Good Writing

Before he wrote the controversial “Case for Reparations” and Between the World and Me, I have been a fan of the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates.  I have pondered from time-to-time what it is that is so compelling about his writing.  The best I could come up with was curiosity--he writes from a perch of curiosity. Then yesterday, I stumbled across an interview at the Harper’s Magazine site with Osita Nwanevu interviewing Coates.  It strengthened my conclusion that curiosity was a key to Coates' writing.  The question and answer below provides a touching and amazing account of a writer driven by his personal desire to find answers.  

[Nwanevu] You’ve said time and time again that writing is an “internal process” for you, which is to say that ultimately you write about and try to understand history and the underpinnings of race relations in America for your own education. Any effect your writing might have on your readers—positive or negative—is incidental to that project. Has the reception of this book and your more recent writing for The Atlantic changed that at all for you? Is writing still an entirely personal process, or do you think more about how readers will respond?

[Coates] I just can’t. I can’t. I mean, I’m just doing my writing. I’m not called to that. If you start writing in that direction, you’ve gone down a very, very dark path. I just write. I enjoy the process of it. It’s personal to me. It’s very, very important to me. It’s bad for writing, and it’s bad for truth. If you start writing for other people, you start losing your own independence, your ability to come to your own conclusions—like for example in this book. If I were writing to effect change, maybe I would write more about the black church. One of the largest vehicles for the struggle. But then it would have been a very, very different book. You’ve got to speak your truth, man. You’ve just got to. Not what a thousand or ten thousand or twenty thousand people want to hear. What you feel. You shouldn’t hand that over. And by the way, people in the movement shouldn’t want you to hand that over. I don’t want them to become artists.

I was introduced to Coates in April of 2012 when Hendrik Hertzberg wrote, “The blog of Ta-Nehisi Coates is one the half-dozen best in the English-speaking world.”  At that time, Coates didn’t have the notoriety he has now.  He did write for The Atlantic, but I enjoyed most the blog he wrote at the The Atlantic online site. (At that time he blogged four or five times a week; now he rarely blogs that much in a month.)

Certain pundits began talking about him and critiquing his ideas in the summer of 2014 when he wrote “The Case for Reparations” in The Atlantic.  In that article he argued that slavery, reconstruction, housing policies, and more have served to plunder black Americans. After the article was published, Coates wrote a number of blog posts listing the numerous sources and events that had contributed to his thinking for the article.  For me his description of his writing path had the excitement of a detective story.  I remembered that at the time he wrote the article, he blogged that he had little hope for reparations.  However, he now understood the plunder and therefore, had met his goals.  I went back looking for his exact words and found this:

I started the case for reparations looking to answer a question that has burned at me since I was a child in West Baltimore—what was the wall which stood between the world and me? And now I feel myself to know the answer. And I feel that while my country may need to lie to itself, it can no longer effectively lie to me. That is a kind of liberation.

Now I feel I have another word to describe good writing: liberation or a spirit of liberation. Recently I listed some of my favorite books of 2015.  I think a spirit of liberation could be listed as a trait found in all of them.  It’s hard enough to find that quality in my reading.  Finding it in my own writing is a hope and a dream.

Notes: Coates' story "The Case for Reparations," can be found here. His blog can be found here.  At the bottom of each set of blogs is a button that says "More Stories."  You can use that to keep going backwards.  On May 22, 2014, Coates begins a series of blogs discussing the "intellectual odyssey" involved in writing the reparations story.  In July of 2013 he writes of traveling to France for the summer and what it is like to live and speak in another country.  I believe his first trip to France was March 2013.  The account starts a few days before he leaves the country with a bout of anaphylactic shock that almost ends everything.