The MessageThe Message

Coates originally set off 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 first of the book's three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal where he feels he's in two places at once: a modern city and a mythic kingdom in his mind. Back in the USA he takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he explores a different mythology, this one enforced on its subjects by the state. He enters the world of the teacher whose job is threatened for teaching one of Coates's own books and discovers a community of mostly white supporters who were transformed and even radicalized by the stories they discovered in the "racial reckoning" of 2020. In Palestine, he discovers the devastating gap between the narratives we've accepted and the clashing reality of life on the ground.