Tag Archives: black panther

Intermission 4, The Journey, Uncategorized, writing

Requiem For The King

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Chadwick Boseman joined the ancestors on the evening of August 28th. It was revealed that he had been diagnosed with stage three colon cancer four years ago, which progressed to stage four, and eventually took him.

Boseman rightfully deserves the most beautiful of elegies, ones that paint a stunning portrait of how impactful his corpus of work has been. As my good friend Kelsey said as we mourned together, Boseman’s artistry bridged past, present and future in a way that was impossible and necessary. He deserves words that reflect this. I, most certainly, am not the one to give it. I didn’t know him.

But I knew Black Panther.

Professor Claudrena Harold introduced me to Black Panther, in a circuitous way. We were having lunch together early in my last year of college, plotting my journey to graduate school, when she asked, “Did you know Ta-Nehisi Coates is writing the new Black Panther comics?”

Professor Harold is not the kind of person from whom you can hide your ignorance; so I owned up to being unaware, and the side eye I received was enough to send me home ready to do a thorough Google search. Fast forward a few months and I had read (and fallen in love with) Between the World and Me, become a Coates stan and was reading old Atlantic articles in my spare time, and was eagerly awaiting the first issue of the new Black Panther.

When the first issue landed in my Comixology account in late spring 2016, I turned the lights off in my dorm room and read the issue under my covers. I wanted as few distractions as possible as I drank in this comic. I emerged with a new obsession, which was only intensified by the announcement of the forthcoming movie that summer.

The film connected the work I was doing at the time as a comics scholar with the work my good friend, Micah, was doing as a film scholar, both of us interested in stories where Black people were centered in the ways we saw ourselves but that white media could not imagine. We both had questions, some answers, a lot of thoughts about what this film could mean, could do, could represent, and we both brought a particular expertise to the conversation. We founded King of the Black Millennials, a short lived blog where we worked out those early thoughts that summer, an endeavor that solidified our relationship as writing collaborators as well as friends.

I entered graduate school in fall 2016 with no sense of what I was doing or wanted to do; in some ways, I came armed with only my love of comics, and specifically, in that moment, Black Panther. So I clung to that. My first graduate level research paper for my Popular Culture class was rather mediocre, but I saw the beginnings of a real project forming. That paper led to my first conference presentation at the Southeastern American Studies Association conference in spring 2017; my first archival trip to work with Black Panther comics at VCU that summer, which became the basis of my Master’s portfolio that I defended that fall.

All that said, it must come as no surprise that the closer the film came, my eagerness grew. I planned out my outfits for opening night months before and secured my ticket for opening night the day they were available. To most of my friends’ surprise, I was firm in my resolve to see the film just once by myself before I saw it with anyone else. They thought it was because I feared I might have criticism; I knew it was because I would sob through the entire film.

When Wakanda unfurled before my eyes for the very first time on screen, I wept.

Perhaps white men had created Wakanda, but Black people had reclaimed it and cultivated this.

In the months after I defended my Master’s thesis, I regularly told my people I was going to take the Master’s and leave. I was uninspired and burnt out. I felt harassed and often patronized in my classes. I didn’t have another plan, but a few days after I had decided I was going to leave my program, a classmate sent me an email. Attached as an article about a Black man who had illustrated Black Panther comics in the 1970s: Billy Graham. Interested, but still unenthused and unwilling to do more research, I clicked it away.

By the grace of God, that classmate brought up the email again in class and directed my attention to the granddaughter mentioned in the article, Shawnna, who currently had Graham’s archives at her home in Williamsburg.

Meeting Shawnna and getting to work in the archives with her for a short while was enough to sustain me for another few months. I never did anything with that research other than write a seminar paper, but I realized after a while, that perhaps that work was simply meant to pull me through. It sustained me. It was what I needed to be okay.

When I first stumbled across the Associated Press article announcing Boseman’s death, I, like most people, thought it was a cruel hoax. It took less than a minute for me to confirm, and moments after that to completely break down. I cried for an hour straight, my heart broken over someone I had never met.

