Captain America: Symbol of Truth
Gatecrashers: Captain America books have historically been political, whether it be exploring real world or fictional politics, so to that end it makes sense that Symbol of Truth very immediately deals with a problem that’s very pressing in the United States, that being one about how the country treats immigrants. Given your history as a lawyer, was there anything from your experience there that inspired your stories in the title?
Tochi Onyebuchi: Absolutely. It’s a trend in all of my fiction really, particularly my prose fiction. It’s impossible for me to extricate characters from the political situations that they’re in and their political context, whether the context of their story is institutional racism in America or issues surrounding migrants or the military industrial complex or whatever the issue is. Every time I think of character, I think of character in the context of those issues. What forces are they fighting? What forces power their privilege? Where do they see themselves situated in the sort of sociopolitical/socioeconomic ladder? And so to Marvel’s credit, they let this be my brand very wonderfully. Going back to Black Panther: Legends, in the first issue, young T’Challa and Hunter are taken by their parents to apartheid South Africa. This is a book for middle grade readers, like these kids aren’t even teenagers yet and yet I’m writing apartheid South Africa into this book. In a subsequent issue, a character castigates T’Challa for the fact that Wakanda hasn’t gotten involved while all these other African countries are enmeshed in civil wars around them. So it made absolute sense for me with Symbol to ground the story in political issues, even if they’re sort of scaffolded with a sort of Marvel touch – like the Wakanda Forever movement is a direct call back to the Back to Africa movement among a lot of black liberationists, particularly in the 60s, who were like, “Look, like, this is a shit situation in this country. We need to go back to our roots, et cetera, et cetera.” That to me was a very powerful sentiment and I wanted to see how Sam, as Captain America, would react to hearing that. That to me is so juicy and complex. How would he feel about that? Would he approve of the people whose suffering he is intimately familiar with wanting a better life somewhere else? Would he feel that it’s his job to protect them here? So would he feel resentful? Well, like, what would he feel? And I just love conflict in stories. It’s like that meme from that Nollywood movie where the guy’s like, “I don’t want peace, I want problems! Always!” and you can always find problems in political situations.
Jackson Lanzing: I just want to shout out real quick, not that it needs my fucking shout out, but the first time we see Sam encounter the Wakanda Forever movement and says, “This makes it feel like I am failing,” was like such a beautiful marriage of political storytelling and character storytelling. To this day, when people are like, “What’s Symbol of Truth?” I’m like, “It’s that moment, it’s that moment where Sam looks at this giant global political context that he is in the middle of, and rather than seeing himself as a political actor inside of it, he sees himself as a person with objectives and he has conflict about it.” It’s just so cool, man. I love that sequence.
Tochi Onyebuchi: Thank you, that means a lot. It really, really, really does mean a lot.
Gatecrashers: There’s also the exploration of Sam wearing the flags and the color of America going to various international nations and doing missions which would seem illegal because that’s an American man operating internationally. What was the inspiration behind wanting to tackle that narrative of Captain America and the politics of that?
Tochi Onyebuchi: Even if I weren’t a political science major and I didn’t have a background in international relations, I think naturally I’d be inherently ambivalent, if not downright skeptical, of American political involvement in other countries (chuckles) by just having a brief look at history. So you have a character in that position, of, to a certain extent, advocating for or extending America’s fortunes in other countries, or at least trying to make it so that situations in other countries aren’t to America’s detriment, and if a character is being put in that position, how do they feel about that? So that was a question I wanted Sam to be asking himself constantly, and that’s part of the reason why the book is so sort of far-flung around the globe. It’s essentially why Sam has to go into Mohannda, undercover at that. He’s not at the head of an American peacekeeping force or he doesn’t have the backing of the US government to do this. It’s essentially like a Black Ops mission, and it’s up to him and Nomad to take out this coup leader and I wanted to show what that looks like. I also wanted to show what on the ground local resistance can look like in a lot of these places, because I think sometimes there can be the tendency in these stories to focus on the outsider and the narrative sort of them swooping in to save the day. But what I wanted to make clear absolutely was that in these situations, invariably there are people on the ground doing the incredible and necessary work of bringing about justice in their countries.
Gatecrashers: There’s also the critiques of Wakanda from Sam, and something that we see a lot in real world discussions. Is this something you wanted to explore back when you wrote Black Panther: Legends, or was that something you wanted to look at when writing Symbol of Truth?
Tochi Onyebuchi: It’s definitely in the air in the Black Panther book, only instead of it being Sam calling to T’Challa to task for Wakanda’s non interventionist policy, it’s Storm. There’s famine going on here, there’s civil war going on there and y’all are sitting in your nice, technologically advanced, air conditioned rooms. Like what’s going on? With Sam, it’s even deeper because there’s all that historical context of everything that African-Americans have gone through since like 1619 on American shores, and for a big chunk of that time, you have them going through this while there’s this isolated African nation existing peacefully with arguably the greatest resource of the entire world that’s powering their development and they’re doing nothing to help you. I think that’s something that Sam takes very, very, very personally. Another thing too, sort of just looking at it from the the perspective of a somewhat mercenary storyteller: I wanted to put Sam essentially in conflict with as many people as possible, and I wanted it to be like, “Okay, like, not all the black Marvel characters are going to agree on everything, right? So like, how can we spice this up?” and I wanted to make it meaningful at the same time. So Sam’s gone through all this stuff and he calls out T’Challa and he’s like. “You know what? How can you look at us with any sort of sense of superiority when the only reason you’re like this and I’m like this is that you got the meteor and we didn’t.” That’s such a powerful thing to say to a person and a moment like that is sort of what I searched for in my writing and what I’m very fortunate I was able to have with Symbol.
Gatecrashers: That discussion was really powerful, and especially stuck out to me along with the myriad of cool ideas you had when I was re-reading Symbol of Truth, and it’s something I would have loved to see explored more.
Tochi Onyebuchi: Thank you.
Gatecrashers: I did notice when doing my research that you were playing Elden Ring on Twitch for a while, so my last question relates to that. If Sam, Misty and Joaquin were Elden Ring characters, what character would they be or what kind of build would they have?
Tochi Onyebuchi: Ohh my goodness. (Laughs) Yeah.
Jackson Lanzing: Love this question. I love this question. (Laughs)
Tochi Onyebuchi: I will literally talk about Elden Ring for the rest of this two hour slot, like you don’t know the door that you have opened.
Misty’s easy. Misty would be Nepheli Loux, who is just like the ultimate badass who has a super compelling storyline of her own. If you do enough of her questline, you can summon her in the fight with Hoarah Loux and she is a literal lifesaver. I’ve played through the game multiple times, and every time I make sure I put in the extra hours just so I can summon her for that fight.
Joaquin and Sam would share a similar build that’s a perfect mix of range and melee and not heavily reliant on magic when it comes to range. On top of that, especially given the transformation Joaquin goes through in Pax Mohannda, he’d have a bit of a madness build and be able to cast some frenzied spells.
Gatecrashers: Awesome. Thank you so much!
Tochi Onyebuchi: Thank you!
