A Hotel Mindset

By Madeleine Jacob

The Message

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Penguin, February 2025

If I took your name out of it, took away the awards, the acclaim, took the cover off the book, publishing house goes away, the content of that section would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.’ Journalist and memoirist Ta-Nehisi Coates had begun to do the rounds on home soil for The Message’s release in the US in October. In this now-infamous CBS Mornings interview, the anchor took issue with Coates’ central analogy: between the experiences of Palestinians today, and those of Black Americans during Jim Crow — which included Coates’ own parents. While his travels, detailed in the book, begin as an expression of a ‘wish, desire, or need for “home”’, he becomes ever more entangled in complex colonial histories. This is no naive travel writing; that treacherous word — home — is carefully garrisoned with quotation marks. As Coates travels to Dakar, in Senegal, to South Carolina, over Israel, and Palestine’s occupied territories, to Yad Vashem, to Jerusalem’s Old City, to Hebron, Lydd, Ramallah, into the West Bank, the voice of The Message becomes anxious and estranged.

The warmly professorial tones (Coates teaches writing at Howard) which dominate the first portion of the book leach into a wan exhaustion. Mid-way through his trip to Israel, checking in to a luxury hotel in Jerusalem seems to promise Coates a spell of relief. But the pleasures of the tourist become unbearable under the strain of ‘knowing how it had been gotten, knowing how it was secured, knowing the gigantic Dream that had drawn most of its guests, and knowing how I had imagined that there could be some break from it all, some comfort amid an active ethnic cleanse, an active colonization’. The surface-presence of ethnic cleansing sickens Coates, especially in the heart of the hotel’s sanitised simulacra. Seeing ‘the gigantic Dream’ for what it has perpetrated fatigues him, but it also takes him right into the network of narratives linking anti-Black racism in the US with Israeli Zionism. As Coates’ repetitions suggest, ‘knowing’ is a process where one unhappy fact begins to topple a whole domino course of ignorance.

His sensitive but emphatic writing hybridises sympathetic personal memoir with the outsider status of the travel writer and the essayistic firm grasp of political ‘new journalism’ that Coates is known for in the States. He is a long-time practitioner of the form, writing for publications including The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. But The Message, marking ‘a beginning, not an end’, has hopes to renovate Coates’ public persona. In ‘The Case for Reparations’, the 2014 Atlantic essay that made him famous, Coates uses West Germany’s reparations to Israel in the ‘50s — seven billion dollars in today’s money — as a precedent to suggest that Black Americans deserve similar compensation. Coates writes that he regrets including that example, blind to stories of Palestinian oppression that came at the cost of Israel’s rehabilitative project. The Message, by contrast, demurs from argument, avoiding the ‘smart-ass contrarianism’ and ‘mean prose’ that spilled out ‘in the young rush to get into the paper or magazine.’ Such a public contrition allows Coates to appear to be refashioning himself. However, that his authorial persona is given a Brooklyn childhood is not new for Coates: his 2015 nonfiction book Between the World and Me also draws heavily on personal memory. When Coates looks beyond the North American continent, though, memoir makes way for adumbrated geo-political reflection. Once the tarmacking is done, Coates the political journalist can thrum into action, gesturing and suggesting all from a deftly subjectivised perspective. If Israel looks to him like the US of his parents’ youth, then it’s a feeling, Coates insists, that he can’t help but have. The manoeuvre might feel a little too slick for some, but it’s undeniably neat.

‘The corpus resists my analogies’, Coates writes, turning away from the bald, brave assertion which characterises his earlier writing. The comparison — of Palestinians and twentieth-century Black Americans — writ broad is, he admits, imperfect. But aren’t analogies imperfect, by definition? Although he self-styles as a mere mortal, Coates evidently still spins together a tale. He affects the sprezzatura of the rhetorician, but his message is clear: that US support for Israel is rooted in racism; that a hunch, a feeling of recognition, an echo, is the perceptible surface-tension of a complex historical nexus linking American and Israeli racist ideology. This history comes to the surface in the City of David, a touristified archaeological site marketed as the seat of the biblical King David since 1967, although the dating of biblical narrative to coincide with this site is under scholarly contestation. Despite this, Coates finds a plaque diplomatically gifted from the US to Israel, inscribed with the lapidary language of foundations and tectonic connections: ‘The spiritual foundations of our values as a nation comes from Jerusalem. It is upon these ideals that the American republic was founded, and the unbreakable bond between the United States and Israel was formed.’ Coates quotes the plaque in full, and then the angry response of his Palestinian guide. Hefty quotation increasingly becomes Coates’ strategy towards the latter end of the book, as his voice begins to break under the weight of new knowledge.

