Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates is a major force in literature and social commentary. He has been a journalist and professor of writing, and he has crafted incredible works of fiction like the best-seller The Water Dancer.
To say that he is obsessed with the history and conflict of racial politics would be to undermine the legitimacy of that proficiency of knowledge. Few other writers have so bravely, succinctly, intelligently, and humanely written on these subjects as Coates has in Between the World and Me and The Message.
Those books, specifically, offer a bounty of eye-opening considerations about the painful, unavoidable ramifications of colonialism in the form of ever-present and systemic forms of racist social structures. He highlights, in these texts, mechanisms of power that have yet – and may never – be dismantled, and he goes into personal detail as to how those mechanisms continue to oppress and dispirit the Black community.
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These are all things built upon a history of colonial theft, the conquest and pillaging of not only a people but of a place. “The first word written on the warrant of plunder is Africa,” Coates writes in The Message; visiting that continent for the first time, he writes, “In my mind, I was traveling across an epic dating back some five hundred years, when the first of us were carried off. Entire worldviews, systems of study, political movements, wars, and literature were birthed by that one act.”
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A civilization, then, constructed on the theft and degradation of a people: an empire consecrated on bones.
Though The Message was published just last year, this political and historical understanding forms the basis for Coates’ incredible 2018 run on Black Panther; never has Black Panther been grounded in the concerns of Empire and Enslavement as in The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda.
The book presents an empire built on the same sort of colonial assault of a people, spread to an intergalactic scale: famous Marvel alien races like the Rigellians have been absorbed into this empire and made to be a working class. That this Empire happens to be Wakanda is a stinging barb: the motherland has become the oppressor. What better crisis of fate for T’Challa than to discover that his people have wrought the exact type of crimes as those committed against the people of his continent?
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Of course, it takes T’Challa some time to come to this realization: the story begins with T’Challa stripped of his memory, one of the Nameless, a slave-caste whose memories have been plundered for the good of the Empire. As with the theft of culture from Black slaves in our own history, the loss of memory – specifically of names – is the loss of selfhood, personhood. To be Nameless is to have something essential taken from you beyond simple liberty, and it is a loss that undergoes those who have been taken from their spaces and made to perform under an oppressive hand. In The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda, the reclamation of names – and legacy of memory – plays a massive part in overthrowing an evil empire; with its subjects returned to themselves, the power of the oppressor lessens.
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The story details T’Challa’s eventual uprising, the conflict of the Nameless and the Empire, but after he recovers his memories (his name, his personhood), he discovers that the Wakandan space empire is the result of time-lost Wakandan astronauts – astronauts he sent into to space to discover more Vibranium. It was his lust for more power that inadvertently created the injustice of Empire. He left Earth to find those lost explorers, and with the rediscovery of his memories, he found that he was welcomed into the empire upon his arrival.
In issue #18 of the series, T’Challa admits to a certain amount of blindness during his initial, pre-slave moments of the Wakandan Intergalactic Empire. Speaking with Ororo, he says that the evidence of colonialism was there. “It was all around me, Ororo, and I did not see it. And now I think I did not want to see it.”
“And I say again, they were Wakandan. They were my people. Therefore whatever blood stained the empire’s mantle must stain me too.”
Ororo responds “What I know now is that empires built on slavery are very good at concealing this fact. That the concealing, the lie, is part of the enslaving.” Her words are furthered by Coates in The Message: “It may seem strange that people who have already attained a position of power through violence invest so much time in justifying their plunder with words.”
This is a comic leveraged to overthrow those words, that hidden sentiment of denial.
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Being a comic book, this isn’t a story that concludes with the harsh realities of colonialism – there are superbeings to battle, and symbiote gods to overthrow. The heroic journey must, ultimately, conclude in victory. But there is no way to erase the sins of the past, to live in a world wherein colonization did not eradicate the way of life of the people of space or on the African continent; there is no way to forget that. To do so would be to disservice the suffering and loss of the hundreds of years of oppression; it would be to further forget the names of the Nameless. As Ramonda of Birnin Zana says near the conclusion of this story, “We cannot heal what was done. We cannot return to you what was taken. What was pillaged. But we also need not act as though that plunder did not happen. Nor pretend that our beloved Wakanda is without stain.”
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For all its symbiote fights, team-ups, and living gods, The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda is a master thesis on colonial harms, on the subjugation of people, and on the theft of identity. It is a cerebral masterpiece masquerading as four-color science fiction, and it sets the standard for what a modern Black Panther story can be.
There is no escaping the crimes of our past; there should be no escaping them, as they are as much a part of us as our own names.
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