Life After Violence in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

February 18, 2023 | By Karis Ryu YDS’23

image description: Shuri (Letitia Wright) in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022)

Like many superhero fans, I bounded over to the nearest movie theater within a week of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’s release in November. A film of pain, hope, and power, I appreciated its muted volume, both auditory and visual, and how Ryan Coogler’s vision clearly included space for grief, both on and off screen. Grief and rage are integral to the story’s central message of healing and renewal: for Shuri, Wakanda, and the world they live in.

Wakanda Forever’s central protagonist is Shuri (Letitia Wright), the princess of Wakanda, who mourns the passing of her brother, T’Challa (the late Chadwick Boseman), and then the death of her mother, Ramonda (Angela Bassett), at the hands of the film’s antagonist Namor (Tenoch Huerta), ruler of the underwater kingdom Talokan. In the pivotal final fight scene, a jaded, wounded, and enraged Shuri pins a weakened Namor to the ground with her foot and her spear. She can finally, finally kill the man who led an invasion into her country and killed her mother. Yet as she is about to drive the point down, Shuri sees visions of Namor as a child. At that moment, she hears her late mother. Queen Ramonda urges: show them who we are. After a long, tense, visible internal struggle, Shuri refuses to kill him, and thus refuses to continue the violence of their conflict any longer.

The sources of these harms in Wakanda Forever are clear and explicitly named. Spanish colonialism decimated the village of Namor’s Mesoamerican ancestors. Wakanda navigates political acrobatics in a global system dominated by the very powers whose legacies and ongoing prosperities profit off of, depend on, and perpetuate histories of enslaving, exploiting, and extracting Black people, their labor, and African land through colonial means. Their existences are imbued and implicated in the lives and afterlives of a global order shaped by the mechanisms of Western empire as it has resulted in, and continues to fuel, racial, sexual, political, and physical harm.

In a cycle of violence, then mercy is defiance. Mercy is the refusal to perpetuate murder any longer. Mercy does not nullify the consequences of past murder—genocide and evil are not rendered meaningless. Rather, mercy is what brings the full atrocity of evil into stark light. Mercy is the refusal to pay violence forward any further. In Wakanda Forever, mercy is what exposes the villain of the fight between Shuri and Namor: the violence of colonialism, exploitation, and greed that have wracked their lives and their peoples.

The social infrastructures we live in and with are particular and pernicious, and have created a global order in which certain ways of knowledge and economy, certain ways of perceiving and classifying the world in colonial terms, have hegemonic ubiquity. But empires themselves as social structures of conquest and subjugation occur and reoccur in human histories at large. The real struggle, then, is to live outside of it as a whole. This is the only way violence stops. And in order to have the courage, constitution, and key to truly quit empire, you need faith that there is life beyond it.

To reject empire, to strip it bare of its power, to live into new life even while this one reigns, is to voice grief—grief over lost loved ones, grief over an oppressed people, grief over violence—rather than suppress it, and to reject the antagonist of it all, violence, by refusing to perpetuate it any further. It is not an option the world will give to us: but it is one we make. And violence is different from justice. Enacting justice, which includes consequences, is honoring the dignity of life in those who have been deprived of that dignity. Rejecting violence, then, is a refusal to devalue life any further. Shuri does both these things in refusing to kill Namor.

In our communities, nations, and lands, and in a global economy operating through histories and ongoing processes of interethnic conflict, genocide, and settler colonialism, there is a way of hope that does not diminish Indigenous rage. Love includes rage. Love is a fire that burns on behalf of those she cares for before herself. Does love not have room for the rage one feels when one’s loved ones, community, and people have been hurt? Hope is to envision and practice a reality in which this rage is understood and dignified.

Additionally, what devaluations of life do we witness in our own lives? What mistreatments of human dignity do you see in your classrooms, workspaces, communities, and social systems? This ethic of justice very much includes our own selves. In this lens, we have the discernment and the confidence to advocate for our own lives to be respected. To live committed to mercy is to actively reject these cycles of violence enacted on our images, because to disrespect the human dignity of a person exploited and discriminated against is to enact murder on their very personhood. [1]

All too often, I strain my head searching for a vision of society beyond empire, of true harmony beyond platitudes that is more than assimilation-propagated-as-democracy. Of course, in those moments I come up hopelessly short. But it is in those moments I am more convinced than ever that the key to love is a divine miracle. I hope in a divine miracle that has already happened, and invites us to take faith in its unfailing reality. Because the ultimate honoring of life comes in the form of perfect love for it, perfect love in a person who poured out his own blood to replenish and renew others, all of whom he knows and loves deeply, intimately, and personally: knowing he would be emptied, but having faith that there would be life after his own death.

In thinking of mercy, I recall what James wrote in his epistle to early Christians: “Mercy triumphs over judgment” (James 2:13b).  I remember the first time that sentence truly reverberated through my heart one Sunday afternoon, almost a year into struggling to process multiple experiences of emotional manipulation and psychological abuse that had affected not only me, but my family and friends in a religious space, of all settings, where we should have been able to trust those who had been tasked with leadership. For months, I knew that, in addition to juridical consequences, I deeply desired to speak the same damaging words and inflict the same violences onto the people who had attacked, hurt, and exploited me, my family, and my friends. I careened back and forth between justified rage and a festering fury that oozed like pus from a wound. Yet pus is the natural discharge of fluid as an infected wound heals. It does not just disappear. It must be acknowledged, given time, and, when ready, drained out. As painful as it can be, healing is a process of both patience and perseverance. It is to give yourself time and space, but also to recognize when the choice is yours to make.

After Shuri hears from Ramonda, she is faced with the choice: to stop and listen, or to keep going. She chooses to listen. While in the post-credit scenes, Namor pictures this moment of mercy as an opportunity to capitalize on Shuri’s vulnerability, what Shuri has done is anything but weak. Despite how odd, vulnerable, or futile her decision might appear to be, honoring a choice of life over a choice of death is the only way to even begin a nonviolent world.

On that Sunday afternoon, while I spoke the verse from James aloud with my congregation, the words struck, and something shifted within me. It occurred to me that I no longer held ill will. I acknowledged, held, and grieved our pain, and demanded that our dignity be recognized and honored, without desiring to destroy the people who had manipulated, mistreated, and disregarded us. I could believe in consequences, and justice, without wishing them harm—without killing their personhood the way I previously burned with desire to. The radical action to take here, I realized, was to refuse to play this game of attrition any further. Mercy triumphs over judgment. I cried, realizing that I truly believed it.

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[1]  It does not escape me—in fact, it weighs heavily on my mind—that the mechanisms of corporations, entertainment, and commerce in our global economy like Disney and Marvel are precisely part and parcel of empire’s ongoing lives and damages. My writing here is thus my own transparent negotiation of living out a life of nonviolence in a world of violence, to consider and witness the entire context while also seeking ways of creating, and co-creating, new life by recognizing the seeds of it as made by players and collectives like Coogler and the team of this film.