Ta-Nehisi Coates explores how oppression can breed oppression in ‘The Message’

Subject

Ta-Nehisi Coates; The Message; Book

Description

Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates says he long felt the pull to visit Africa — and yet it was a trip he kept putting off.

“When you’re Black in this country, Africa — or the story that’s told about Africa — is a weight,” Coates says. “I always knew it was a trip that I had to take. But I think, in the back of my mind, I knew that I would have to confront some things, that it would not be a vacation.”

When Coates did finally travel to Senegal, he says it felt like a pilgrimage. As the plane descended into Dakar, he was so overcome with emotion that he uttered a profanity.

“It came out of nowhere, and I was shocked at myself,” he says. “But I think it was evidence of some things that I really had been burying that had to be confronted.”

While in Dakar, Coates visited the island of Gorée and the fort in which people were held before being forced onto ships that would take them to enslavement in the United States. There he says, “What I imagined was my many, many, many, many, many grandmothers who were taken in that way. That was what I saw. … That hit hard.”

Creator

Heard on Fresh Air

Terry Gross

Source

https://www.npr.org/2024/10/01/nx-s1-5131276/ta-nehisi-coates-the-message-senegal-israel-gaza

Publisher

NPR.org

File