Sothoryos & Confederate: When White Nonsense Designs Black Worlds
I have admitted that I am a total nerd and bookworm many times before, but sometimes I reveal things and people understand just how deep it runs. Exhibit A:
As a doc student, I don’t have time to do much leisure reading. I know if I picked up the A Song of Ice and Fire Series, I wouldn’t put it down. So, instead, when I have a moment of down time, I read random pages on the Game of Thrones wiki or the Wiki of Ice and Fire. I get lost down the rabbit holes sometimes.
As a doc student, I also don’t have time to blog as much as I’d like, but I’m in that sweet spot between semesters where I can catch up on shows, read, watch tv, and sleep like a normal person. There are often times I have thoughts and words to share, but don’t have the time to get them on the blog. Usually if I wait long enough, someone else writes about it, I share it on my social media, and that’s that. But I have time, and I hadn’t seen/read this perspective anywhere yet.
Like pretty much everybody, I’m obsessed with Missandei and Grey Worm’s doomed love affair. Not doomed because he was castrated, but doomed because 1- He’s off at war in a foreign land, and 2- It’s GoT and anybody we even halfway like dies. I’ve been reading up on the both of them on the wikis (and catching the cute stolen glances in their GoT Rewind).
As I was finishing the summer semester and following the wikihole of MissanGrey, the new show Confederate was announced. This is PEAK white nonsense. If the writers want to do some hypothetical reimagination, they have the free will to create a timeline where Europeans had not plundered the continent of Africa and created American chattel slavery in the first place. As others have pointed out, if HBO wanted to show about slavery they could have picked up the popular WGN show Underground which was cancelled earlier this year. But there is a bondage narrative much closer to GoT and HBO.
In the current GoT universe, Sothoryos is an entire continent full of Black people. If you haven’t figured out it’s analogous to Africa, you’re not actually watching. It’s the southernmost continent. Xaro Xohan Daxos and Salladhor San are the darkest characters we’ve seen thus far, and they’re both from the Summer Isles. Soldier Bae Grey Worm is also from the Summer Isles.
Raiders from Essos regularly pillage the Summer Isles, Naath, and mainland Sothoryos. They kidnap men, women, and children and ship them across the Summer Sea. From what we’ve seen, they sell them at auction, trade them, rape them, castrate them, mutilate them, kill them, crucify their children, and God knows what other brutalities. Sound familiar?
The GoT co-creators have all of that history and context ripe for exploration, storytelling, and adventure. HBO is developing FOUR GoT spinoffs. And with all of that right at their fingertips, the producers and the network have decided instead to put free Black American people back in chains in some God-forsaken alternate universe where the South won the Civil War.
Do they not see the fervor Black folk have over just a few photos from Black Panther? Did they not catch us fawning over all of the Yoruba references and imagery from Beyonce? As the costume designer from Black Panther has said: Black history didn’t start with slavery or end with the civil-rights movement.
They could have given us Iyoba Idia fierceness, Mansa Musa wealth and opulence, Anansi folkore and wisdoms, Library of Alexandria intelligence, or groundbreaking medicine, metallurgy, and mathematics- anything from an entire continent. And instead they gave us… chains.
After David Benioff bumbled through a Civil War story, D.B. Weiss says of slavery, “It’s our original sin as a nation. And history doesn’t disappear. That sin is still with us in many ways.” I agree with him entirely, and that proves my point even more. I’m not sure whether to call it cowardice or whitesplaining or something else- but there is something to be said about having to recreate history to address injustice the present instead of showing and calling it exactly how it is.
As for the producers’ and others claims that it can’t be white nonsense because two of the four showrunners are Black, to that I will say: there will always be someone to condone and enjoy mess. I believe the Spellmans when they say the chains will not be literal (they’ll probably opt for some combination of tattoo and chip ID smh). Still, I find nothing entertaining about fictional bondage and white supremacy, when we have plenty to struggle with right here in the real world. I’ll pass.