Erik Killmonger: The Beauty of a Complex Villain

It’s been legit years since I’ve written on this blog but after watching Black Panther twice this weekend, I had to revisit it.

SPOILERS AHEAD

There are many reasons why Black Panther is such a great movie. Coogler manages to strike the exact right balance between action and emotion; the plot is rooted in a substantive story; and the characters are fleshed-out human beings with layers and complexities as opposed to caricatures or archetypes. The prominence of intelligent, strong-willed, personable black female characters and their integral contributions to plot, story and the very fabric of the film is nothing short of spectacular.

Like I said, it’s a great movie for different reasons and I could write an essay on each reason but this post is specifically about Erik Killmonger and the beauty of a complex antagonist.  

One of the many great things about Black Panther is that while it manages to be accessible to all audiences, it also speaks directly to black audiences whether in the diaspora or on the continent. The movie deftly explores continental African culture as well as African American culture both respectively and in relation to each other. The movie also addresses the various ways that white supremacy has enacted its oppression on black people whether it’s through showing the display of stolen West African artefacts in a UK museum 

source: https://amberjliu.tumblr.com/post/171023030692/erik-killmonger-black-panther-2018

or the discussion of over-policing and inflated incarceration rates in the U.S. Anti-blackness is global and multifaceted and BP manages to show that with subtlety and precision.

Erik is an empathetic and layered character because while he is African American, he is also representative of the diaspora as a whole. While BP uses Wakanda to celebrate the various cultures in Africa, it uses Erik to explore the longing of the diaspora to reconnect to those same cultures whether it’s through him taking a mask from the West African exhibit 

source: http://demonio-dos-pampas.tumblr.com/post/161648103138

 or through the revelation that at the beginning of the movie, it isn’t T’Challa asking T’Chaka about the origin of Wakanda, it’s Erik asking N’Jobu. More than that, Erik was raised in a society shaped by white supremacy and due to his career path, visited various countries around the world subjugated to that same white supremacy. So when he shows up at Wakanda demanding that they help their "brothers and sisters in need", explaining that black people have been subjugated and oppressed and started revolutions with next to nothing; when he shames Wakanda for their detachment, he is not wrong. At all.  However, what makes Killmonger an antagonist as opposed to a hero or even an anti-hero, in my opinion, isn’t his “by any means necessary” approach but the fact that his intention and his rhetoric actually don’t align.

Throughout Killmonger’s time onscreen I found myself nodding my head, muttering “he’s not wrong through” nearly every time he spoke. Yet I think it is made clear that he doesn’t actually intend for the oppressed to overthrow the oppressor, his intention is destruction. And no, I don’t mean “burn down the system and start from the ground up” destruction but complete and utter annihilation. 

source: http://fallenvictory.tumblr.com/post/167853472722/ive-waited-my-entire-life-for-this

He admits as much during his final fight with T’Challa when he proclaims that the world has taken everything from him, everything he ever loved and this way they’ll be even. He speaks of arming Wakandan war dogs and the oppressed peoples of various countries but without formulating or discussing a strategy of any kind for the revolution itself or for what would happen after. He can only pronounce that Wakanda will rule over everything.

For me, it’s less about the fact that he was demanding Wakanda become the very thing he hates and more about the fact that the violence and toxicity and trauma of white supremacy broke him to the point that he couldn’t see anything outside of his own pain and rage. This is why the movie ends up agreeing with Erik’s rhetoric but not his intention. T’Challa not only faces his father and ancestors to tell them that they were wrong, he comes up with strategies and plans for Wakanda to actually reach those in need.

The tension between rhetoric and intention and the context of Erik’s intention is what makes him such a great antagonist. It is what allowed for my viewing experience in which I wholeheartedly rooted for T’Challa and yet empathized deeply with Killmonger. T’Challa was the hero I wanted to see succeed but the entirety of my emotional responses to the film came from Erik’s scenes. In other words, if you haven’t seen Black Panther yet, I recommend you check it out, right the hell now!

Cannot Believe It's Been A Year Since I posted But ...

... I really wanted to post this. To those of you who look in (if anyone) click on this link, comment, share, "react", see if there's anything you like :)
http://www.buzzfeed.com/zalr

When Do You Tell A Specific Story Right? (I wasn't clever enough for a witty title today...)

