AUTHOR KEEPS QUIET
Award-winning writer Ta-Nehisi Coates says he isn't ready to celebrate America just yet
Ta-Nehisi Coates is on his way back from somewhere quiet, somewhere peaceful. A place that is decidedly not New York City, currently hung over from U.S. president-elect Joe Biden's win. Where Coates's getaway is exactly, the writer doesn't want to say, but he laughs as he declines to give away the location, perhaps conscious of how the refusal might come off.
“I missed all of that,” says Coates, referring to Nov. 7's coast-to-coast spontaneous dance numbers after the media called the election. More importantly, the writer's fans also missed his much sought-after take on it all. But since quitting Twitter in 2017 after a dust-up with Cornel West, and then a year later departing the Atlantic, his intellectual home for nearly a decade, Coates has been happily away — off somewhere (thinking, reading, writing) and not everywhere.
“If I'm honest with you, I feel like the need to have an opinion on everything at every moment corrupts thinking. Some of my favourite thinkers, people who I really respected during the Obama years and in some cases before, have been deeply corrupted by Twitter and the need to respond and the need to argue,” Coates says.
“When I see that, I get very scared because I think it could have been me. I mean, it kind of was,” he adds pensively. “And I don't think that's who I'm supposed to be. And if it is, I don't want to be that,” Coates says, all too conscious of how personas are made, and how they can unmake a person. Because Coates — winner of the U.S. National Book Award and the MacArthur “genius grant,” whose writing led to a congressional hearing on reparations for U.S. slavery — is acutely aware of how legends are made. The 45-year-old became one — the intellectual celebrity — just as his work deconstructing another — the shining city on the hill that is America — shot into the stratosphere. But he is on his way back.
Coates's debut novel, The Water Dancer, an intimate story about an enslaved Virginian man grappling with his own gifts, came out in paperback this month. Last year, the bestseller got Oprah Winfrey's coveted anointing and brought back her book club. Winfrey and Brad Pitt are teaming up to produce the film adaptation. Coates is now tasked with writing the screenplay.
The story follows Hiram, the son of an enslaved Black woman, who lives on a once-successful but now crumbling plantation owned by his white father. Like Hiram, Coates is constantly examining the duelling realities of living as a Black man in America.
“In my work, there is a thing that's going on all the way through it: The America as it thinks it is, and as it projects itself out into the world. There are aspects of it that are really beautiful and seductive, and if you're Black,” says Coates, placing emphasis on his identity, “on some level, you understand that it's not true. A large part of my life is figuring out the how and why of that.”
When the news broke that Biden was now U.S. president-elect and Sen. Kamala Harris would be the first Black, Indian and female U.S. vice-president, Coates couldn't get too hyped (though he finds plenty of joy in the excitement of Harris's fellow sorority sisters, Howard University alums and HBCU graduates).
Still, he was in his quiet somewhere, contemplating the myth of America and how reality always rears its messy head in the morning. “For me, it's hard to jump up and down. I don't condemn anybody else. I know it's been a dark four years. I get it. But I don't know if we're going back to normalcy,” says Coates, who made certain to underscore the “for me” part of his explanation more than once, more than twice. For Coates, the man who cannot help but hear the dog whistles beneath the words, “it's a very hard situation to wrap yourself around.
“A president-elect who stands up and says, `The Black community had my back and I will always have yours,' that's a beautiful sentiment to hear. As a Black person, I'm very happy to hear that,” says Coates. “But if the past 12 years really taught me anything, it's that other people hear that, too, in other communities. And it really doesn't reflect the world that they want to live in.”
That's pretty dark. But these are also pretty dark times, right? Even with all the celebrating that's going on. There are nearly a quarter of a million Americans who weren't here for it, and the rise of coronavirus infections in the United States shows no signs of stopping. The deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor brought the Black Lives Matter movement to the fore, once again. Hundreds of children are still separated from their parents. President Donald Trump is actively dismantling the legislative legacy of former president Barack Obama. This is the America that Coates contemplates.
It's heavy stuff, for sure — holding a mirror up to the America of the past and present to show them how much they favour each other — but Coates says the work is nowhere near as daunting as it once was.
The global pandemic has been both tragic and clarifying. In the time he's been away from the daily churn of journalism, “takes” and Twitter, Coates has learned a few things about himself. His wife, Kenyatta Matthews, and his now college-aged kid, Samori — for whom Coates wrote 2015's breakthrough Between the World and Me as a 155-page letter from father to son — are lighthouses.
“I want to have as much time with them as I can,” Coates says. “I never knew how important that was. I really enjoy learning. I really enjoy reading. And I enjoy reading and learning whether it turns into writing or not. I like that private space of imagination, which to me is the closest thing to being a child and playing with toys.”
Coates's HBO special is an adaptation of Between the World and Me. The special is executive produced by the Apollo Theater's Kamilah Forbes, who assembled an Avengers-style cast of A-listers not just in Hollywood, but in the music industry and the activist world, to read careful selections from Between the World and Me with interwoven documentary footage, graphic art and archival images from Coates's life.
If I'm honest with you, I feel like the need to have an opinion on everything at every moment corrupts thinking.