Sunday, November 24, 2024

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates is a work of nonfiction that's described as one where Coates "set out to write a book about writing, but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities."

The book starts talking about language, and the sports stories that captivated Coates in his youth, and then gets into stories, and how stories of places not actually always what they are. 

There's three distinct parts, first on a trip by Coates to Dakar, Senegal, then on his time in Columbia, South Carolina, and finally Palestine. In South Carolina he's confronted by often racist mythology, and in Palestine, sees the repression of Palestinians by Israel.