since October 2023.
This book is a must-read for all, especially the people with their heads in the sand claiming that one peoples deserve the right to live and thrive on the land of another; who claim that a people should be tormented and killed just because their oppressors once suffered at the hands of another.
'The Message' should be mandatory reading in the US, Canada, and all the colonial, imperial nations, because they should see how blatantly they are on the wrong side of history.
Do not skip this book. 'The Message' is an imperative read.
Coates isn’t just a brilliant writer, he’s one of our greatest minds and he continues to demonstrate that in 'The Message'. His ability to draw a through-line between slavery and the ongoing attempted genocide of Palestine, needs to be studied. He is poetic and precise in his writing here.
The book begins with an essay on the racism that he and his family have lived under the shadow of in the US, through to the Trump presidency that laid the groundwork for the banning of books that supposedly made white kids 'uncomfortable'. The significance of these book bans, Coates explains, isn't about the present, it's about the future. These bans will have a legacy of curtailing the imagination and knowledge of the next generation of writers.
Coates also explores the idea of 'home' - for many African-Americans, travelling to African countries is like a calling. Coates' eyes are opened to a new way of being when he visits Senegal. Reading this book close on the heals of listening to Tawny Newsome on a podcast talking about her first trip to Africa and how she couldn't recommend it enough for others in the Black community, was fascinating to me. This is just one of so many things that slavery took away from an entire peoples - a sense of home.
But home can be contentious, and that's what the meat of 'The Message' is about - about how the Jewish people, after suffering the atrocities of the holocaust were given the chance to go 'home', except 'home' had people in it, and those people have been forcibly removed from their land. The plight of the Palestinians, and how Israel commits innumerable atrocities while claiming to be the most victimized people in the world, is a hypocrisy that is outrageous. Coates dives into the history of this colonialism, this racism, this western need to paint anyone who isn't them as savage and barbaric and worthy of nothing more than annihilation. It is horrifying. I come from and have connections to different parts of the world, so I didn't realize just how blinkered North America is about what is happening, and what has been happening in Palestine. I didn't realize that Palestinian voices have been literally silenced in the US and Canada for years - not just since October 2023.
This book is a must-read for all, especially the people with their heads in the sand claiming that one peoples deserve the right to live and thrive on the land of another; who claim that a people should be tormented and killed just because their oppressors once suffered at the hands of another.
'The Message' should be mandatory reading in the US, Canada, and all the colonial, imperial nations, because they should see how blatantly they are on the wrong side of history.
Do not skip this book. 'The Message' is an imperative read.