So Black Panther has been bumming me out for a few weeks now. I think a lot of it has to do with the concept of Wakanda.
Wakanda is a dream. Wakanda is The Dream. Wakanda is the name of the place in the heart of every disenfranchised kid who was, is, and will ever be forced to justify themselves to the context they live in. Wakanda is the stories you’ve never heard of ancestors whose names and faces are lost to time. Wakanda is a song sung in a language your mouth was made to speak but will never know. It is where our royal hosts still lie in wait, forever lost to time and space, waiting to greet and anoint us in ways that compliment the shapes of our faces.
Part of my ancestors have been native to these continents since time immemorial and yet, this is not my country. The flags I see aren’t my flags, not their colors my colors. Neither are the religions, and yet, neither is the way out of religion.
One of the core issues in America is the absolute lack of mythology to build upon. We have moments in our history that define us but have never been captured and smuggled to the deepest heart to make a good myth. At best we have stories, and at worst we have mere lies. Of course, this is said from my perspective as a person whose most basic presentation is considered grounds for slaughter depending on how many wrong turns I take. Not for revenge, but for the sport of supremacy.
If you know the feeling of losing home, of yearning for home, of wishing to one day wake up in the place where you do not have to contort to a colonizer’s eye to survive or thrive, you know the desire for Wakanda.
So what does this have to do with the film Black Panther? Why have I been prattling on about constructs of the psyche? I have done so because this comic book movie did a lot of very comic book things: introduced fanciful, colorful characters and locals, showed extraordinary people doing magnificent things, fought for and saved the day. But it also did one thing, one very audacious thing that set it apart from just about anything else I’ve seen. Right at the very end of the movie, after saving his country and revealing the location of his mythic kingdom to the world, King T’Challa goes to Oakland and turns to work to fight actual problems facing the actual world we live in. He says he will build lavish outreach centers to share the fantastical technology of his country with the poor of this one.
In all my time of watching movies spit allegories and metaphors at me in a variety of tones, I cannot recall a film that so acutely cried out against reality itself. As the Wakandan aircraft touches down on a concrete basketball court, showing these poor kids in Oakland people who look just like them but capable of anything imaginable, King T’Challa turns around to look at his work and admire it. At this moment, he is supposed to look proud and optimistic, but in this same cut it becomes apparent this is not King T’Challa from Wakanda but rather Chadwick Boseman. At this moment, he is an actor pretending to behold something marvelous, something that this world will never see.
Ten years on from the election year that suggested a hopeful future, a man pretending to be a king looks on in despair as he prepares to go back to this reality where we have no hidden kingdoms. If he is a man of thought at all, in this moment I do imagine that no one else would have traded more for any of the movie we just saw to be real, even in the slightest.