Break out the black crepe and send for the undertaker, folks. The New Yorker just committed journalistic suicide with its publication of “Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Temptations of Narrative”, staff writer Parul Sehgal’s pathetically dishonest pseudo-takedown of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “shocking” (and shockingly accurate) description of Israeli apartheid directed at Palestinians contained in his new book The Message.
I have not been a fan of Coates. I treated his work in some, but not much, detail in my long discussion of critical race theory, “CRT v. Anti-CRT: Wait, Wait! You’re BOTH Right! Occasionally.” I found his writing style bombastic, overwrought, and hypocritical. Yet there was so much fuss about The Message that I figured I ought to read it to find what was what. And I discovered that the longest part of the book, devoted to a trip to Israel, to be 1) shockingly accurate and 2), equally shockingly, saying nothing that hadn’t been said before many times, by many Jews, including, for example, Peter Beinart and Joshua Leifer, as well as non-Jew Jimmy Carter, whose 2006 book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid unfortunately contained more truth than most Americans could handle. And I felt that I wanted to write a long take on Coates when the New Yorker dumped this piece of drivel on my lap that cried out for an immediate response/smackdown. And this is it.
Sehgal’s piece reads precisely as though her editor went to her and told her, “We need to take this guy Coates down a notch without actually, you know, lying. At least, not too much.” If Sehgal just sat down and read The Message and said to herself “this demands a response and I’m just the gal to do it” and dashed it off in a white heat of honest rage and righteous wrath, well, I’d be nonplussed,1 dubious, and dumbfounded
The Message is broken down into three parts, describing Coates’ journeys first to Dakar, Senegal, to observe the departure point of thousands of African slaves to the “New World”; to Chapin, South Carolina, to meet with a white schoolteacher who got in trouble by having her class read one of Coates’ books; and finally his visit to the West Bank and Jerusalem in the Middle East. The first two, though they have their moments, contain extensive “filler”, Coates continuing to repeat things he’s said about growing up and a fair amount of what might be called “Advanced Creative Writing”, “Writers Writing About Writing”, aka Process Over Substance.
Sehgal’s piece, as the very title suggests, has more than a hint of ACW as well. She begins by recapitulating Coates’ career, arguing that he has failed to meet the standards he set for himself, gassing on about Coates’ gassing on about what he sees in Dakar and South Carolina, “An unwelcome impression begins to gather, that these places, these people, are being relegated to bit players in the larger, more exigent story of Coates’s intellectual evolution, his contemplation of his career and legacy.” Notice that Sehgal doesn’t come flat out and say “Coates is so full of himself he can’t see past his damn nose,” but rather “an unwelcome impression begins to gather”. Oh, those unwelcome impressions! They do begin to gather! And it isn’t Sehgal’s responsibility at all! She isn’t judging! She’s just, you know, observing! Observing those unwelcome impressions as they gather!
And there he is, [Sehgal writes] doing the press rounds, sharing statements of support for Palestinian rights and Palestinian liberation that are forceful, clear, compelling, and still relatively rare in mainstream media. But the book he is promoting feels strangely out of step, slipshod and assembled in haste. “The Message” is stitched together with haphazard reporting, and it suppurates with such self-regard that it feels composed by the very enemy of a writer who has so strenuously scorned carelessness and vague pronouncement. It is a public offering seemingly designed for private ends, an artifact of deep shame and surprising vanity which reads as if it had been conjured to settle its author’s soul. The precepts on craft and narrative gather underfoot, tangled and unheeded.
“Suppurates with such self-regard”! Hey, no judging here! And definitely no resentment or envy! Sehgal’s actual criticisms of Coates’ take on Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is stunningly brief:
He [Coates] offers a desultory tour of Palestine’s past, with largely familiar facts. He doesn’t reckon with Palestinian political history. He doesn’t reckon with the attacks and aftermath of October 7th. His interventions feel directed at declawing certain linguistic battles—say, the objections to characterizing Israel as a “colonial” state, when, as he points out, the revisionist Zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky celebrated it on those very terms. The frame is kept squarely on what he saw during his trip, a constraint that has the unhappy function of again subordinating the stories he tells, of slotting them into the grand narrative of the education of Ta-Nehisi Coates.
The description of Coates’s time in Palestine contains nothing that feels new to those sympathetic to his perspective, and nothing that would meaningfully challenge those who disagree, in part because he does not entertain any objections.
Sneer, sneer, sneer. Sehgal doesn’t actually attempt to refute a single thing that Coates says about Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, doesn’t explain why “Palestinian political history” would “explain” Israel’s abysmal and hypocritical treatment of the Palestinians, nor why the horrible events on Oct. 7 would somehow “justify” relentless Israeli land grabbing that has continued for decades without a single meaningful objection from the U.S. Instead, the vast majority of Sehgal’s “review” is simply an ad hominem attack on Coates, accusing him of treating the whole affair as a vast ego trip, “The Education (and Self Promotion) of Ta-Nehisi Coates”, which is a massively deliberate and disingenuous misreading of the section on Palestine in particular.
The Message contains quite a few faults, which I intend to write about in the future. But Sehgal’s “reply” is a shameful exercise in intellectual and journalistic hypocrisy from start to finish, and both Sehgal and the New Yorker should be ashamed of publishing such conscious deceit.
1. It appears that there is no verb “to nonplus”. The noun “nonplus” once meant a “state of confusion”, from the Latin “no more, no further”. The noun has more or less disappeared and we’re left with this fake verb. Word will take either “nonplused” or “nonplussed” but the web definitely pumps for the double es.
