I was genuinely taken captive by Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book Between The World and Me, read from the vantage point of being a white male living in Canada. Yes, I am certain Coates has his detractors and his disagreements- comes with the politicized territory. But I found him to be a poignant window into a world not my own, breathing a kind of poeticism into the conversation befitting one who understands the power of langauge and words. Written from a father to a son, the non-fiction narrative approach helps enliven ideas that might otherwise get lost in the ambiguity of theory.
I recently finished his follow up called The Message, which if it lacks the pointed bite of his prior commentary, also reaches and applies more broadly as the story of the son growing into a writer. It follows his travels through three distinct places- Africa, South Carolina, Palestine- showing us how he became aware of the power of language and the word. Of story.
I’ve been mulling over some of my highlights this week, beginning with this quote,
“When I think of my earliest days as a writer, what I recall is a kind of longing- I felt everything I wished to say, even if I didn’t exactly know it.” (P 129)
I’m not so presumptuous as to call myself a “writer”, but what stood out for me hearing these words is how much resonance it holds for any act of communication. The deep felt need to communicate what is in one’s head and ones heart and the frustration that comes from either not knowing how to or of such efforts failing to be heard and understood.
One of the biggest struggles in my life is the struggle with feeling misunderstood and without the ability to bridge that understanding with others. Coates writes of story and words playing the role of “haunting”, by which he means bringing to the surface a shared understanding of what is right and wrong about a given thing or moment or state or idea. When I think back on my earliest years, pen and paper was my way of having this same dialogue with myself, both about the world I was grappling with out there and my place in it.
Coates writes,
“There are dimensions in your words- rhythm, content, shape, feeling. And so too with the world outside.” (P 44)
The relationship between word and reality helps us shape the feelings that often are caught inbetween. We do not understand the world, or for that matter ourselves (or more so yet, our place in it), and yet words speak where we cannot. As Coates describes it,
“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… But the color is not just in the physical world you observe but in the unique interaction between that world and your consciousness- in your interpretation, your subjectivity, the things you notice in yourself.” (P 44)
What we experience as one who has been set in relationship to the world around us is the product of the complexities this very relationship creates. This is what we feel, the feelings themsleves birthed from what we experience and what we observe, and these feelings, these intuitions, are brought to life through the power of langauge, of the word. To speak a word, to write a word, is to release these feelings into the spaces and places they are attempting to wrestle with and define and make sense of. This becomes, then, the necessary act of interpretation, which always needs an interpreter.
Which is perhaps the reason why being misunderstood, or the failure to communicate be it through ones own inability or a failed process, is such a pervasive and oppressive truth shared by more people than I realized for most of my waking years. As one Psychology Today article puts it, “One of the hardest burdens to bear is being misunderstood by other people.” It’s also one of the most common experiences we humans share. When we cannot communicate what’s on the inside, especially where it relates to others perceptions of us and what is necessary and important to us, and worse yet when these become perceptions that have the power to dictate and shape us in ways that run counter to what we feel, we (or I) no longer feel like I have any control or agency in these matters at all. I am what the world tells me I am and the world remains haunted by the things that haunt it, even as the words I put out into the world say otherwise and long for the opposite.
And yet, to believe in the power of the word is to believe that there is some external truth that is drawing them forwards and out of us, however it is that we communicate it. There is a reason they are being spoken and written, which is precisely why they are worth being pursued. And sometimes, as Coates puts it, the best reminder that this is true is immersing yourself in the stories, in the words, of others. We are all stories being told, after all. We all belong to a story.
“As a reader, I changed. I was no longer merely turning words over in my head or on my tongue- I was now turning over entire stories… as I turned the stories over in my mind, I could feel the revelations spinning out of them.” P (10)
It’s a reminder that we are all speaking words precisely because we feel, and the best revelations occur when we realize that we feel the same world, even if we see and experience it from different vantage points. Even more powerful when the words of another somehow become our own. This is what Coates offered to the many persons of color encountering his work, evidence in the many reviews and responses stating that he put into words a feeling that otherwise could not be spoken, and gave a new license and ability to speak this same word, and even a new word themselves.
Which means there’s something even more powerful at play in this picture- you never know when merely speaking your word might free someone else to feel understood and thus freed to speak.
One last note, perhaps needing to be relegated its own separate thought and thread- this is also why, I think, I have found such solace and healing in the Christian narrative. The notion of the Word being spoken into our midst as God’s act of solidarity or understanding with the human experience remains one of the most haunting and powerful revelations for my own journey. It shapes the God-human relationship into a narrative, into a story, through which we can both understand and be understood, and it breathes into us the invitation to speak our own word in response.
The Stories of my Life 