The drumbeat of history
Ta-Nehisi Coates isn’t a rapper, but he writes like one. Coates writes about race and politics with a musical bop that thumps readers in the chest, as his phrases bang over the drumbeat of history. For Coates, black identity isn’t something to be feared.
When the National Book Award-winning author, who rose to prominence because of his incisive essays in the Atlantic, publishes a new work, the response is similar to when an album is released. People devour his provocative words and ideas, then quote them on social media.
Twitter and Facebook lit up when “The First White President,” from the October issue of the Atlantic, went online. The essay is also the epilogue of his latest book, “We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy.” The book is ostensibly a collection of his essays — “Fear of a Black President,” “The Case for Reparations” and “My President Was Black,” among others — from the eight years of Barack Obama’s presidency. But it’s so much more. Each essay has a prologue, a diarylike entry by Coates about what he was thinking and feeling — ruminations on how he reached conclusions.
The book is the equivalent of meticulous liner notes, a bridge into the mind that has captured the hope and hopelessness of a nation grappling with its past, present and decidedly dark future. The introductions reminded me of “The Mask of Metal Face Doom,” the profile of the rapper and producer MF Doom that Coates wrote for the New Yorker in 2009. Doom allowed Coates to flip through his rhyme books.
“It was a great honor — an m.c. sharing his rhyme books is like a magician sharing notes for his tricks,” Coates wrote.
I spoke to Coates on a recent afternoon at a hotel in San Francisco. His answers have been edited and condensed. Q: Does hip-hop — particularly the lyricism — reverberate through your work? A: I’m tremendously influenced by hip-hop. It’s probably the biggest single influence on how I write. It’s the literature I grew up with. It’s the literature I knew as a child.
(Coates recites lyrics from LL Cool J’s “I Can’t Live Without My Radio”: “Walkin’ down the street, to the hardcore beat/ While my JVC vibrates the concrete.”)
Hearing that — this feeling I have right now, it’s the feeling I like to give people when I write. That feeling. I can remember being in college hearing Mobb Deep, and I was writing poetry at the time, and the way Mobb Deep described the world — it was a world I knew. And I wanted to describe that world, too. So when I finally got a chance, it was only natural that that would be what was in my head still. Q: Is the flow already there when you sit down to write?
A: With the “First White President,” the first sentence — “It is insufficient to state the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact” — once I had that and maybe the line after that, then you just go in with details, details. One of the things people don’t give hip-hop enough credit is — I’m talking about the great ones — the amount of weight they put on each line, how much energy is actually put into each line and how that has a cumulative effect. For me, the way I do that is — even though the lines are written a certain way — they’re facts. If I say something poetic about Trump, it’s going to be facts after that.
Q: Let’s get to the facts. The facts are under attack in this country. Does that anger you? A: When “First White President” came out, I knew people would have all sorts of responses. They could be pissed about it, they can be angry about it, a thousand people can reply to it, but they’re gonna read it. And they’re gonna read the next one, too. And the reason why is because of the facts. If I was just lying all the way through, eventually people would figure it out — this is an act. But the facts, even when people dispute them, disagree with them, that’s what brings them back time and time again. Q: Do you ever need to retreat after deep dives examining the consciousness of the country? A: I don’t. I love coming to an understanding that feels credible. It doesn’t feel painful to me. What America does is it gaslights black folks. It lies to you. It tries to wheel you into a game debating people over your humanity. But if you do not take these people seriously from the jump, it’s hard to be gaslit. The notion that you voted for Trump for non-racist reasons, I just don’t take that seriously. I don’t accord it respect. So it doesn’t bother me in the same way to hear folks lying. Q: What do you want? You’ve made it clear in interviews that you don’t want to be the anointed one, someone who speaks for all. A: I want a world where all of these black folks who are out here creating — Nikole Hannah-Jones, Alexis Okeowo, Jelani Cobb, Ava Du Vernay, Ryan Coogler, Issa Rae — where these folks are seen as representing diverse aspects of an experience, and you don’t look to one to interpret all.
Otis R. Taylor Jr. is the East Bay columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle. Email: books@ sfchronicle.com