FIRST-NAME BASIS
T’Cha’s ties to superhero
AT A GLANCE
The Black Panther screens in select cinemas Thursday evening and opens wide on Friday. Hippie parents.
That’s my short answer when people ask — after making sure it’s not Chuck, or Chad, or Charles or Sean or, en français, Richard — where my name is from.
The long answer is, well, long. It involves explaining that my parents didn’t name me until I was three months old; that a friend of theirs, exasperated, decided that if they weren’t going to make up their minds, she was going to call me Benjamin; that my dad, mortified, walked over and, in true egalitarian hippie fashion, asked me what I wanted my name to be; that I, in monosyllabic infant fashion, uttered something that sounded vaguely like “cha!”; and that my mom, inspired by one of the many comic books lying around the house (my dad was an avid comic book reader), suggested they name me T’Challa, after the Black Panther, a Marvel Comics superhero who comes from the imaginary African country of Wakanda.
I’m sure it seemed like a sensible idea at the time.
The year was 1971. T’Challa, you may surmise, was not a common name. In 2018, it remains an uncommon name. But in 1971, after my parents had it printed on my birth certificate, I was the only T’Challa for miles around.
(My brother, born a year-anda-half later in a log cabin in the Gaspé, was given a relatively — relatively! — more common name: Joaquin, after a family friend.)
When we moved from Montreal to Sackville, N.B., soon after, I became even more of an oddity.
Home to Mount Allison University, the one-traffic-light town of 4,000 people did not quite know what to do with our family, my long-haired, sandal-clad dad or my weird name.
The first day of school in Grades 1 through 5 was systematically torturous. Each new teacher would get to my name, hesitate, stumble and do a thorough hack job before I begged for mercy and asked them just to call me T’Cha — one syllable, silent apostrophe.
When we returned to Montreal in the early ’80s, my dad helped me legally shorten my name to T’Cha, to make it less unwieldy. But as I passed through my teens into university, something happened: my weird name became not such a big deal.
I grew into it, you could say. I began to see it as a badge of honour, hinting at my unconventional upbringing. My good friends, familiar with the long answer, even took to affectionately calling me T’Challa (pronouncing the apostrophe, to make it “tee-challa”).
During all that time, very few people had ever heard of the Black Panther. So here we are in 2018, and the most anticipated movie of the new year is about to hit theatres: The Black Panther, a groundbreaking, blockbuster celebration of black culture and creativity, fittingly released in the middle of Black History Month.
You may have noticed: I am not black. Nor am I — spoiler alert! — the Black Panther. And I’m well aware that legitimate complaints of cultural appropriation await should I claim too much ownership of any, um, Wakandan heritage.
My unusual name may or may not be indirectly responsible for the fact that I became a rabid hip-hop fan, along with legions of other white kids in 1986, when I first heard Run-DMC’s Walk This Way; or that, inspired by the political rhymes of Public Enemy, I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X when I was 18; and that I felt a twinge of vindication when I heard the song T’Cha-T’Cha by rapper KRS-One’s old band Boogie Down Productions, in which he chants, “Come to the tea-cha! To the tea-cha!” over a dance hall reggae rhythm.
Years later, I got to interview KRS-One, who informed me — somewhat disappointingly — that the title was a play on words referring to his nickname “the Teacher” and that he wasn’t sure why he had spelled it like that. And so my quest to connect my name to something other than an obscure comic book from decades back continued.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I have been outrageously excited ever since the project was announced, a few years ago, to make the Black Panther into a feature film.
At last, I thought, redemption will be mine! All will know the name T’Challa!
I recently saw a press screening of the film. It’s awesome — entertaining, intelligent, evocative. The great achievement of The Black Panther is in simply being a great superhero movie. And it’s a revelation to see a big-budget action film in which white men don’t hog the screen (and are, in fact, relegated to a couple of supporting roles). Like the royal blood from which T’Challa springs, black men and women rule in The Black Panther, and it’s thrilling to watch.
A soundtrack by Kendrick Lamar seals the deal, bringing my rap and Black Panther connections full circle. Yet I must admit, as someone whose name has always been utterly unique, it was more than a little strange to hear it repeated countless times throughout a Hollywood movie.
T’Challa, for the record, has no last name. Superman is Clark Kent; the Black Panther is T’Challa.
Strangely, no one ever asks him to repeat his name.
So there it is, the long answer. Now I just have to get ready to deal with being named after a superhero everybody knows. I can picture the conversations already:
“Oh, your name’s T’Cha, like T’Challa — the Black Panther?”
Exactly!