My life in books

Black Panther: Avengers of the New World, Book One is the beginning of a new narrative arc in the Black Panther comic written by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The rebellion is ended in Wakanda. A new constitution, a new, more representational form of government is being forged. But T’Challa and his people face a new crisis - the disappearance of the Orishas, the gods of Wakanda, who have until the recent rebellion been an active force in Wakandan life. But now prayers and entreaties go unheard, and not even the Black Panther can commune with his patron orisha, Bast, as he has in the past.

But there are other threats. Strange, violent reptilian beings have begun appearing, entering Wakanda through portals that Wakandan science cannot control, and Wakanda’s shamans cannot close without facing their own deaths. All that is known is that these Simbi are ancient enemies from Wakanda’s far-distant past. And the Simbi are not alone. Other creatures appear, giant ape-like creatures called Vanyan, the spider-men known as the Anansi, and other dooms from the past.

Guided by the spirits of former Black Panthers, T’Challa seeks out a potential ally, the ancient sorcerer Zawavari, who appears to know something about what is going on. He manages to close a gate, killing a troop of invading Vanyan, but falls into a coma - first uttering the chilling words that the gods are dead, and predicting that the Originators will return. With Zawavari unable - temporarily, they hope - to help, Shuri persuades T’Challa to seek the help of his former wife Oromo, the warrior goddess known as Storm.

As the crisis worsens, news is brought to T’Challa of a new religious cult - in the name of the “twice-risen” god Sefako - sweeping the land, filling in the gap left by the disappearance of the orishas.

And there are other enemies circling Wakanda as well - Zeke Stane, Doctor Faustus, Fenris, and the rebel Zenzi are planning to take advantage of Wakanada’s unrest. The first dign of their involvement comes when T’Challa learns that Fenris has kidnapped T’Challa’s old friend Asira and given her to Wakanda’s enemies, the Azanians. Aneka and Ayo of the Dora Milaje are sent to rescue her, but are taken prisoner by Doctor Faustus and Klaw.

It’s an action-filled, tense beginning to the next Black Panther adventure. I find the missing orisha plotline more engaging at the moment, but that’s probably because I lack context for all these villains and their history with the Black Panther. I’m certainly enjoying the fact that in Black Panther, we have a hero surrounded by women without whom he would be quite lost. And I find the idea of Wakanda, an uncolonised African nation, ever resisting, very powerful.

Just a few pages into the second volume of collected Black Panther comics, I start mentally screaming at the page, “No, T’Challa, please don’t go there.” If it is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ intention to show us a man trying to figure out how to govern a troubled, even a broken nation, then T’Challa seems to be trying all the wrong things. I’m fascinated by the exploration of what it is to be a leader, of what are the key issues in governance and in building (or rebuilding) a nation, but I am finding it very hard to like this protagonist.

He doesn’t understand his people, he doesn’t listen to them, he doesn’t allow himself, as any good leader should, to be taught what must be done by the needs and hopes of his people, rather than by his own goals. It’s his job to take the best of what his people imagine and figure out out how to make it happen. But T’Challa is as broken as his country, and he is getting everything so wrong.

Not that the leaders of the rebellion are doing much better. I see them getting drawn away from good intentions, of losing their idealism. Power does corrupt, and one important part of figuring out how to lead, is how to put that natural process in check.

So, Volume II of A Nation under Our Feet leaves me very concerned about the future of Wakanda. But then, with a title like that, it’s almost a warning that governance will be an issue through to the end. That there is a road to a better understanding is clear, never so much as in one vignette, a part of the story of T’Challa’s sister Shuri. In a dreamquest if sorts, she experiences a fight practice between her mother and herself. The image of the Queen tells the story of how the early forerunners to the Wakandan nation resisted the first white imperialist interlopers. At the ends, she says “The point is power, and in that practice, either you are a nation or you are nothing.” T’Challa has forgotten, if he ever knew, that to lead, he must be the nation, and thus, in his struggles to lead alone, he has so far achieved nothing.

But I’m keeping faith with Coates, because I believe he has a longer view here, and intends to give us, in the end, a superhero/king who is flawed and human, but still represents a force for good, for his own people and for the world. He will be the nation, because he has let the nation become him.

Franz Kafka once wrote: "I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us."

Ta-Nehisi Coates' new book, Between the World and Me, is such a book. It is framed as a message to his son about his own experiences, thoughts and perceptions of race and racism in America. A message written at a time when the experience of race and racism is front and centre in American culture, as it was for James Baldwin when he wrote, as part of The Fire Next Time, "My Dungeon Shook — Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation." An attempt to explain how the past became the present and what that may mean to the future.

But where there was hope mixed in with the history and the horror in Baldwin's message, Coates does not see through to or articulate a better future when he considers what it is his son is seeing today.

I write you in your fifteenth year. I am writing you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, that John Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department store. And you have seen men in uniform drive by and murder Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old child whom they were oath-bound to protect. And you have seen men in the same uniforms pummel Marlene Pinnock, someone’s grandmother, on the side of a road. And you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy. Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed. Resent the people trying to entrap your body and it can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed. The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations. All of this is common to black people. And all of this is old for black people. No one is held responsible.

What Between the World and Me really is, at least in the eyes of a white woman who is not the audience Coates has foremost in his mind, is a hammer aimed at the cold stone heart of racism in North America, a howl of rage against the inequities of centuries of abuse, another tear in the flood of salt soul water that has poured from the black bodies beaten, raped, tortured, shot, hanged, denied, defamed, derided, devalued, disappeared.

Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when she dies, the world—which is really the only world she can ever know—ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history. Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains—whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.