Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of my favorite writers. He’s just finished up, by my count, his 26th issues of Black Panther. As the series takes a new direction- T’Challa! In Space!- I wanted to offer a retrospective on the themes that came up in his run and what it means for black personhood.
Bast is the god that T’Challa claims the divine right to rule from. Please beware- I assume you have already read his run and thus will leave spoilers unmarked.
A year and some change ago, my wife and I attended a Student National Medical Association event at a friend’s house. Black people of all shades and backgrounds gathered for a night of food and drink. Over ribs and other BBQ, we talked about topics relevant to the diaspora—Martin vs. the Fresh Prince, the jollof rice wars, and whether or not Atlanta was overrated as a city. Blackness was on full display in that home that evening, with people from the country to the Continent representing their individual flavor.
The evening made me think further back to my summer in Cape Town. The summer before my senior year, the fellowship I was a part of gave me a plan ticket and kind words before throwing me to the wind. I emerged 18 hours later in South Africa and spent the winter doing HIV prevention education the townships that ringed Cape Town.
I was diaspora dreaming. I was raised on a diet of Malcolm X and black nationalism. I thought I would be welcomed with open arms back to my “home.” But various instances reminded me to stop dreaming. I shaved my head before going, but it grew back quickly; as my curls started to assert myself, my African co-workers started to call me colored. The more academic knowledge I absorbed about South Africa—visiting Robbin Island, going to the Bo Kamp, visiting the District Six museum—the less I realized I knew about what was actually happening in the nation. Why was the ANC so popular, yet reviled? What was driving the meth addiction in the colored population of the nation? I retreated to books and newspapers and grew increasingly befuddled.
My dream of the diaspora faded into work I simply could not complete in six weeks’ time. I wanted to leave the townships of Gugulethu and Nyanga with a sense of togetherness, yet left only with a better understanding of the chasm that existed between my American self and my Continental peers. The diaspora bade me to remember a history where we were only African and united under God’s sun, and not forcibly divided by oceans and nationality. Yet I realized that I knew too little about my motherland to remember anything accurately, save all the stories and myths I had absorbed as a child.
I feel all black creatives eventually have to deal with the gravity that the diaspora exerts on their work. White supremacy seeks to pull my beautiful people flat. We can all only be criminals, or slaves, or some consistent element that must be kept down for society’s sake. Resisting this through literature or media means showing that there is more than one way to be black. Yet we also feel the impulse to rush to unification rather than celebrating differences. It is the crew coming together in season one of Dear White People to watch movies or protest a cop pulling a gun on a student. It is Dinka in the Barbershop series, who is connected to African-Americans via his profession. It is Michael Blackson, a Ghana-born black man, adopting much of the vernacular of black English to connect with his audience. It is Desus and Mero being both black and the children of immigrants. It is Cardi B defining her Afro lineage. They all show the complexity of the diaspora and why we must resist its flattening.
It is also Ta-Nehisi Coates in his first two years of his Black Panther run.
In Coates’ Black Panther, T’Challa is besieged by his failures. He was the first king to allow invaders to raze his land. In quick succession, Dr. Doom, Namor, and Thanos entered the Golden City and placed the unconquered people on their knees. With the limits of his power exposed, a large number of Wakandans rebelled against his monarchy. Assisting one of the rebel factions was a group of C-List villains who could not be bothered to hide their racism. In return, T’Challa assembled “The Crew”—the diaspora unified, clad in the raiment of superpowers and the X-Gene.
African-American heroes Luke Cage and Misty Knight, the teleporting aboriginal Eden, and the veteran Kenyan X-Man Storm came to help the king put his house in order. In a series where Coates tries to answer the questions about politics and God he spent years developing on his blog, it is one of the true popcorn munching, fist pumping action sequences.
The diaspora action continues throughout the series. T’Challa rekindles his romance with Storm; later, he recruits criminal Thunderball, finding more utility in his civilian guise—Dr. Eliot Franklin, an expert on sound and gamma radiation—to combat his most personal foe.
Coates uses the diaspora throughout his run to fight the machinations of white people. For the heroes, T’Challa’s example and long history of superheroism proves stronger than any difference that nation and circumstance could pose. And for Thunderball, the pull of Wakanda provided him with a chance of small redemption after a career spent wrecking the Avengers. Wakanda serves as the Mecca for the diaspora, where black personhood can fight for a nation never wrecked by white men.
In one of his passages from Between the World and Me, Coates writes about the collection of books his father had on black people. His dad “loved books, and loves them to this day, and they were all over the house, books about black people, by black people, for black people spilling off the shelves and out of the living room, boxed up in the basement.” I can imagine he grew up enveloped by the words of Marcus Garvey and Malcom X.
Going off to Howard University expanded his view of the diaspora. “My tribe was shattering and reforming around me” he writes as he expanded his definition of the diaspora to include blacks of different shades and sexual orientations. He writes further about meeting his friend Ben at Howard University: “there was something particular about journeying out with black people who knew the length of the road because they had travelled it too.”
His answer to the diaspora’s gravity is to surrender to it fully. In exploring it, he found his family. He found his true companions. And, years later, his creative impulse reached back to make his experience the model for his Wakanda—a nation where its king could readily count on the strength of the diaspora to defend his crown. My fanboy, again, cheered when the crew put the villain who called them “kaffier” in his rightful place.
And yet. I think back to all the reading I did to prepare for my time in Cape Town. One of the articles I read was Malcolm Gladwell’s “Black Like Them.” How he tried to navigate through social science research and memoir the complexities of being black, but not being African-American. I think of Ifemelu’s blog from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and how it talked about the differences between native born blacks and those who came to this nation from the Continent.
I think about how I felt that evening as the conversation of the jollof wars transitioned into another conversation of import for the menagerie of blacks gathered around the dining table. As an aspiring black creative, I feel the diaspora’s gravity has pulled me into a different orbit. I was a foolish young man who went to the Continent in college, full versed in hip-hop and uneducated to the words of the immigrant song. Because of this, I flatten black personhood into a predictable map—one that arrows all progress to America. It is only years later that I figured out what I wanted. What I wanted was Wakanda, a black world anchored by so many varieties of black personhood. I got it that night years ago.
