how to sabotage a black utopia
reflections on Wakanda Forever (2022)
Film: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022)
Directed by: Ryan Coogler
Written by: Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole
Adapted from: Marvel Comics
Stream: In Cinemas Now (Forthcoming on Disney+)
(Spoilers for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever)
Melancholy trills through Wakanda Forever which, more than any MCU addition since Avengers: Endgame (2019), endeavours to make sense of the relentlessness of loss. Wandavision (2021) captured this in part, gifting us with a question that cracked an aching world wide open: “What is grief, if not love persevering?”. But Wakanda Forever feels… Different. The void that groans both off-and-on-screen is different. With its denser gravitational pull, the vacuum of Black loss drew a Kendrick Lamar lyric from my mind during T’Challa’s funeral procession… “I grieve different”.
“We grieve different.”
Black life endures a continuum of transactions that arc towards loss.
We give (often beyond our capacity) and we are taken from (often without our consent). This is why the nation of Wakanda cultivated such profound and viral joy in Black Panther (2018). It presented the sole geopolitical superpower of Earth as an African country–a Black utopia unmarred by the brutality of colonial pillaging, arriving like a balm to the imaginations of Black people to afford us some reprieve from the ubiquitous white gaze. There was radicality in its isolationism–a selfish, yet understandable response to the European genocides of Africa. The central conceit of Black Panther explored a cross-diasporic conflict of idealistic differences (and a literal family squabble). It was a painful clash but at least it was a Black community exchange. It also made clear that Wakanda, despite its excellence, is not exempt from feeling transactions that arc towards loss.
CUT TO: Captain America: Civil War (2016)
11 Wakandan diplomats are killed by Wanda Maximoff in Lagos. Baron Zemo mind-controls Bucky Barnes into assassinating King T’Chaka in Vienna. T’Challa spares Bucky and later facilitates his deprogramming in Wakanda. T’Challa spares Baron Zemo, going as far as to prevent him from killing himself.
JUMP TO: Black Panther (2018)
After Killmonger infiltrates Wakanda, he severs the spiritual connection to Wakanda’s ancestors by burning the heart-shaped herb garden and sparks a civil war that costs an unspecified number of Wakandan lives, T’Challa defeats him and decides to open their borders to “the world”. Killmonger is not spared.
JUMP TO: Infinity War (2018)
Captain America requests for Shuri to safely evacuate the Mind stone from Vision. Wakanda becomes ground zero for Thanos’ invasion, leading to the irreversible deaths of countless Wakandan soldiers before Thanos snaps half of all life out of existence.
JUMP TO: Endgame (2019)
After the Hulk manages to snap everyone back into existence, T’Challa leads a regiment of Wakandan footsoldiers to resist Thanos’ second invasion. They are victorious and the world is saved. We don’t know if the Hulk’s snap brought back all the Wakandan warriors who fought in the climax of Infinity War. We may never know the toll that Thanos’ war took on Wakanda.
SMASH CUT TO: The crackling voice of Queen Ramonda in Wakanda Forever:
"I am Queen of the most powerful nation in the world and my entire family is gone. Have I not given everything?"
The Marvel Cinematic Universe treats Wakanda like it has an endless wellspring of Black life to sacrifice for its plots. When Nakia kills a Takonil civilian girl while retrieving Shuri and Riri from Talokan, Namor retaliates by taking warriors into Wakanda. They attack the village square, siren-sing aircraft pilots into the rivers and flood the streets with hydro-explosions. Namor decimates aircrafts, attacks the palace and drowns Queen Ramonda.
The single, Talokanil life costs as much as Wakanda’s Queen Mother, plus all the unnamed victims who were drowned or otherwise killed. That’s some pretty anti-Black arithmetic.
We could shoulder the blame on Hollywood’s obsession with environmental destruction. After decades of seeing climactic explosions and excessive property damage go without accountability in action films, our concern for the collateral casualties on the ground has been all but snuffed out. If we truly considered civilians as autonomous with valuable lives, Namor’s invasion would be just as shocking without Queen Ramonda’s death.
But there is a pattern of who remains faceless and who is given a voice.
The civilian Talokanil girl is awarded a provocative, dying breath but we never see the mother of the boy Okoye rescues in the flooding. When the Wakandan battleship is blasted off balance, sending countless Wakandan warriors and Dora Milaje into the water, the whistling Talokanil blades picking them off one by one, these fatalities simply become a means to reveal Okoye’s brand new “midnight angel” suit. There is an expendability of Black life that manufactures Namor’s “complexity”.
I left the theatre thinking, “people are going to love K'uk'ulkan”.