It's been a while since I've blogged, much less blogged about literature, but I got to thinking today. A while ago, I leant my friend Junot Diaz's latest book This Is How You Lose Her and she called me up to rant about it. This surprised me because she and I love Diaz's work; while Drown is expertly economic and sparse in its writing yet full of raw emotion and intensity, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a beautiful masterpiece, a saga of colonialism, family, intergenerational trauma, nerdism, sexuality, identity and fantasy. Admittedly, when I had read his latest book in the fall, it hadn't spoken to me as strongly as his other two had but I found it superbly written and honest, an exploration of an older Yunior's psyche and views on relationships as a man. My friend didn't disagree but she said while in Drown and The Brief Wondrous his honesty was entwined with a commentary on these views, in This Is How You Lose Her that ironic/meta/critical element was gone. Yes, it is an unspoken (sometimes spoken) trend in Caribbean/Caribbean-American-Canadian/African-American-Canadian communities for black men to go after light-skinned women and see darker women on the side, yes power dynamics and sex can be entwined, but her issue was that the novel seemed to celebrate these issues and themes; This Is How You Lose Her seemed to take what made Drown and The Brief Wondrous stimulating, buzz-worthy, and sexy and run with it, revel in it, instead of stop and dissect it. I don't necessarily agree with this assessment but I found enough merit in it to think about it for a while since the same accusations were made about The Brief Wondrous. 

Many women I know found Diaz's female characters stock in comparison to the lively energetic voice of Yunior and the colourful characterization of Oscar; a lot of [white] women found the female characters unnecessarily harsh and unaffectionate; and other women (of many nationalities/races/ethnicities) felt as if he adheres to the whore/Madonna trope in all of his work. Certainly, the women are more subtly portrayed compared to the male characters in The Brief Wondrous but I never equated flashiness with depth; further, I understood the women in his novel because I grew up with and around these women. Their grit-teeth sternness, their suck-it-up attitude... they're survivors of horrific life experiences and are hardened as such; moreover, support for many Caribbean families isn't about emotion, it's about "getting shit done", about moving your offspring up in the world, providing for them, making sure they won't want for anything when they're older: financial stability, education, work ethic, an instillation of a "no-nonsense-nobody-will-walk-over-me-in-life" attitude and I think Diaz portrayed that unapologetically and wonderfully and my friend agrees with this. My point in bringing this up and explicating my defence of The Brief Wondrous is that it led me to another question (and this is where my post really begins): what does it take for commentary to work? If you're not writing an essay, if your fiction isn't explicitly polemical, if you're just trying to tell a story while at the same time making a comment on the world you grew up in ... how do you it? When and how is it successful? As a writer, I'm very interested in this question. It's almost related to the question about satire: when is irony not ironic anymore? As someone who witnesses "hipster racism" (http://jezebel.com/5905291/a-complete-guide-to-hipster-racism) daily, the irony/not-irony question is another one that really interests me.

I find myself constantly debating with people about when commentary in a story/movie/TV series works and when it doesn't or when it's nonexistent. For instance, I got in a heated argument with someone over Robert Downey Jr.'s use of blackface in Tropic Thunder. I felt like I understood what Ben Stiller was trying to do with RDJ's character: not only showing that Hollywood would rather "blacken" a white man rather than hire an actual African-American actor but that black characters in Hollywood films are presented as how white people see them and not as they are (the "collard green" scene did that for me). He, however, found that Stiller was using the defence I made as an excuse to get some cheap laughs at the expense of African Americans. On the other hand, I absolutely loathe New Girl. It's one of those shows I watch purely to hate (kind of like Sex and the City) and while a few of my friends have defended the never-ending racial jokes as a commentary on multiracial friendships in contemporary society, I feel like the show is just using racist jokes to make racist jokes under the guise of irony. I especially think this since the jokes or statements have nothing to do with the plots and they don't influence the dynamics in any way; plus New Girl still employs tokenism with Winston and CeCe rejects her cultural ways and for the few episodes that she embraces them, it's clear (to me) that the show is poking fun at the traditions.

