Your future, not ours: lessons on liberation from The Girl with All the Gifts
[attention: there will be spoilers]
What is liberation if it requires the enslavement of others? How can we prioritize our freedom while holding space for empathy?
Imagining new futures means we do not have to accept the compromises made in the past. We can discard the colonizer mindset and adopt one that does not require the sacrifice of one for the sake of another; that negotiates paths wide enough for all. Under existential threat, we will defend ourselves — with whatever means necessary. When we have the advantage, we can be magnanimous — in fact, power demands magnanimity. Absolutes, either/or dichotomies, the idea that one group must sacrifice itself for another: these are all tools of the master.
In The Girl with All the Gifts, Sennia Nanua plays Melanie, an adorable Black girl who is infected with a symbiotic fungus. She’s incarcerated along with a bunch of other children — all white — who get up every day, get strapped into a chair, and get educated by a woman called Miss Justineau (also white). In the book, Miss Justineau is Black, and Melanie is white, and this makes more sense to me given the ending. But, I’ll get to that later.
Melanie is obviously bright, caring, and inquisitive. She cares about the well-being of all the…
