Spoilers for Berserk (1997) and Casca’s arc in the Berserk manga.
Content Warning: Discussion of sexual violence, racism, misogynoir, ableism, self-harm, suicide.
Here’s a short story about three Black women. The first was born in Jamaica in 1935 and emigrated to Britain in the fifties as part of a population known today as the Windrush Generation. She endured racism, poverty, and sexism, but she never stopped to consider the toll these oppressions had on her health. One day, she decided she would not get out of bed. She spent her senior years totally bed-bound in a depressed stupor, and at sixty-six, she died, seemingly by choice.
Her eldest daughter is the second. She struggled through various states of depression as an adult, but the words “counselling” and “mental illness” were alien to her. One day, she finally admitted “I’m depressed,” and the suppressed horrors of her life oozed from her head and puddled around her feet.
I’m the last. At fourteen, I felt the first tremors of anxiety. By my sixteenth birthday, I was in a facility, brown skin marred by self-harm, a mind only half-active. I kept silent about my increasingly deteriorating mental health due to attitudes that were fed to me by my foremothers: just endure everything. Black women always have to be strong. Society thinks we have some superhuman ability to withstand trauma. We are depicted this way all over the media to devastating results. I want to talk about Casca, a character who stands as the antithesis to this extremely harmful stereotype.