There is no real conclusion or solution or realization in this post/to this post, it's really me just spewing out my thoughts and wanting to share them with whoever comes across this blog. I may have mislead you, the reader, into thinking this is about literature but I suppose I'm wondering more about storytelling and the politics/mechanics/influences of it. Spike Lee's Bamboozled does a great job in exploring the questions I've raised, making a commentary on when/how/why satire becomes real and therefore almost, ALMOST slipping into the caricature he condemns in his own film (which is interesting). So this more of a discussion than a definitive post and hopefully I get some [respectful] responses. And with that, I'll end.

The Message of Tyler Perry's "Temptation": Women Should Know Better.

Since Tyler Perry’s first movie I have had fundamental issues with his work firstly as a Black woman and secondly as a person who enjoys good films. In relation to the first part Tyler Perry has tropes and themes that permeate his films that personally offend me. For instance, there is a tendency to villainize the Black middle/upper-class; the men are abusive, controlling and emotionally domineering (Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Madea’s Family Reunion) and the women are manipulative and cruel (Madea Goes To Jail, Why Did I Get Married?) or just simply weak. The women, then, take a romantic chance on the unemployed man or the man with an arrest record because he is hardworking (whereas Black upper-class man aren’t) and has found God and is therefore redeemable. Another trope is the negligent mother who either ignores the molestation of her daughters or who purposely pimps her daughter(s) out to keep a man or who doesn’t have her child’s interest at heart (Madea’s Big Happy Family). However, his latest film Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counsellor has enraged me beyond any of his other films.

Quick plot synopsis: Judith is a therapist working at a matchmaking company. She is married to her childhood sweetheart Brice, a pharmacist, who has become increasingly inattentive to her throughout their marriage. Judith confides in Brice that she wants to start her own marriage counselling business but Brice urges her to put it off for 15 years until they’re more financially stable. Judith then meets Harley, a wealthy Internet entrepreneur who considers investing in the matchmaking company. Harley takes an interest in Judith and begins to seduce her implying that her sex life with her husband is bland and conventional, which prompts Judith to spice up her and Brice’s lovemaking, which is an attempt that falls flat. On a plane ride to New Orleans and back, Harley seduces her and they begin an affair, which eventually leads to Judith becoming addicted to cocaine, to quitting her job to start her own company (in which Harley is a partner), and to her leaving Brice and living with Harley where they engage in a volatile relationship in which he beats her viciously. It is then revealed that Harley is HIV positive, has a history of abusing women and giving them his disease. Brice then “saves” Judith but not before she contracts the virus. The end.

OK. My issue with this movie? Let’s start with the plane “sex” scene, which is actually a rape scene. What happens is Harley starts touching and kissing Judith, sliding his hands between her legs and Judith says “no” and “stop it.” She starts to cry and she starts to push him and hit him and her cries of “stop it!” get louder then he says, “OK stop it, stop it! Now you can tell people you resisted” and starts kissing her again and she stops resisting and the sex ensues. Before this scene was the one in which Judith attempts to spice up her and Brice’s love life by saying, “ATTACK ME, ATTACK ME LIKE AN ANIMAL” (previous to that Harley had told her sex should be “random like animals”). The plane “sex” scene coupled with the  “attack me” scene imply very irresponsibly that rape does not exist because women want it, crave it; we like being physically dominated but it’s “socially unacceptable” so we “pretend” to have real objections, so men just be men and push past the hitting, the crying, and the constant screams of “stop it!” and the woman in question will eventually succumb to her desire. This is how rape culture starts and gets perpetuated, this reinforces the idea of “she wanted it anyway” and so this is absolutely abhorrent.

