"Welcome to my wild paradise"

Nice Magazine #2

From September of 2017 to April 2017, my period had remained for about seven months. Included in that I had my first UTI, which led me to get sicker. Because of those things, my health deteriorated, I gained about 56 pounds (which twenty-six pounds of it I lost), and I was losing so much blood that I passed constantly and couldn’t work properly because of it. My mom herself had to spend 50$+ in buying overnight pads to manage the servers bleeding (I eventually I to wear bladder pads) and also thankfully having help from strangers on here and having those donate things and buy pads off my wishlist.

My depression grew worse than it was usually. Eventually I got see a doctor after months which I hadn’t been able to do until I signed up for Medicaid since it’s very costly to visit the doctor and pay for medicine with the insurance provided by my mama’s , prescribed to birth control which I hadn’t been able take because of the aforementioned reason, I was able to regulate my period to about week (which is this pretty abnormal, at his point I wish for anything manageable). When I pick up the medicine my mothers insurance that I had was listed as my primary insurance and my Medicaid was secondary. While I had thought my mom took me off of her insurance she explained that she too scared of the events going with trump in office, she was fearful I could be dropped from Medicaid. Anyways because of that I sat down with my pharmacist who said she’d waive the cost of the Medicine since I presented the insurance card.

Fast forward to this week. I wake up on Wednesday, I wake up with a pain on my back. I have a pretty poorly set up bed so I ignore it. Around this same day my period seemed to have come off completely and I was happy. Throughout the day I find the pain being unbearable, I end up not eating for majority of the day. I find myself urinating frequently and pain tryin to urinate at that, feeling super dehydrated, by the time it’s 7pm I’m in so much pain my cannot sleep and I lay for hours with a fever of 103.

I suspect it’s a UTI since I have a lot of the symptoms and that I’ve had one before I was unable to go to the urgent care in my city until the next before of my mom’s work—when I got to the urgent care, was diagnosed with a severe UTI, with large amounts of blood in my bladder as well. I get antibiotics, take them go home. My body rejects the medicine, I have terrible cold shivers, vomit trying to take them. I wake up the next day to terrible chest pains and felling my heart beating fast as as dizziness and trouble breathing. I go back to the urgent care for follow and give blood samples as well as a scan of my heart. My results come back that my white blood cell could is extreme high, and that my infection had reached my kidneys. I’m rushed over to the emergency room. I stay from 6 to 11pm—the doctors tell me that since I’m severely anemic from my terrible menstrual cycle, it’s harder for my already weak body to fight the infection. (I’m sorry I only have photos my mom took to send to my brother in NY and my Sister in another city about my body’s condition) I’m left on a iv drip, I’m switched to another set of antibiotics and now I sit here writing this on the notes of my phone after waking out from several hours of sleeping and not being able to keep my fever or food down.

Because my mothers insurance is listed as my primary insurance I have to pay for my medication. Which means I have to pay 30$ for the birth control that literally has saved my life. I’ve tried NURX, a organization that helps women acquire free or low cost birth control, but from what I know they currently don’t serve my area.

Because of the infection I have that has reached my kidneys and my whole life situation in general I’ve had few emotional breakdowns one of which leads me to go hiatus on all my social media accounts. Im sorry to my friends that I’ve disappeared from so suddenly. I’m not okay, emotionally, physically right so I not posting on here or anywhere, but I need help to able to save up for my birth control medicine as well as my inhaler since it’s hard for me to find another job and especially one that doesn’t worsen my body’s current condition.

I have a shop, The Black Velvet Underground https://tictail.com/theblackvelvetunderground where I sell shirts, caps, what have you with a section dedicated of stuff inspired by director wong kar-wai https://tictail.com/theblackvelvetunderground?filter=navigation_id%3Awong-kar-wai-inspired-s. That being said please use paypal to checkout you decide to be nice enough to buy a shirt, and if you’re using a card then select pay with debit/credit card at checkout.

Also my Cash me is $valentinesdean and my venmo is wannabevalentine

I love you all and I’m sorry that I can’t be here right now but it’d be great if y’all can help.

If you have anything that could help me, please send me an email [email protected], I’ll try to check it as often as I can. Again, if you boost, donate or do neither I still thank you for hearing my the current situation I’m going through. I hope y’all have a great day and enjoy the summer with yourselves or ones that you love.

Black Panther is a love letter to people of African descent all over the world. Its actors, its costume design, its music, and countless other facets of the film are drawn from all over the continent and its diaspora, in a science-fiction celebration of the imaginary country of Wakanda, a high-tech utopia that is a fictive manifestation of African potential unfettered by slavery and colonialism.