While The Message’s critique is slickly delivered, it is in want of solutions. Coates opens the book by addressing his cohort of writing students as ‘Comrades’ with middle-aged professorial cool. Shrugging his academic robes off, Coates leans back in his chair, begins with a tale from his childhood, and comes, ultimately, to confessing his fears that political storytelling is essential but inadequate. Closing the book, he looks to pass on the torch to ‘new messengers, tasked, as are we all, with nothing less than saving the world.’ But who might be able to finish Coates’ sentences? Someone — anyone! His cohort of students, or the Palestinian writers too often excluded from the US media? And more than that, he hints at a different form of writing which might better express these subaltern ideas: ‘There is a whole other corpus — truly complex, jagged, profound, in defiance of any perfect arc or circle.’ This final portion of the book gasps towards hope, as Coates searches for a way to tie-up ongoing genocide into the type of neat denouement that would please a publisher.

Coates’ conciliatory conclusion is translucent, though. Frustration and despair undergird the book’s final lines. Coates has spent the last two hundred pages discussing writing as if it could deliver a transcendental clarity: ‘We require another standard — one that sees the sharpening of our writing as the sharpening of our quality of light.’ Audre Lorde’s metaphor of ‘poetry as illumination’ is transformed into the empirical project of Coates’ new journalism. Writing can make pain ‘glow’; language ‘illuminates the truth’. Coates finds brightness in Palestine: ‘Of all the worlds I have ever explored, I don’t think any shone so bright, so intense, so immediately as Palestine.’ In his oh-so-American, evangelical vocabulary of ‘the gift’ and of course ‘the message’ itself, there is a great gulf of uncertainty implicit in that doctrine of ‘clarity’ which has dominated popular theories of political writing, at least since George Orwell excoriated ‘Meaningless Words’ in his 1945 essay ‘Politics and the English Language’.

Coates tangles himself in insupportable claims that writing is a humanising, truth-telling enterprise. As readers, we can follow him only so far, as metaphors become mixed and analogies uncertain. If writing enlightens, ‘the glare of racism’, which does not ‘burn stranger and more intense than in Israel’, also glitters seductively. At times, the pull of ancestry and precedent, and of the metaphor of research as ‘walking the land’, intimates that Coates participates in a colonialist discourse just as much as he critiques it. Through his stars-and-stripes sunglasses, America is always the reference point, or the ground on which Coates’ telescope is nailed. Stuck, uncomfortably, inside a hotel mindset impossible to shake, the best Coates can do is to let others speak. Although his name is emblazoned on the dust jacket, he acts the medium, quoting long passages from his many tour-guides, and also from influential Zionist writing. Carefully curating his evidence, Coates’ voice wanes from the text as he opts to ventriloquise both the silenced and the understudied. In the voices of others, he delivers his strongest argument — that colonial bureaucracy deploys description’s pretensions to accuracy to naturalise occupation and violent oppression. Some writing might illuminate buried histories, but racecraft fabricated the ‘barbarity’ of the ‘natives’ with manipulations of language. As Coates learns in the City of David, narrating history is always the work of a spin-doctor. It is the ‘raw’ data — if such a thing can be said to exist — that Coates makes his best case with. By itself, the practice of writing is no saving grace.

MADELEINE JACOB is currently reading English at Hertford College, Oxford. Her writing has appeared in ArtReview, Architecture Today and The Isis Magazine. She is the lead editor of Starch, a literary pamphlet based in Oxford.

Art by Poppy Williams