My other issue is the message: BEWARE OF THE [Black] WOMAN WITH AMBITION. Certainly, Brice was inattentive and certainly Harley seduced Judith with flowers and private jets and (very stilted) sexual banter but he also seduced her with giving her a vote of confidence. He seduced her by telling her she should start her own business, she should be self-sufficient and the movie says, shame on her for believing him! If she had just listened to her husband and waited then she wouldn’t have contracted HIV! This leads me to my other problem with the film. It actually begins with a much older, frumpier-looking Judith counselling a couple. The husband states that he still loves his wife while the wife states that she was a different person when they got married at eighteen, people change and grow. The husband then leaves the session out of sad exasperation and Judith realizes that the woman has met a man who makes her feel exciting and wanted so she tells the story of her life as a cautionary tale while stating that this story is about her “sister”. When the story/flashback sequence finishes, the film moves back to the present and upon learning that Judith contracted HIV, the wife says, “Thank you for telling me this story. I’m going to end my almost-affair and stay with my husband.” So according to Tyler Perry and this movie, it is impossible for a woman to fall out of love with her husband and if she wants to start a new life she’s selfish and if she does, she will become addicted to cocaine, get beaten and contract HIV?

Furthermore, why did Judith have to change her clothes? Fashion and beauty play a big role in this movie. When Judith resisted Harley and remained a loyal wife, she dressed frumpily and then the more Harley seduced her, the more makeup she wore, the more flattering her clothes became and then after the affair, she reverts back to homely clothing. Consequently, good girls can’t wear makeup or flattering clothes because if they do, they’ll go sex-crazy and spiral out of control. The logic of this film and the conclusions it draws are absolutely ridiculous. Also what happens to Harley? Nothing! Brice beats him up and then that’s pretty much it. It’s Judith who has a lesson to learn, it’s Judith who should’ve known better, it’s Judith who should be punished because well, boys will be boys, men screw you over, it’s the way of the world, and she should’ve known! I mean, her religious mother had told her that Harley was Satan!

This film is also terrible on a cinematic level. It is pure melodrama with overacting and dun dun DUN moments with no nuance and no subtlety. First off the sexual banter was painful to listen to and was not at all seductive or appealing or charming or natural. “Sex should be random … like animals” made me cringe. There is also absolutely no chemistry between Jurnee Smollett-Bell (Judith) and Robbie Jones (Harley) and the entire movie was full of awkward stares and painful silences. Further, the whole Harley as Satan motif was pounded into the audience’s head what with his red sports car, the fact that the second time he and Judith have sex, they do so in the steam of the bathtub (so much steam in fact that all you see is steam) surrounded by lit candles, and oh yeah, like I said before, Judith’s mother literally calls him the devil. This movie took two hours of my life I will not get back.

Tyler Perry’s issues with Black women is not a subject that hasn’t already been parsed in the media but I felt compelled to write this post because I found this film irresponsible, deeply misogynistic and personally offensive. I have not been offended like this by a movie in a long, long while and I think the problems with it should be discussed in an open forum.

The Problems with The Vampire Diaries: More Than Irksome

I am a self-professed fan of The Vampire Diaries. Yes. I am. It’s endearing, funny – at times slick and witty – action-packed and I am obsessed with the love triangles it portrays. I will try not to bring any ship-war fandom into this post.

…

STELENA FTW!

Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.

But truly, this isn’t a Stefan versus Damon, Stelena versus Delena piece, this is about how while I tune in to the show every week and have been for the past 3 years, there are fundamental issues with TVD and they’re beginning to more than irk me.

            

Let’s start with the witch, Bonnie Bennett.

           

TVD has been running for four seasons now so the pattern concerning witches is well established: they have all been Black. The only exception to this pattern is Esther, the “Original Witch” who created vampires, and even she learned her craft from the Black witch who serves her family i.e. a woman enslaved to the family (The Vampire Diaries also glosses over enslavement while feeling self-satisfied with its subtle hints toward its presence in American history). I bring this up because most characters of colour have died on The Vampire Diaries – Anna, Connor, Luka and his father, Pearl, Bree – and if they haven’t died, they are there to serve the purpose of either helping or destroying the predominately white vampires. Nothing else.

