Ontologically whole, reparations, and Wakanda’s childhoods

Forever. For all future times. For always. This article is a meditation on the appearance of Black/Afro and Indigenous childhoods in the movie Wakanda Forever, which we undertake as a reparative act. Deeming the colonial apparatus redundant and obsolete, the article follows Toni Morrison’s cue to suspend racism’s distractive function in order to attend care-full-y to the ontological wholeness of Black/Afro (and) Indigenous childhoods. Ontological wholeness is a concept derived from Sylvia Wynter’s analytic universe whose aim is to tell the truth about the non-ontological-lacking wholeness (Wynter, 1989) of Black/Afro (and) Indigenous young people. Through still images, narrative, and movement, we delve into Wakanda’s audiovisualities that restore the multiplicitous dimensions of these childhoods. Our analysis is committed to adding forms of language, vocabularies, and syntactic formations that, in vibrations with the splendor of Black and Indigenous young life, can contribute to how we speak and write the Black (and) Indigenous child in social life. Theoretically we seek to learn how this truth-telling practice that affirms Black and Indigenous existence can be reparative and add to the demands of Afro (and) Indigenous reparations. In considering reparations and attending to the geographies of Wakanda, we turn to Abiayala, which includes the Caribbean, and to peoples of the region for the rich ways in which they give meaning to the world and for their/our wayfinding craft in articulating reparations slowly and rebelliously.