But it is first and foremost an African American love letter, and as such it is consumed with The Void, the psychic and cultural wound caused by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the loss of life, culture, language, and history that could never be restored. It is the attempt to penetrate The Void that brought us Alex Haley’s Roots, that draws thousands of African Americans across the ocean to visit West Africa every year, that left me crumpled on the rocks outside the Door of No Return at Gorée Island’s slave house as I stared out over a horizon that my ancestors might have traversed once and forever. Because all they have was lost to The Void, I can never know who they were, and neither can anyone else.

It is also The Void that creates Michael B. Jordan’s Erik Killmonger, the antagonist of Black Panther, cousin to Chadwick Boseman’s protagonist King T’Challa and a comic-book villain so transcendent that he is almost out of place in a film about a superhero who dresses as a cat. Black Panther is about a highly advanced African kingdom, yes, but its core theme is Pan-Africanism, a belief that no matter how seemingly distant black people’s lives and struggles are from each other, we are in a sense “cousins” who bear a responsibility to help one another escape oppression. And so the director Ryan Coogler asks, if an African superpower like Wakanda existed, with all its power, its monopoly on the invaluable sci-fi metal vibranium, and its advanced technology, how could it have remained silent, remained still, as millions of Africans were devoured by The Void?

“Two billion people all over the world who look like us whose lives are much harder, and Wakanda has the tools to liberate them all,” Killmonger scolds the Wakandan court. “Where was Wakanda?”

Killmonger has come to Wakanda as a conqueror. His father N’Jobu facilitated the theft of vibranium in an attempt to arm black people all over the world against their oppressors; N’Jobu is killed by T’Challa’s father T’Chaka for his insubordinate attempt to end the centuries of isolation that have kept Wakanda safe. T’Chaka abandons Killmonger in Oakland, California (the birthplace of the Black Panther Party), leaving Killmonger literally and figuratively an orphan, who sees in his lost homeland a chance to avenge the millions of black people extinguished in The Void, and those who still suffer in its wake.

Killmonger’s stated purpose, to liberate black people all over the world, has sparked a lively discussion over whether he is a bad guy to begin with. What could be so bad about black liberation? “I fist-pumped in the silent, dark theater when he was laying out his plans,” writes Brooke Obie at Shadow and Act. “IT’S A GOOD IDEA!” That Coogler’s villain has even inspired this debate is a testament to how profound and complex the character is.

“In the end, all comes down to a contest between T’Challa and Killmonger that can only be read one way,” writes Christopher Lebron in a well-argued piece in Boston Review, “in a world marked by racism, a man of African nobility must fight his own blood relative whose goal is the global liberation of blacks.”

This is not actually what happens in the film. Killmonger’s goal is, in his eyes, the global liberation of black people. But that is not truly his goal, as Coogler makes clear in the text of the script and in Killmonger’s interactions with other characters. Like Magneto, another comic-book character who is a creation of historical trauma—the Holocaust instead of the Middle Passage—Killmonger’s goal is world domination. “The sun will never set on the Wakandan empire,” Killmonger declares, echoing an old saying about the British Empire, to drive the point home as clearly as possible. He sees no future beyond his own reign; he burns the magic herbs Wakandan monarchs use to gain their powers because he does not even intend to have an heir.

It is remarkable that many viewers seem to have taken the “liberation” part at face value, and ignored the “empire” part, which Jordan delivers perfectly. They are equally important. Killmonger’s plan for “black liberation,” arming insurgencies all over the world, is an American policy that has backfired and led to unforeseen disasters perhaps every single time it has been deployed; it is somewhat bizarre to see people endorse a comic-book version of George W. Bush’s foreign policy and sign up for the Project for the New Wakandan Centuryas long as the words “black liberation” are used instead of “democracy promotion.” Killmonger’s assault begins in London, New York, and Hong Kong; China is not typically known as a particularly good example of white Western hegemony in need of overthrow.

There are other Wakandan characters who wish to end the kingdom’s isolation for reasons of their own. Lupita Nyong’o’s Nakia is seen at the beginning of the film rescuing people from a Boko Haram–type militia, and later urges T’Challa to take in refugees; T’Challa refuses, citing Wakanda’s tradition of isolationism. Killmonger seeks more than aid or revolution—he seeks hegemony. Here, there are echoes of the breakdown of the original Black Panther Party in its later years, as radicalized chapters sought a direct armed struggle to overthrow the U.S.