           

Bonnie is the only character-of-colour who is in the forefront and even she is an incidental character. Indeed, she is integral in all of the supernatural creatures’ plots to either save Elena or themselves but she is not a character beyond her witchiness. They do not show her for anything else.  She is there to be used for her powers and nothing else and when she is so traumatized by an event that she can’t use them anymore, she’s told that she is not valuable (“The witch who has lost her powers is left out of the important conversations”).  It can be said that Bonnie’s character revolves around loyalty to her family, to her friends, and to, in a sense, morality and yet the only way she’s given to express that is through her magic. Caroline, Elena, Rebekah and Katherine are all given complexities and arcs that make them fuller characters. Caroline went from a neurotic, deeply insecure and seemingly shallow teenage girl to a fierce, loyal, mature and grounded vampire woman; Elena, driven by compassion and empathy is not a saint, she is selfish a lot of the time and victimizes herself to an irritating degree; conversely, Katherine who appears to be purely selfish and cold-hearted is also driven by love and loyalty; and finally, Rebekah, also deeply insecure, lonely, desperate and loyal channels her frustration through intense-vampire-bullying. Bonnie, however, lacks any of these interesting dynamics. It is not that she is a witch first, she’s a witch only; she is the contemporary Magical Negro there to serve at the pleasure of those around her. Magic is her only identity and she is the least protected character in the entire show – most characters have lost at least one family member throughout the course of the series – but Bonnie sacrifices, she and her family are the collateral damage 99 times out of 100 and she isn’t given the support of her friends.

           

This sort of segues into my next issue with The Vampire Diaries, which truthfully hasn’t been brewing as long as my Bonnie Bennett problem. As I mentioned earlier, The Vampire Diaries prides itself on giving its characters interesting dynamics so as to avoid creating stock characters (with the exception of Bonnie) and that is especially true for the two leading men: Stefan and Damon Salvatore. I will be focusing on Damon and particularly his relationship with Caroline.

Damon comes into the series as basically a psychopath who takes advantage of insecure girls, feeds on them, sleeps with them, compels them (erases their memory) and repeats – Caroline being his most prominent victim.  He also kills civilians to prove a point to his righteous, straight-laced little brother, Stefan, and tries to tempt Stefan’s girlfriend, Elena, into cheating on Stefan with him. Further, he tried to kill Caroline by draining her blood (Stefan saw to it that that didn’t happen) and he also tries to kill Bonnie and, again, Stefan saves her life.  It’s then revealed that Damon is pathologically lonely, fiercely in love with a woman (Katherine) who has led him on for over a century, ridden with suppressed guilt for the pain he has caused, and actually falls completely in love with Elena as she is someone who saw good in him and took a chance on him.

As the seasons progress, he becomes less and less psychopathic (even though his promiscuous and homicidal tendencies appear every once in a while) and allows his caring nature to shine through, mostly with Elena and with his brother, although with secondary characters too, such as with Caroline’s mother, Sheriff Forbes. In this season, Damon appears to be completely reformed and as a vampire, Elena has transformed into a different, more impulsive, “darker” woman. The two are finally together – yay for Delena fans, ehh for Stelena fans. However, Caroline reserves judgment on their relationship and takes jabs at Damon every chance she gets, which culminates into Elena vehemently defending Damon and paying no attention to his track record, criticizing Caroline for falling into bed with him in an instant and then ends with Caroline apologizing for her judgment.

            

Um, WHY SHOULD CAROLINE APOLOGIZE? The notion astounds me.

         

Indeed, Damon has changed. Elena and Stefan have both directly and indirectly turned him into a better man. However, the present doesn’t outweigh or erase the past. When Caroline transitioned into a vampire in season 2, all of her erased memories came back, which included Damon’s murder attempt and his emotional and physical abuse. While the show doesn’t directly acknowledge how Caroline feels about these memories or shows any real hostility in the Caroline/Damon relationship, Caroline is incredibly wary of Damon’s character and constantly pushes Elena to stay with Stefan who, does have a very bloody past, but who meaningfully atones for his past crimes and who has never tried to kill any of Elena’s friends. Caroline’s mistrust of Damon is well-founded and yet the show doesn’t appear to think so and constantly tries to counter her doubts so as to show Damon as a truly honorable person while forgetting or trying to make the audience forget that she has experienced a serious trauma with this person. It ventures into the Stephanie Meyer land of irresponsibility and is more than irritating and astounding.

Alas, I think I will end my post because if I go any further it will become a piece about how and why Stefan is better for Elena than Damon and that is not why I sat down and wrote this this afternoon. I am not completely writing-off The Vampire Diaries, it is a show I am completely obsessed with (probably a bit unhealthily so) but that isn’t to say that it’s not without some deep-rooted, real issues because it is, and they need to be acknowledged.

