Some thoughts about Enfys Nest after seeing Solo again.
[spoiler alert]
Enfys Nest makes me cry and I am attempting to string ideas into something like an explanation why.
I think a lot of it can come together under the idea of identity. I grew up accepting and never questioning my identity as a boy, then as a man. It never felt like a choice, never felt like something I needed to consider. But there were many times when I did not see myself as masculine, as fitting the image of the Ideal Man. I had fears, I left many things unaccomplished, I was physically small and weak (or so I felt). I was offered an alternative identity - the Smart Guy, an alternative to the Ideal Man. Still a man, but less so, with skills in my brain instead of my muscles or heart. In time I even came to think of this as a better identity, that I could rely on logic instead of power, right instead of might, as it were. But in a way I still recognized this as something lesser.
Meanwhile, I had no mooring to think about my racial identity. I was brown, that was for sure. I knew the areas of Western Africa and Mexico were involved, but I had no name for *what* I was in that sense. I knew that discrimination and prejudice existed, but I thought of them as purely based on appearance and color, not on identity and power. In a way similar to my gender identity as a Thoughtful Man, I felt that if anything my racial identity was Don't Mind My Brown Exterior, I'm Just Like You on the Inside, Where It Counts.
But, the reverse side of the above (along with some other factors) was that I adopted continuous voices in my head, reminding me of the compromises and denials I was making. You're not a real man if you can't at least come out even in a fight. The stupidest bully can stop you. You may be smart but you've got all the susceptibilities of men -- unable to handle emotion, creativity, and spatial thinking. Your sexual urge is essentially destructive. Brownface. Mud race. All I had to do was watch movies or TV to see real heroes, then look in the mirror to see the obvious difference.
Despite the enormous plate with a large chunk of the world on it, being held out to me as a young middle-class American man, I felt drawn more to characters who were underdogs, outsiders. People who were judged from the beginning as unworthy of consideration, definitely not up to Doing the Thing. Often that meant, and still means, characters who are women or girls. I identify with them because like me they carry something around with them that others can immediately see, and that they know they are judged for. What feels heroic about these characters to me is that they recognize that judgment that is always there, and they accept it as a fact about the world, but they refuse to believe that it means anything about their own abilities.
So when Enfys Nest removed her helmet, I saw myself: a mixed-race kid, apparently meek and childlike, but surrounded by a persona based on one chosen skill (bad-ass marauder in her case, gifted nerd in mine).
