{"id":9593,"date":"2024-12-12T13:20:19","date_gmt":"2024-12-12T17:20:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/ta-nehisi-coates-on-writing-and-the-power-of-words-to-remake-the-world-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2024-12-12T13:20:19","modified_gmt":"2024-12-12T17:20:19","slug":"ta-nehisi-coates-on-writing-and-the-power-of-words-to-remake-the-world-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/ta-nehisi-coates-on-writing-and-the-power-of-words-to-remake-the-world-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Ta-Nehisi Coates on Writing and the Power of Words to Remake the World \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

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\"Something<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWords have more power than any one can guess; it is by words that the world\u2019s great fight, now in these civilized times, is carried on,\u201d Mary Shelley wrote<\/a> in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars that laid the template for the colonialist power structure of the modern world, in an era when her chromosomes denied her the authority of her natural powers.<\/p>\n

Who gets to write shapes what gets to be written, which shapes what is remembered \u2014 that is the making of the collective selective memory we call history, and it is made of words. We invented words to name the world and invented power to apportion the named. It is our inventions that tell the fullest story of our nature. The range of them \u2014 the range between chocolate and racism, between the Benedictus<\/em> and the bomb \u2014 is the measure of what James Baldwin called \u201cthe doom and glory\u201d<\/a> of what we are, metered by the words that tell the story of our self-creation.<\/p>\n

<\/a>
Drawing by David Byrne from A History of the World (in Dingbats)<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cWhat I have always wanted is to expand the frame of humanity, to shift the brackets of images and ideas,\u201d Ta-Nehisi Coates reflects in The Message<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 his soulful and sobering reckoning with the power of words and the power structures roiling beneath the landscape of permission for making the images and ideas we call art. What emerges is a manifesto for reexamining who gets to word the world\u2019s story and render human the worlds within the world, pulsating with the urgency of the writer\u2019s job to clarify in order to galvanize \u2014 for \u201cyou cannot act upon what you cannot see.\u201d<\/p>\n

Writing, Coates recalls, was one of the great \u201cobsessions\u201d of his childhood \u2014 he relished the \u201cprivate ecstasy\u201d found in \u201cthe organization of words, silences, and sound into stories,\u201d in \u201cthe employment of particular verbs, the playful placement of punctuation,\u201d this mysterious alchemy of skill and vision with the power to \u201cmake the abstract and distant into something tangible and felt,\u201d to dismantle the myths told by the wardens of the status quo and tell a different story about the world and its horizons of possibility. An epoch after John Steinbeck insisted in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech<\/a> that a writer ought to bear the torchlight of clarity in humanity\u2019s \u201cgray and desolate time of confusion,\u201d Coates considers what it takes to do that, in all its ecstasy and power:<\/p>\n

\n

There has to be something in you, something that hungers for clarity. And you will need that hunger, because if you follow that path, soon enough you will find yourself confronting not just their myths, not just their stories, but your own.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art by Beatrice Alemagna from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader<\/em><\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Permeating the book is Coates\u2019s countercultural courage not to mistake for reality what he so aptly terms \u201cthe haze\u201d of his own experience \u2014 a needed reminder that we lens everything before us through everything behind us and bow to the image in the lens, calling it the world. And yet what the visionary physicist John Archibald Wheeler wrote of the nature of reality \u2014 \u201cthis is a participatory universe [and] observer-participancy gives rise to information\u201d<\/a> \u2014 is true of the nature of writing. Coates reflects:<\/p>\n

\n

There are dimensions in your words \u2014 rhythm, content, shape, feeling. And so too with the world outside. The accretion of imperfect, discomfiting life must be seen and felt so that the space in your mind, gray, automatic, and square, fills with angle, color, and curve\u2026 But the color is not just in the physical world you observe but in the unique interaction between that world and your consciousness \u2014 in your interpretation, your subjectivity, the things you notice in yourself.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Just as the writer writes with all of themselves, the reader reads with all of themselves, adding another layer of subjectivity in the act of interpretation. Sylvia Plath understood this when she was only a teenager: \u201cOnce a poem is made available to the public, the right of interpretation belongs to the reader.\u201d<\/a> So too with all creative work, much as a child enters the world to become their own person. \u201cYour children are not your children,\u201d Kahlil Gibran wrote in one of his most poignant poems<\/a>. \u201cThey come through you but not from you.\u201d Echoing Plath and Gibran, Coates reflects on his own writing:<\/p>\n

\n

I imagine my books to be my children, each with its own profile and way of walking through the world\u2026 It helps me remember that though they are made by me, they are not ultimately mine. They leave home, travel, have their own relationships, and leave their own impressions. I\u2019ve learned it\u2019s best to, as much as possible, stay out of the way and let them live their own lives.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art by Ofra Amit from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader<\/em><\/a>. (Available as a print<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This is not, however, a recusal from responsibility \u2014 over and over, Coates celebrates, demands even, the power of the written word to change the life of the world and the course of what will one day be history by changing the present landscape of possibility and permission we call politics. He writes:<\/p>\n

\n

History is not inert but contains within it a story that implicates or justifies political order\u2026 A political order is premised not just on who can vote but on what they can vote for, which is to say on what can be imagined. And our political imagination is rooted in our history, our culture, and our myths.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

Politics is the art of the possible, but art creates the possible of politics\u2026 Novels, memoirs, paintings, sculptures, statues, monuments, films, miniseries, advertisements, and journalism all order our reality.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Half a century after Gwendolyn Brooks wrote in her forgotten poem \u201cBook Power\u201d<\/a> that \u201cbooks feed and cure and chortle and collide,\u201d that they are \u201cflame and flight and flower,\u201d Coates considers the singular power of writing among the other tendrils of the creative spirit \u2014 the power of revelation and self-revelation:<\/p>\n

\n

Film, music, the theater \u2014 all can be experienced amidst the whooping, clapping, and cheering of the crowd. But books work when no one else is looking, mind-melding author and audience, forging an imagined world that only the reader can see. Their power is so intimate, so insidious, that even its authors don\u2019t always comprehend it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Complement these fragments of The Message<\/em><\/strong><\/a> with James Baldwin\u2019s advice on writing<\/a> and some excellent tips from Mary Oliver<\/a>, then revisit May Sarton on how to cultivate your talent<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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