The only thing more compelling than radical isolationism is radical resistance. Namor is someone so fiercely protective of his people that he’s willing to wage war over one person dying. But he’s also the second antagonist to cite European colonialism as pivotal in his motivations and the second antagonist to ventilate all their frustration on Wakanda.
“It’s not surprising to me that it took U.S. Black entertainment, not Latine media, to tell dignified stories of Indigeneity in a major motion picture.”
–Dash Harris
It is difficult to reconcile the celebration of Wakanda Forever’s indigenous representation with its thematic connotations. Despite inspiring and paving the way for an Indigenous supersociety (and the pocket dimension of Ta Lo from Shang-Chi and the Ten Rings (2021) AND Ms Marvel’s (2022) ‘Noor dimension’), Wakanda’s service is the price of Talokan’s ‘dignity’.
Shuri has Namor dead to rights but her hand is stayed by noble heroism. “Vengeance has consumed us,” she says, echoing her brother’s mercy for Baron Zemo. She pledges to protect Talokan’s secrets and, whilst sparing Namor is a politically wise decision, (M’Baku’s point that killing a nation’s “God” risks eternal war is sound) it doesn’t explain why she demands no repercussions at all. She doesn’t detain him for murdering her mother and Queen. She makes no advocacy for justice beyond his yielding, no punitive measures beyond his injuries. He offers nothing, either. The vengeance she mentions still digests him. When he returns home, wounded but regal, he tells Namora that he’s just biding his time until Wakanda needs to rely on him. He understands, it seems, that all he has to do is wait patiently for Wakanda’s next transaction to arc towards loss.
With the central conflict being between Indigenous Yucatec Mayans and Black African Wakandans, it is easy to posit that Wakanda Forever decentres whiteness. But the film only achieves this superficially. Sure, the core cast members are Black and people of colour. Sure, America’s interest in vibranium is relegated to a B-story. But for the second time, Wakanda is positioned as the last line of defence against threats to the white supremacist status quo.
Namor proposes he and Shuri invade the “surface world” together and she exclaims, “that’s madness!”. But… Why? Why wouldn’t she be more responsive–or at least, indifferent? The barbarity of white supremacy justified Wakanda’s borders being closed for more of Shuri’s life than it has been open.
Her indignation only makes sense if you infuse her psyche with an allegiance to whiteness that should barely exist inside of her.
Whiteness doesn’t need a white body to exercise its influence. Sometimes it just needs a mouthpiece, an inner voice that siren-sings a Black character away from their own self-interests. At a summit of the United Nations, Queen Ramonda gives an arresting and impassioned speech about the duplicity of western leaders before exposing a covert, French-led-American-backed raid on a Wakandan outpost in Mali. But she doesn’t withdraw from the assembly. Nor does she recognise their actions as a serious act of war. Instead, she scolds the United countries like naughty children and returns their toys to them with sore bottoms, taunting the world leaders for “performing civility” whilst accepting a role in their pantomime all the same.
Wakanda Forever is more concerned with cosmetic appeasements than it is with presenting Wakandan characters who have a principled dedication to Wakanda or a revolutionary love for themselves. Neither Queen Ramonda, nor Shuri, show as much devotion to their own citizens as Namor–exposing the widening trench between the Black utopia on the page and the politics of the hands guiding the pen. The names of Black revolutionaries like Patrice Lumumba and Toussaint L’Ouverture are smuggled into the script as if the people who’ll recognise those names won’t also side-eye how Wakanda has aligned itself with a CIA agent twice in two movies and recognise that the film’s penchant for integrational politics is slowly eroding Wakanda’s protection of itself.
Wakanda cannot return to radical isolation because how would they be the magical negro nation when the rest of the world needs saving? Wakanda cannot advance to radical resistance because that would mean confronting imperialism beyond pandering feel-good speeches or performative “coloniser” jokes and accepting Black vengeance as a viable moral position that doesn’t warrant cinematic capital punishment.
Wakanda Forever is a gorgeous work of art that weaves a compelling and cohesive story despite its obligation to introduce new characters (and an entirely new geopolitical arena) whilst also having to navigate the off-screen tragedy of Chadwick Boseman’s untimely death. A lot of care and consideration has gone into it. Every visual is meticulous in its dedication to beauty. Each action scene is an expertly choreographed dance of fury and skill that ignites the screen. But beyond its cinematic brilliance, the film incarcerates the nation of Wakanda into pledging allegiance to everyone else before it fulfils its responsibility to its own people. In a story that is so bathed in reverberations of grief, I didn’t think that one of the things I’d mourn was Wakanda itself.
Everything!
You put into words the exact frustration that I have with this film 🙏🏾