They're both Black ... So What's The Issue?

There have been many debates surrounding the choice to cast Zoe Saldana as Nina Simone in the upcoming biopic “Nina”. On the one hand, there are arguments for the casting choice, which essentially say Saldana is an excellent actress and a woman of African ancestry so what’s the issue? On the other hand, there’s an argument against the choice and it specifically takes issue with Saldana’s light skin and with the Hollywood tendency to “whitewash and lightwash a lot of stories, particularly when black actresses are concerned.”

            I agree with the latter argument.

            

This isn’t an attack on Saldana or on her acting abilities (although to be honest, the movies I’ve seen her in haven’t given her the capacity to exercise her acting skills for me to judge whether or not she is a good actress). However, I do take issue with the fact that rather than finding a dark-skinned actress who looks more like Nina Simone, the writers/producers/director have chosen to cast a light-skinned woman, fix her with a prosthetic nose, afro wig and – wait for it – darken her with makeup.

             

Sure. Actors and actresses have physically altered themselves to look like the characters they play; they dye their hair, gain weight, grow a beard, put on accents. However, none of those practices are rooted in racism and carry the emotional and historical and colonial baggage that blackface does. Yes. I do consider Saldana darkening her skin to look more like Nina Simone – who incidentally wrote “Four Women” a song about the histories and skin tones of four Black women – an act of blackface. Further, I find the choice an insult to Nina Simone’s legacy in that she did not adhere to what show business at that time deemed acceptable aesthetics and celebrated her dark skin and wide nose when she was told that those features did not embody beauty.

For more context surrounding the aforementioned Hollywood tendency, one just needs to take a look at Thandie Newton and the controversy surrounding her role in the film based on Ngozi Adichie’s “Half of a Yellow Sun”, which deals with the Nigerian Civil War; there is also the fact that Jacqueline Fleming, who is biracial, was cast as Harriet Tubman in “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.”

            

As Tiffani Jones, founder of the blog Coffee Rhetoric, says: “When is it going to be O.K. to not be the delicate looking ideal of what the media considers blackness to be?”

Ship Of Souls: A Novel of Revolutionary Nature

The best way for me to describe Zetta Elliott's novel is to say that it is revolutionary but not necessarily because it makes any overt political statements (although there are a few), but because it is a rarity; Ship of Souls is a Young Adult fantasy novel and all three of the protagonists are Black teens. In my experience, it is difficult to find a YA novel about Black teens much less a fantasy YA novel. As a writer, it is my goal to achieve what Elliott has -- and that is to write a story about human relationships wherein the characters happen to be people of colour. This leads me to discuss the book itself.

For those who don't know what the novel is about, the summary is as follows: a mysterious and supernatural bird takes three unlikely friends, D, Hakeem or "Keem", and Nyla on a "perilous journey that will take them from Brooklyn to the African Burial Ground in lower Manhattan, and into the very realm of the dead" (from the back of the book). Not only is the fantastical element of the novel both chilling and intriguing, Elliott masterfully balances the otherworldly with the banalities of adolescence. While D is coming to grips with the fact that he can speak to a bird, he also worries about impressing the beautiful Nyla, fitting in at school, and whether or not he's "Black enough"; issues that concern Black teenage boys as well as teenage boys of other racial backgrounds. Thus, Elliott succeeds in exploring themes that reach a specific (and often overlooked) target audience without excluding other readers.

The characters were also very enjoyable to read; D, Nyla and Keem made a wonderful dynamic since all three of their personalities were wildly different. I found myself drawn to Nyla's tough and independent nature and her sassy wit made me laugh on more than one occasion. While D is the main character, Nyla is the most active out of the three, and I was immensely pleased to read about a female character who was not passive in any sense and who didn't apologize for her personality or her beauty but who did not exploit her appearance either.

This is all to say that I read Ship of Souls in one sitting and while I deeply enjoyed the novel as a reader, I also deeply respected it as a writer. Zetta Elliott is a master of balance and nuance; she is able to use specificity to achieve universal appeal and I would highly recommend this novel for any young adult.