You wonder how author Ta-Nehisi Coates felt sitting on the stage of the Apollo Theater fielding questions from journalist Ayman Mohyeldin. It should have been him answering a pedestrian, a 125th street regular, who wanted to know why so many people were crowded outside the theater. “Who’s performing tonight?” the man asked. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen this many people here.”
From the balcony to audience member Carl Dix seated in the front row of the orchestra, the Apollo was packed to SRO capacity. No writer in recent memory has attracted such a large and enthusiastic audience. The Apollo itself must have swooned with memories of James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and the Motown days when the lines wrapped around the block.
A celebrity approaching rock star-status, Coates seemed undaunted by the applause he received with the promise of his latest book, “The Message,” after touching the stump of the Tree of Hope and taking a seat across from Mohyeldin. This wasn’t his first time on the Apollo stage.
“I was really thinking about what in the world I could possibly say to introduce someone like Ta-Nehisi Coates,” Mohyeldin began. “I mean, you [all] already are here because you know who he is. You know his books. You already care …” Yes, they cared even if a vice presidential debate was occurring at the same time.
Wisely, the interviewer focused his questions about the sweeping book, which consists of four parts, to its last section, “The Gigantic Dream,” which has commanded the most attention. “Why did you leave out so much? Don’t you believe Israel has a right to exist? You write a book that delegitimizes the pillar of Israel. What is the role of the Palestinians in their own oppression?” Mohyeldin asked, repeating the words from a previous CBS Mornings interview with a less friendly interrogator, and echoing the responses that have come from readers of a New York Magazine article where Coates is pictured on the cover. “I haven’t read the articles. I haven’t read the press,” Coates replied.
Mohyeldin quickly shifts gears, returning to the book’s format and an earlier section on Coates’s visit to Senegal, which, along with South Carolina and Palestine, are the three stops of his tour. In Senegal, Coates is defined as a person of mixed ancestry by an acquaintance. “Look, I understand that Black is in America. I get that you’re Black there, but here you are mixed. That’s how we see most Black Americans,” is a conversation from the book. Coates was told that being of mixed race in Senegal was seen as beautiful and that many women tried to lighten their skin and straighten their hair. “This surprised me,” he wrote.
Coates is asked if he sees a correlation between the ability to dehumanize people and the ability to subject them to control. “Yes,” he answers immediately. “And I’ll just go ahead of you. I don’t think the United States of America, and I want to be clear about this. I don’t think the United States should provide fighter planes as it’s doing to drop 2000-pound bombs on schools, hospitals.” There was a loud round of applause.
Then Coates is questioned as to whether he is an anti-Zionist. “I just wouldn’t put labels on myself,” he said. “I don’t do that and that’s not special to anti-Zionism or anything. I guess the closest thing I’ve ever adopted for a label is like a humanist or something like that; you know, as a writer I think I always have to be worried about that.”
Mohyeldin said he had asked a friend of his who does not agree with Coates’s politics to attend the event. “She responded saying, ‘Oh, he went to Israel. He’s an expert now. He’s been there for 10 days…’” Coates compared his short visit to a northerner going to the South during the slave era, and making certain judgments and being told by a southerner, “You don’t really know the Negro like we do. We live around the Negro …” Coates went to stretch his analogy to the George Floyd incident and the police’s explanation. “I know you saw that dude with his knee on this guy’s neck, but you don’t actually know what’s happening here.”
Coates further noted that his case concerning the Palestinians “is not based on the hypermorality of Palestinians. That’s not the root of it. People don’t have to be extra moral to deserve freedom.”
Toward the end of the interview, Coates made it explicitly clear where he stood on the current presidential election, when Mohyeldin then read from a statement where Coates said “… Should it turn out we have our first Black woman president and our first South Asian president, we continue to export 2000-pound bombs to perpetuate a genocide in defense of a state that is practicing apartheid. I won’t be able to just sit there and shake my head and say, well, that’s unfortunate.”
His final words at the Apollo resonated with the same passion and authority at the end of his book where he wrote “Palestine is not my home. I see that land, its peoples, and its struggles through a kind of translation — through analogy and the haze of my own experience — and that is not enough. If Palestinians are to be truly seen, it will be through stories woven by their own hands — not by their plunderers, not even by their comrades.” He concluded saying that “the corpus resists my analogies. It escapes my words. It demands new messengers, tasked, as are we all, with nothing less than saving the world.”
“The Message” may be a bit opaque and not as clear as many readers might demand, but there’s no dismissing its deep-seated feelings and its sense of urgency.