It took me like a whole damn week to reply to this ask (I'm sorry about that!) because I just have so many feelings about this fic.
Quarantine has been really, really hard on me. I think it's zero percent an accident that The Old Guard spoke to so many of us so deeply last year — their tragedy is that any social contact they might have with a mortal could lead to a picture or a story on social media getting picked up by a CIA agent that could lead to them getting locked in a cage for eternity. Social connections outside their group are high-risk, just like in-person social contact is high-risk for us these days.
Booker speaks to me so much as a character because he was profoundly isolated even before he got exiled. Booker struggles to actually communicate about his needs with the people who care about him. Jewish Booker speaks to me so much because it's the mark of antisemitism to assume you won't be wanted, to assume you'll be exiled if you're not useful enough or entertaining enough or whatever enough. I'd love to not know so intimately how depression and trauma fuck with your brain and make it hard to believe people care about you, let alone ask them for what you need, but I do, and here's this character who's seemingly hand-made for me to work out this shit through.
And Jewish Booker speaks to me because I don't have much in the way of Jewish community these days. I'm coming up on another High Holidays that I'll be spending alone, when there are certain prayers you can't say by yourself, and knowing that this niche headcanon of this fictional character is alone too makes it a little easier.
So I sat down to write "5 times Booker gets wasted on Purim and one time he doesn't" and instead all these FEELINGS came pouring out. Feelings about what it would mean for a small group of immortals to be the only long-term source of human connections for each other. Feelings about being able to spend time with an ancestor who survived. Feelings about how beautiful it is when we get creative and find new ways to keep going, as Jews in the face of violence and erasure, and just generally as people in the face of traumas big and small.
Once I accepted that this wasn't gonna be a silly romp and started writing in earnest, I started having a lot of feelings about how Nile might relate to all this. Which led to one of my favorite passages in the fic:
There's a hell of a lot more between the two of them now than just the shared life experience of modern immortals who carry the weight of their ancestors, but it's still one of the things she treasures the most about their friendship. Sometimes she carries her ancestors like a teddy bear, dangling them by the hand as she runs off to explore everything the world has to offer, or clutching them to her chest for comfort. Sometimes it all feels like an albatross around her neck, all these boundaries and expectations for her life set long before she was born, and to ignore it would be naive or a betrayal but maybe a relief as well. It's not the only or most important thing about her, but it's there, all the time, an essential part of her. Booker is the only one of their little family who understands.
That imagery is inspired by this post by @victimhood that I like to think of as the Book of Nile Manifesto 2.0. So much of our understanding of ourselves and our experiences of the world are intimately linked to our context, what's happening around us in the times and places where we live. Booker and Nile were born into a world that had so much context foregrounded for them, and Nile and Jewish Booker are members of diasporas who were forcibly disconnected from so much of their peoples' original contexts. That's a RADICALLY different experience of the world than Andy and Quynh and Lykon, or even Joe and Nicky. The older immortals lived through things that were foregone conclusions before Booker or Nile were even born, and now they're each a diaspora of one as a result of their immortality, but first living a mortal life of longing for impossible connections? It all hits different for our baby immortals.
Telling stories is the very most human thing. Telling stories about what awful things happened to us and what we learned as a result and how we're choosing for it to shape us — that's the crux of so much Jewish storytelling. And I think that survivor's outlook on telling stories would speak deeply to Nile.
It's not an exclusively Jewish way of telling stories, of course. And we even get some of it in the movie, when Andy tells Nile, "You come from warriors." I don't think she's talking about the Marines there — she's talking about what it takes to fight for your survival.
Anyway, I just have a million diaspora feels, and I think that Nile would learn from Booker about Jewish rituals and Jewish ways of telling stories and she would have her own pile of diaspora feels about it. Nile walked into a family in crisis, and she shouldn't have to fix anyone else's shit, but she deserves agency in shaping the next iteration of this little broken family she's been forced into, and I think she'd see all the mess that came from people not fucking talking to each other, and she'd continue to be rightfully pissed that Andy welcomed her to immortality with a bullet to the forehead, and she'd take everything she learned from her parents and grandparents and church elders and everyone else she might've looked up to growing up, and she'd take everything she's learning from Andy and Joe and Nicky, and she'd take what she's starting to learn from Booker, and she'd start building into her life rituals to help her feel connected.
And as much as there's pain in diaspora, there's beauty in it as well. Writing non-Jewish Nile seeing the value in these Jewish practices makes me feel a little more understood and wanted, a little more connected myself.
Thanks so much for asking about this fic, friend. <3
