The Message

“This meant that we could never practice writing solely for the craft itself, but must necessarily believe our practice to be in service of that larger emancipatory mandate.”

Coates lays out what he takes to be the responsibility of the Black writer—to counteract the dominant narratives that have contributed to oppression. This sentence is thus a crucial part of Coates’s ethics as a writer. Rhetorically, it also defines one of the purposes of the collection that follows.

“Haunt. You’ve heard me say this word a lot. It is never enough for the reader of your words to be convinced. The goal is to haunt— to have them think about your words before bed, see them manifest in their dreams, tell their partner about them the next morning, to have them grab random people on the street, shake them and say, ‘Have you read this yet?’”

Coates dramatizes the power of words here to help the reader and his primary audience understand the power of storytelling. The comparison between impactful writing and haunting is an example of metaphor.

“I think the only way I ultimately survived was through stories. Because as much as stories could explain my world, they could also allow me to escape into others.”

As a boy in Baltimore, Coates was subject to violence in the streets and misunderstanding in school. His identity was defined by key elements in his environment. Through the power of storytelling, Coates was able to escape and define himself in ways that later proved to be consequential.