As you may have noticed, I tend to write solely about accessibility or disability issues. After all, being disabled is quite rooted in my personal experience, so it is hard to view a topic, without a certain disability perspective.

However, writing about disability and accessibility requires constant clever analysis. One must adopt quite a victim” mentally, one that posits the entire world as “ableist” and inhospitable for one’s own mind and body, citing the need for an entire overhaul of society in order to be accessible and inclusive.

I started my advocacy work, out of a genuine desire to make the world a better place for younger kids with disabilities. For that one girl who felt out of place and thus sought lowly of herself, wanting nothing else but normalcy. I wanted to educate others on the experience of having a disability, and encourage others to support the cause of acccessibility. In a sense, I still do.

Yet, it can be exhausting to constantly remain in that negative mental space all the time. So here is an article I wrote just for fun.

The article, on the face of it, is simply about one of my favourite films of 2022 — Wakanda Forever, the sequel to Black Panther. As a Marvel fan, it was a typical Marvel movie plot-wise. Except it had an emotional core, the death of Chadwick Boseman and his character King T’Challa, or the Black Panther.

However, it was the fact that the director specifically chose Haiti as one of the backdrops, as well as named the new protagonist in the series Toussaint was enough to get me tear-up in the theatre.

In the article, I explored the significance of this decision. How Haiti prior to this film has only been depicted as a poor, run-down, underdeveloped nation. Perhaps some people might find it shocking that within a “fun” article about a Marvel film, I end up talking about serious political, and historical issues within Haiti. Such as the United States/France placed an embargo on Haiti because they hated that Haiti won its independence and they can no longer use the island for slavery. Or how the United States invaded and occupied Haiti twice, under the guise of “development” when in reality it was just so that they could protect their economic interest. I even talked about the recent presidential assassination and how that has recently left Haiti in shambles. I certainly have a weird definition of “fun,” don’t I?

Regardless, that is exactly how I viewed, it. Nothing more than a fun, fluff article, something to distract me and give my mind a break from all of the disability work I was doing. I didn’t even tell my family about the article, because why would they care about how emotional I felt about a film?

It was not until over the Christmas holidays, I received a message from the Editor -in-Chief of The Varsity. Apparently this particular article was not only popular, it received 22 Thousand views on the website, making it the most viewed article on the site to date.

I was dumbfounded. Remember, this article was supposed to be a little article. Perhaps catch a few hundred views, but that’s it.

I would later receive messages from different people across Noth America, people within the Haitian diaspora who enjoyed the article so much they sent it around like wildfire.

I do not know if this article in particular is still #1 on The Varsity‘s website. But it was certainly interesting to be considered “famous” for a month or two.