Within Marvel comic book lore, Wakanda is a nation apart – a vibranium-rich African idyll whose superiority and cunning have kept it safe from invaders here on Earth or other faraway galaxies. It holds its own militarily, economically – and all while laying claim to an undiluted national identity.
In the 2018 film Black Panther, Wakanda was depicted with clarity and majesty; many across the African diaspora couldn’t help but take immense pride, while others remain convinced that Wakanda is a real place. But after watching the 2022 sequel Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, these same admirers have now been left to sit with the horror of this seemingly indomitable nation being wiped clean off the map by another equally powerful civilization lurking under water.
Wakanda Forever wouldn’t be so affecting or so urgent (for repeat watchers especially) if director Ryan Coogler hadn’t gone to such lengths to ground the film in truth. But of the many heady themes the film tackles – Chadwick Boseman’s sudden death, the insatiable avarice of the world’s superpower nations, the tragic infighting among racial minority groups with common cause – it’s the way Wakanda Forever handles Black people and their relationship to water that’s most resonant. It’s fraught territory for any film, much less one meant for kids.
Reducing water to a kryptonite-like metaphor for a superhero film that centers the Black experience isn’t so much of a stretch. Sadly water runs through some of the darkest moments in recent Black history – not least the North Atlantic slave trade, which saw some 2 million African people lose their lives during the two-month-long Middle Passage, many of the dead thrown overboard to stanch contagion.
In the 1940s and 50s public pools and beaches became an integration battleground as municipalities fought to keep out Black bodies, fearing the relationships that might flow from so many near naked bodies commingling. Those who marched and protested against Jim Crow laws were doused with fire hoses.
Even today Black people suffer deadly consequences from their relatively limited access to water; according to the CDC, school-aged Black children are still five and a half times more likely to fatally drown than their white counterparts. (Hispanic children aren’t much farther behind.) All of it feeds the stereotype of Black people being genetically incapable of swimming, an easily debunked hypothesis that nonetheless remains as alive in the minds of propagating eugenicists as in a post-civil rights generation who would rather not tempt fate.
It’s only recently that these perceptions have somewhat pivoted. The past 15 years alone have seen Americans Cullen Jones, Simone Manuel and Lia Neal score historic triumphs in pools at the Olympics. But even as a new generation of Black and brown kids have followed in their wake, pop culture has lagged woefully behind.
The 2007 film Pride tracks the true story of a Black former competitive swimmer who launches an all-Black team from a crumbling Philadelphia recreation center with a rotting pool. Yet even with Bernie Mac and Oscar nominee Terrence Howard in lead roles, it was far from a blockbuster success. On the opposite side of the popularity spectrum there’s the song Water No Get Enemy, the B-side of Fela Kuti’s 1975 EP Expensive Shit; in that song Kuti preaches about the power of living in harmony with nature, and how that alloy of power is virtually unstoppable – a parable that plays out in Wakanda, where the oneness between man and vibranium is regularly flaunted in the first Black Panther film.
Initially in the sequel we see water as a source of serenity when Shuri and Queen Ramonda slink away to a literal watering hole, complete with grazing elephants. It isn’t until the elephants begin stirring that the royals realize there’s an intruder in their midst, a feathered serpent god called Namor who eluded their best defenses and is now threatening to take them down. And with that, the tone is set – as Kuti himself sang: “Nothing without water.”
From then on the symbolism becomes impossible to escape. Water meant everlasting life for one civilization (the Mesoamerican-inspired inhabitants of an Atlantis-like nation called Talokan), certain death for the Wakandans. Throughout the film, Black protagonists were forced to reckon with their literal place in water. Nakia, the shape-shifting spy, thrives. Okoye, the stony Dora Milaje general, barely survives. Riri, the impulsive kid, nearly gets herself killed twice. In one critical scene, Shuri emerges from the deep in white, newly baptized.
The second time it’s Queen Ramonda who comes to her rescue, and the camera lingers as she pulls Riri to safety – as if to say: “See, we can be actual lifeguards, too!” Even the choice to show the queen’s natural gray locks bobbing in the blue seems directed at the legion of Black women whose concerns about their hair keep them from testing water. When the queen’s heroic act winds up killing her anyway, it hits like a Namor punch to the chest.
But for me the hardest scene to watch was Wakanda being inundated with water as the Talokan invaded. It was too close to my memories of the devastation that followed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. What’s more, the scenes shot in Haiti didn’t give me much rest, as they were clearly intended to tie the film to the community that had been devastated by Hurricane Matthew.
Even Coogler was forced to confront his own relationship with water, recently telling Variety how he learned to swim explicitly to direct Wakanda Forever. “If the camera is in the water, actors are in the water, I’ve got to be in there, too,” he said; 64-year-old Angela Bassett, who plays Ramonda, was motivated to improve her less-than-average swimming ability as well. “Almost to the point that I was going to get a complex,” she told Variety. “Like, am I going to be able to deliver what you’re asking for? She had to be strong. She had to be a mother. She had to be a leader. [Coogler] was just throwing all of this at me. And then on top of that: ‘Can you swim? Can you put your head in water?’”
Ultimately, the film lands on the balance that Kuti sings about – and even seems to draw further inspiration from the Afrobeat star by taking its sweet time to get there. Of course it’s likely much of these surging cultural undercurrents will wash over the viewer who only signed up to see how this film relates to the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But for the rest of us who are attuned to the bittersweet nature of water and take to it anyway despite deeply entrenched fears, Wakanda Forever’s go-with-the-flow allegory is too strong to drown out.
