Coates originally set off to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell’s classic Politics and the English Language, but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories, our reporting & imaginative narratives and myth-making, expose and distort our realities. The first of the book’s three intertwining essays is set in Dakar, Senegal. Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist & named for Nubian pharaoh, Coates had never set foot on the African continent until finally he travelled to the coast where the enslaved were transported to a new world. Everywhere he goes he feels as if he’s in two places at once, a modern city in Senegal and a mythic kingdom in his mind, the pan-African homeland he was raised to believe was the origin and destiny for all black people. In Palestine, he discovers the devastating gap between the stories we tell ourselves and the vivid reality on the ground. He travels the singular landscape and meets with activists and dissidents, Israelis & Palestinians, the old, who remember their dispossession and the young who dream of revolution. The final essay takes place in the USA, in Columbia, South Carolina, where Coates visits a school district in the process of banning one of his books. He enters the world of the teacher whose job is threatened and her community of mostly white supporters who were transformed and even radicalized by the “racial reckoning” of 2020. Written at a dramatic moment in global life, this work eloquently expresses the need to interrogate our myths and liberate our truths.
