I recall how one judged me, as being too ‘self-loving’…but
hey wait that is how one would perceive their lot. I was not self-loving per-say,
but assertive and calling it as it was. I stood tall to tall with them; my own
clique hated me for that; because they had decided in the majority to take the
subordinate role. I was having none of that; we had something in common and so
let’s do it.
I found myself laughing and joking with the
opposite race as I would on a neutral ground, I found it a neutral ground.
I knew Halgfna was suspicious of who I was and
where I got such guts which she decided to call strength, perhaps I had been
indoctrinated from a young age that ‘for we are all made in the imagine and
likeness of God.’, He made all and not just some, as He made some white
coloured cows, he made some colourful, some brown and some black and white. Breeding,
am not a farmer, and all I know is that each farmer is proud of its herd.
I was not trying to have the best of both worlds, I
was trying to make the best of my life and exploring what was nice and
befitting to me.
My love, we clicked, we loved, we were similar, I
was perhaps stronger than he was, he too was stronger perhaps than I was. We
laughed, we shared, we loved, we trusted, we were united and it was the outside
world that saw a wrong; that saw me as an outsider and how my knowledge of them
would perhaps weaken them, he was a traitor perhaps and he would come out as
having acted at a moment of weakness. He could have gone on deceiving them that
he was one of them, when in fact he too like my friend, saw beauty, comfort and
was at home with ‘black’.
Without sounding racist, for me, I was lamenting
our love,
‘Romeo; Romeo why
must I die?’
It was a clear manifestation of Romeo and Juliet only in this case the characters were white
and black, were by Romeos and Juliet’s case it was a case of the family feud between
the ‘Montagues’ and the ‘Capulets’ that dated many years back. Was he going to ‘die’
for this special thing that we had that I called love? Was I going to die for
this thing that I felt so passionately about?
If he rediscovers his identity would I be left to a
lonely feeling and wondering?
Where art my
Romeo, where art though?!
‘I love you.’ I said openly, I did not need to seek
his approval as like a fool I had fallen heads over heels, with his maturity,
his venerability, and his openness.
‘I love you.’ I whispered in the dark of night. He
knew that that was my weakness and he was not going to put his heart on the
line, he was in love but he would guard what he did with this love. His love
would hurt and disappoint other people. He would be judged as weak, to be in
love with a race that they had looked down upon. How did it work? Just how did
it work? Was love just love, just love all the way?”
She put the pen down and took a bite on the croissant and took a sip from her
cup of café latté.
* * *
Most people were involved in debate in
their schools, and one of the topics that were debated would be ‘what is better
a boarding school or a day school’. Opposing sides had to give their view on
the theme. Perhaps if White and Black had been a problem they would have
debated it. But what was better indeed, they all were schools with an objective
of educating the learner and hoping to empower them to earn a living thereafter,
so it was with race, the body being an object that contained life, so what was
better one life in a particular skin colour as opposed to the same life in a
different colour as white sugar is to brown? Since people shared birth dates
across the race, hundred babies across the world would be born at the exact
same time, second and date and year, so what would be the difference between
those lives?
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