treatises on grief, part 1 (of 0)
Hello again! Eid Mubarak!
So, I was going through my emails and found this draft, and it seems to be the last email I worked on before I completely went on an unintended hiatus from this newsletter. So it’s meant to be part 1 of 2, and the other part was supposed to be all about the Before the Coffee Gets Cold series, but I’ve left this too long that I not only have no recollection on how the second part was supposed to go, I have no idea how to “finish” this first one.
So I’m not going to.
Here it is, an unfinished first part of zero.
treatises on grief, part 1: only the most broken people can be great leaders
Note: Spoilers for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and Before the Coffee Gets Cold.
October to December are often the hardest months for me to get through, and because of this, I tend to read less, and consume more “happy”, usually mindless, media. And yet, somehow, this month I find myself engaging with two very different stories that to me are about the same thing.
Just last week, I saw Black Panther: Wakanda Forever in the cinema. I went alone, because I didn’t like my enthusiasm for my special interests be dampened by experiencing them with someone not as enthused, and also because I anticipated crying. I mean, I cry at commercials sometimes, so of course I would be wary of a film said to be a tribute to Chadwick Boseman’s T’Challa. And here’s the thing - as a Marvel fan, I am not very attached to T’Challa as a character. He’s noble, but not particularly interesting to me, the same way Steve Rogers is noble and not particularly interesting to me. (Scott Summers is similarly noble, but interesting to me solely due to him being very autistic-coded. Also why do all these leader types have to be so noble and boy scout-y?)
I am, however, attached to Chadwick Boseman’s portrayal of T’Challa, and all the characters T’Challa was surrounded by - Okoye, his left-hand woman; Shuri, his kickass sister; M’Baku, the frenemy; and yes, even Killmonger. Maybe especially Killmonger, whose desire to burn the whole world down I understand maybe a little too well. Killmonger would do well with the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, if only he was a mutant.
Wakanda Forever begins with Shuri trying to find a cure for her brother’s illness, and then learning he had died in her absence. The funeral scene that followed was a beautiful tribute, a celebration of both T’Challa and Chadwick Boseman - but it was Shuri that I stayed with, and it was Shuri’s grief that became the focus of the film. One of my main complaints about Thor: Love and Thunder was its inability to just let the audience feel any of its tragedies, and its insistence on making light of all these moments. And okay, I understand the need for distraction, to ignore the pain and focus on the hilarity and ridiculousness of it all. After all, it’s why I read fewer books, and consume more mindless-and-joyful media during these three months. But it somehow frustrated me in Thor, and I am so glad that Wakanda Forever doesn’t follow suit.
Instead, this film makes Shuri its emotional anchor - the way she was wallowing in survivor’s guilt, and her inability to save her brother, the way she remained in denial of her feelings by insisting she was okay and buried herself in work, refusing to burn the funereal clothes she had worn on the anniversary of her brother’s death, her growing anger at the whole world for taking her brother from her. The way she was avoiding facing her grief head-on, the way her mother advised her to, and how that caused her to make mistakes that cost her country more deaths.
I guess this is my long way of saying that Wakanda Forever lets its characters, and the audience, really feel grief without picking it apart the way WandaVision did (although I did enjoy that, too), or glossing over it with humour the way Thor: Love & Thunder did. Like I said, Shuri’s grief is front and center in this film - but really, it is something that every character experiences, and grapples with.
Like Shuri, Namor lets his grief consume him without ever facing it, and it allowed for his hatred for the colonisers that drove his people to the sea burn so strong, he wanted to wage a war against all surface-dwellers. Queen Ramonda’s grief and anger caused her to take a really cool (in movies) but probably too aggressive (irl) stance against the rest of the world, and against Namor/Talokan, putting her country in danger. Nakia’s grief caused her to cut herself off from her community, but facing that grief even while away and isolated helped her grow in a way that she wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. Even Killmonger, who appears in a surprise posthumous cameo, still lets his grief cloud him with anger, unable to see anything beyond petty revenge. And like him, like Namor, Shuri follows her grief into self-destructive revenge plans that would ultimately bring about only more death and pain to those around her - only when her rage had run its course, when she was almost dying and had a second glimpse at the Ancestral Plane, did she finally hear what her mother had wanted her to know earlier in the film.
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Talokan is inspired by Tlālōcān, a paradise ruled by the Aztec deity Tlālō.
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K’uk’ulkan or the Feathered Serpent is a deity also known as Quetzalcoatl among the Aztecs, Kukulkan among the Yucatec Mayans, and Q’uq’umatz and Tohil among the K’iche’ Mayans.