“Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other depicts the complexities of identity through the interconnected stories of twelve Black British women, painting a portrait of the state of contemporary Britain that also examines the legacy of Britain’s colonial history in Africa and the Caribbean. Though Black women are not a monolith, there is something about the stared experience of a certain collection of people who identify together in gender-related experiences and the results of coming from places where colonialism - from the standpoint of the colonised and the coloniser - played an importance on how your skin colour dictates how others treat you.”
- Tyrese L. Coleman
Girl, Woman, Other is told from the perspective of twelve different principal characters in the book. Each character has their own chapter. The book has four sections, and each section includes stories of three black women living in Britain who are connected to each other either as relatives, friends or other vital figures in their lives. The characters stories aren’t always set in the same time, but all twelve characters and additional characters in the book cross paths with each other and their lives intertwine throughout many occasions.
Short Summary
Chapter 1
Amma (a queer theatre director) finalises preparations for the opening of her play shown at the National Theatre in London
Dwelling on her past and what it took for her to arrive in this position she reflects on the difficulties she faced as a black actress, the issues revolving around setting up her own theatre company, and becoming a mother.
She’s bringing up a confident and opinionated daughter (much like herself) called Yazz who has just began college. Yazz and her friends are able to challenge Amma in many ways that defy her expectations
Amma’s best friend Dominique takes her relationship with an African American woman Nzinga further and joins her in moving to America. After arriving in America however, Dominique becomes perceptibly more conscious of Nzinga’s controlling manners.
Eventually Dominique gathers the nerve to separate herself from the relationship and decides to move to LA instead where she sets up a successful women’s art festival.
Chapter 2
Centres around old school friends Carole and LaTisha; as well as Carole’s mother Bummi.
Carole progresses at school after she gains the help of her teacher Shirley King and ends up succeeding and landing a job as a banker. Also marries a wealthy, charismatic British man.
Latisha had a difficult time growing up as her father departed unexpectedly. She starts off working at a grocery store after her graduation and slowly evolves into supervisor. She gives birth to three children from different partners.
As Carole turns into an adult, her mother establishes her own cleaning company.
Bummi pursues a relationship with her female employee Omofe but decides to end it as she can no longer handle the shame and embarrassment of her same-sex romance.
Chapter 3
Chapter 3 revolves around the schoolteacher Shirley King, her mother Winsome, and Shirley’s colleague Penelope
Although Shirley started her teaching job off as hopeful and enthusiastic, those feelings soon turn to disappointment. With the aim of getting more out of her teaching career she picks up mentoring one student a year and her first student is Carole.
Shirley is married to a handsome and loyal man named Lennox, but we later find out in Winsome’s section that Shirley’s mother and Lennox had a secret affair.
Penelope goes through two marriages. Her first marriage fell apart because of her motivation and passion for her career that comes between the two. Her second husband is a psychotherapist who feels the need to analyse every decision of hers and ultimately breaks up with her to pursue a relationship with a younger patient.
Chapter 4
Focuses on Megan/Morgan discovering her own identity, Morgan’s great-grandmother Hattie, and Hattie’s mother Grace
With inadequate support for her queer identity from her parents, Megan/Morgan searches for means and guidance elsewhere; starting with drugs and then turning to the internet
Megan gets in touch with a trans woman Bibi online who introduces her to gender non-binary life
Megan soon changes their pronouns from “she/her” to “they/them” and their name from Megan to Morgan.
Bibi and Morgan also begin a long lasting romantic relationship, paying regular visits to Morgans great-grandmother Hattie on her family farm
Hattie grew up on this farm which originally belonged to her European Rydendale family spanning over 200 years before
Following the death of her father, Hattie’s African-American husband found documents confirming that it was Hattie’s parents relatives who were able to build their fortune as slave traders and later bought the farm with the earnings
With so many characters being present in the book and most of them being related to one another I figured it would be helpful to create a visual mind map showing the connection between all of them. This helped me visualise the relationships between all people mentioned in the book and made the importance of some of the characters more clear. I found myself flicking back and forth while reading the book remembering a characters name having been mentioned briefly and wanting to make sure I wasn’t missing out on any links between people.
Bernardine Evaristo in an interview with Tyrese Coleman about the characters in her book and the shared experience they have:
Tyrese: I find myself and I see other Black women always saying “we aren’t a monolith”, but we do have shared and relateable experiences. What were you hoping to say about the shared experience of Black women?
Bernardine:
“As Black women in the UK and US, we will share certain experiences in that we are living in societies where we are racialised and where women are also discriminated against. My novel explores many women, one of whom is non-binary, from multiple perspectives, and this includes experiences of queer and straight sexuality, different classes, occupations, family set-ups, and cultural backgrounds, migration histories, rural and metropolitan women, and women of every generation through to a nonagenarian, and so on. My aim was to create as many stories as I could about Black British and in so doing to counteract our invisibility in literature to present my characters as complex, flawed, and very real beings. All of these areas lattice across the text, so that while the novel is specific to individual narratives, there are so many points of connection for the reader, especially for Black women readers, and women of colour more generally.”
Comments