I woke today with a deep sadness settling over me like a weighted blanket. It took most of the day, and mourning with friends, to come close to articulating what losing Chadwick Boseman meant in this moment.

He was our joy. Our superhero. Our king.

Criticisms of the film still stand, but the way Black Panther became a cultural phenomena is unmatched. I had never seen such collective Black joy until the week of the release of Black Panther. It was a reason to celebrate, whether you liked superhero movies or not.

And, boy, did we celebrate.

The specter of Death looms over Black people in a particular way. Our health worries do not only include Coronavirus in this moment, but police violence, domestic abuse, assault, inadequate health care as a result of so many interconnected factors.

Tragedy has come to call again and again and again; its presence is unwelcome, yet it lingers.

We started the year with the loss of a legend, Kobe Bryant, and every day since has been another crisis, another loss, yet another moment that calls for mourning.

But this hit different.

Days after the Jacob Blake shooting, we lost a man who we came to associate with the purest form of Black joy.

It seemed pointed and cruel to lose a King of Joy in a moment that desperately called for any bit of hope.

Chadwick Boseman deserves the most peaceful rest.

To the King.

lectures, Ravynn, Ravynn: Act 4, Ravynn: Act 4, Scene 1, Readings, The Journey, Uncategorized, writing

“What do I owe?” | An Evening with Ta-Nehisi Coates

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Fun fact: I adore Ta-Nehisi Coates’ writing. I got Between the World and Me in 2015 and never looked back. Just a year later, he started writing Black Panther, and I recall reading digital issues on my iPad in my dorm room, huddled under the covers like a child. In 2018, I was awarded my Master’s degree for a thesis in part based on those comics.

Ta-Nehisi Coates has been an important part of my intellectual coming of age story; so naturally, when I heard he would be keynoting at ASWAD (which was being held in my city), I knew I had to be in that room.

I sat in the packed room last night, taking in the conversation. It wasn’t a traditional lecture, but a dialogue between Coates and a long time friend, Dr. Benjamin Talton of Temple University. The two covered a lot of ground, moving from the intellectual places and forums Coates inhabits to the digital spaces he has shied away from; they discussed his seminal piece, “The Case for Reparations,” and his newest piece of fiction, The Water Dancer; and in between were insightful remarks about practicing history. He read a few passages from the novel and then answered a series of questions from the audience about everything from narrative voice to writing as activism.

There are so many strands of thought that I could potentially pull out as I use this post to digest what I heard Friday night, but I think I want to focus on two moments in particular. The first moment was a series of questions Coates asks himself when he writes:

“What’s my duty? What’s my commitment? What do I owe?”

I wrote the questions down and almost missed a significant portion of the talk because as he discussed his own duty and commitment to writing, I began to think of my own.

I tackle these questions often, think about them almost daily, mull them over with Micah. I think about duty when I write fiction, considering the Black girls for whom I write. I think about my commitment to accessibility in my academic writing. I insist upon maintaining my personality in my writing because I want to show how you make a space for yourself when everything tells you that you are not welcome. And I often think about what I owe to myself. Of course, much of what I do is for other Black girls, but truly, the bulk of my work is selfish. It’s for the little girl I was who needed the stories I find different ways to tell.

I want to show my younger self that I gave myself permission to be large.

There’s magic in that act, which, in a way, leads me to the second moment I’ve been chewing on from Coates. Someone asked Coates about the magic in Harriet and the magic of representations, and he said what I have been preaching about for the last year or so. The supernatural is present, and has always been present, in our narratives. He’s being faithful to the way enslaved folks saw the world, and despite the circumstances, it was always tinged with a touch of magic. He used the talisman Frederick Douglass received that was supposedly to keep him from being beaten ever again as an example. I would also point to Charles Chesnut’s Conjure Woman Tales, and Zora Neale Hurston’s investigation of Hoodoo, and Ntozake Shange’s Spell #7, and Solomon the Flying African, and and and.

Our people are magic, in particular our women. And Coates acknowledges that openly and that moment encouraged me to move forward with my dissertation investigation. To have someone who has been such a force in my intellectual life unknowingly validate my belief was a powerful moment.

