Despite the backlash due to Coates’ writing and speeches on his time in Palestine, there are really three narratives in this travelogue. The Palestine one is the third one and it’s the one I’m going to spend as little time as possible on because I don’t want this page to be a forum on what’s happening there right now.
I actually think the best essay here is the first one, where Coates finds himself in Dakar, Senegal. He has written at length about the rejection of his youthful beliefs about the mythology surrounding Black people in Egypt (he referred to it once as the “When We Were Kings” stuff). Coates has always been a relentless seeker of the truth. And yet, for a public intellectual, what I’ve always admired about Coates is his ability to be publicly vulnerable and wrong. He is willing to autopsy his process of learning and growth. And he lays it out here in Dakar, as he talks about setting foot on the African continent for the first time, the mixed feelings he has, the surprise at the desire for people in Senegal to be an American version of Black and how much his work means to folks over there. He concludes it with a tour of Gorée Island, which has a historical reputation as being a major port of slave trading, marked by the symbolic “Door of No Return.” This has largely been debunked by historians to be myth (there was slavetrading there but not to the extent it was reported) and Coates knows this. A deeply unsentimental person, he still finds himself moved by the experience of being there. And he writes beautifully about the power symbols have when connected to experience. I still think about those passages.
The second essay is the weakest because I’m not sure Coates knows what to say. But it’s still an interesting reflection on Coates meeting a woman who got into hot water for teaching Coates’ banned books, unpacking their encounters, his feelings on the influence his work has had for better and for worse, and other items.
The third…again, I’m not gonna say much. I have not been to Palestine. If I ever go, it will not be the place it was when Coates traversed there just before the war. I will say this: I think Coates made a genuine, good-faith effort to report on what he saw. I’m not sure he gets the history of Zionism and Israel down pat but I say that because I don’t know it with any degree of thoroughness. And while he writes about a lot of things, his overarching point: that there is little Palestinian representation in the media to tell the story of Palestinians, is accurate. And this is what bothers him as a journalist. And I think that is a fair sentiment.
It’s not his best work but it is very good and it makes me wish he wrote more.