THE PESSIMISM OF THE BLACK WOMAN

"I don't like walking naked down the street," Nina shouted, tugging at her t-shirt to prevent her grandmother from taking her clothes off.

"Nina, you know what's going to happen if we go out in our warm clothes," the latter retorted, raising her voice slightly looking the little girl straight in the eye.

"But it's cold," Nina defended herself, pouting and crossing her arms over her chest.

"Exactly Nina. And that's why we need to keep our clothes safe to keep us warm when we need them. They'll take them from us otherwise, and we risk being cold all the time," the grandmother explained calmly.

"Why is everyone stealing everything from everyone, it's not fair!" The little girl asked sadly, still pouting.

"Because everyone's empty inside, so everyone's trying to fill themselves with anything and everything," the woman replied; a veil of sadness came to rest on her brown face.

Aged forty-two, she had experienced life as unfair on countless occasions as a black American woman in a big city in the United States. Indeed, life in a big North American city hadn't been privileged for the majority of those whose identity was defined by words like woman, black, poor, uneducated.

Nina's grandmother had never imagined that the world could actually go lower or worse than where she had been: mother at the age of thirteen following a rape by a family friend, she had raised her daughter while trying somehow to finish high school. Her severe dyslexia had always made studying difficult from an early age.

All the men in her life had either manipulated her, mistreated her, abandoned her, or abused her, so she had finally decided to move away from them to better devote herself to the real reason for living in her life: her daughter whom she had conceived following the outrageous crime of a man on her teenage body. She had brought into the world an infant who seemed to want to live. They both cried constantly while giving her a lot of joy surprisingly. She had chosen to keep despite what had happened to her because for once, she had been given the right to choose. The only choice she had ever been given to make in her entire life: give or take back life.

Choosing, deciding, questioning were the luxuries of her existence as a woman, black, poor, and uneducated in a big North American city. History was repeating itself for her, like the remake of a hit film. She looked after her granddaughter as if she was own. The latter had literally been ripped from her arms in the street to be dismembered before her eyes. Because she was carrying a bag of food.

Why tear her to pieces? Just take the bag and leave her daughter alone...

The woman had always found the ruling white people in her country, men as well as women, miserly and cruel, but she was forced to realise that their machine had surpassed their creators in both matters. Cyborgs felt nothing for humans regardless of skin colour, gender, wealth, and social status. Men were nothing to the machine they had created, just as machines had been nothing to men. Such was the irony of the story of the miserly and cruel human beings who thought themselves as almighty. However, the misfortune of mankind was that in their downfall, the men with their insanity had dragged down with them the entire human race; the whole human species would go down with them including all those they had always looked down upon.

***

Nina walked alongside her grandmother, hand in hand. Her little naked body was shivering from the cold; she held on to the woman's limp hip, clasping her hand very tightly into hers. Nina's grandmother walked purposefully, her gaze scanning a hundred eighty degrees all around her while keeping her head held high. The miracle of food could be found in any corner, but you had to be discreet and quick. She was bringing the little girl with her to teach her how to navigate the environment she was destined to grow up unless a miracle. In a world like theirs, there was no point in protecting a child. The best hope of seeing her grow into adulthood was to teach them very early in life when and how to defend herself, attack, play dead to survive, get back up and always go forward without looking behind.