And even more exciting was learning that Coates and I share intellectual lineage. When asked about professors and spaces that shaped his thinking, he of course mentioned Howard University and several of the professors he interacted with there. In his fairly extensive list was Dr. Blakey. In stunned disbelief, I wondered if he was talking about the Dr. Blakey that I knew and had as a professor back in 2017. A quick peak at Wikipedia confirmed what I knew as Coates described the work Blakey had done: Coates and I had interacted with and been taught by the same professor.

I came into that room wanting an autograph but I left with an invaluable gift: things to think about. Coates has been provoking me to push further with my thinking for several years now, and I’m so grateful that I had the opportunity to see him in person.

If you want to know more about the conference, check out the ASWAD website: http://aswadiaspora.org/

Ravynn: Act 2, Ravynn: Act 2, Scene 2, Research, Uncategorized

Week 5, or Confessions of Black Panther Scholar

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WARNING: Black Panther spoilers ahead.

I was worried I wouldn’t love Black Panther.

I’m an aca-fan, a term that scholar Henry Jenkins uses to denote someone who is a fan of the things they study. I’m an aca-fan of Black Panther, in a very serious way. I have so much personal investment in the character, the narrative, and the authors that Black Panther turned into the focal point of my Master’s thesis.

I spent so much time wading waist deep in the comics from the late 1960s, critiquing, speculating, diving for meaning, that I worried I would not be able to simply enjoy the Black Panther film. Coupled with my anxieties about still enjoying the film were the expectations regarding my response. People laughed when I said I was not planning to write anything about Black Panther. I had inadvertently become– to some– an authority on Black Panther. I don’t believe that I am and to be frank, I don’t want to be. It doesn’t give you space to make mistakes, learn, grow. I am a Black Panther scholar with lots of questions I need to ask and still more to learn. I was worried that people would be expecting too much of me and I think that worry robbed me of a little of my joy in the weeks leading up to the film.

I tried my best to separate my academic self from my fan self so I could enjoy the film, but in the same way I cannot tear my womanhood from my Blackness, I was not able to do so. But I am so glad that I couldn’t– because it makes my love for Black Panther all the more rich.

So here are my top three favorite things about the Black Panther film:

  1. The diverse displays of Black womanhood. My favorite thing about Black Panther is all of the amazing Black women that surround him. Shuri represents a force in the STEM field, while managing to provide most of the laughs in the film, keeping her brother on his toes and also still managing to kick a little ass. Nakia gives T’Challa the Wakandan equivalent of a “Boy, bye” when he tells her if she weren’t so stubborn, she’d make a great queen. And Okoye– by far my favorite of all the fearless and strong women that make up the cast of characters in Black Panther. She gets to strike fear into the hearts of her enemies, deliver some of the funniest lines, and be in love with with her partner and her country. Needless to say, I’d drop out of grad school in a heartbeat if it meant I got to join the Dora Milaje.
  2. Killmonger as a character and the fact that he is driven by desire to liberate African Diasporic peoples. Michael B. Jordan as a person is a fan favorite for me but as Killmonger he was impeccable. Killmonger, in this rendition, is a Black liberationist. T’Challa and Killmonger are represent two strands of a potential strategy for liberation, and, to be honest, Killmonger’s arguments were compelling.
  3. The actual space of Wakanda. Walking into theaters filled with excited Black people made the on screen space of Wakanda even more real. My love letter to Wakanda would include a line about my pride for this powerful, culturally rich nation. It would praise the traditions and the King. It would give thanks for providing a space for me to be the fullest, most uncontained version of myself. My love letter to Wakanda would include how glad I am simply for Wakanda to exist, even if just in my imagination. Wakanda is real. It is my home. It is my heart. This is why representation matters.

Since Thursday, I’ve seen Black Panther three times. It gets better every time. I love it more every time. The characters become my friends. Wakanda becomes my home.

Maybe someday I’ll write that think piece that everyone is waiting for. But today, I just want to enjoy Black Panther.

Wakanda Forever.