Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo
“Women who miraculously spend their working day wearing bondage - tight skirts and vertiginous, destabilizing heels which make their feet look bound the erogenous zones of crushed muscles and cramped bones, encased in upmarket strippers’ heels and if she has to cripple herself to signal her education, talent, intellect, skills and leadership potential then so be it.”
Girl, Woman, Other is Evaristo’s eighth book and charts the journeys of twelve individual women, most of them black and British-born. Their collective journeys span the globe and across decades as they learn how to exist, take up space, and navigate relationships of all descriptions.
Each character is given a chapter entirely to themselves, where we are offered deeper insights into their humanity, flaws, loves, cultural background, and the steps that have led them to where we meet them in the present day. Across the chapters, the characters’ lives overlap in increasingly subtle ways and the breadth of individual experiences that Evaristo covers in these stories is impressive.
The book opens with Amma, a black, feminist, lesbian, socialist playwright who is finally experiencing her big break at her play’s opening night at London’s National Theatre (leaving her, and those around her, to question whether she has ‘sold out’). Although there is no real overarching storyline, all the subsequent characters link back to Amma in some way, with a closing chapter bringing us full circle to the after-party of the show.
I loved the nuances Evaristo weaves in, sharply bringing us up to speed on the complex intersections of race and feminism that are often left unexamined. Dominique, Amma’s best friend, is drawn into an increasingly controlling and violent relationship with an older woman who moves her from London to a remote community in America. Another character begins an affair with her daughter’s husband. Carole, a young black woman, is preoccupied with shedding as much of her black, working-class heritage as she can, recreating herself in the ideal of a successful woman in a white, patriarchal world. Yazz, Amma’s daughter, is positioned as a leader with her sharp millennial wit and intellect, but her naivety is revealed in her over-exuberance to have a voice over non-binary Morgan later in the book.
Sexuality, gender, heritage, the African diaspora, feminism, and modern life are all examined with controlled yet poetic prose:
“while dancing
for herself
out of it
out of her head
out of her body
feeling it
freeing it
nobody watching”
The stories are also stripped of capitalisation and punctuation (something that took me a little while to get my head around) but that gradually came to feel natural as I sank deeper into the stories. My only criticism here is that it did begin to feel very formulaic. After the seventh story, I found myself having to pause and untangle some of the details from one story to the next as they seemed to merge. Perhaps this may have been deliberate? A comment on the ways we often tie certain groups of people together? I do feel that the book as a whole would have been more powerful with fewer stories and there were some characters, like Carole and her mother Bummi, as well as LaTisha, a single mother of three struggling her way up the leadership train in a supermarket, I would have liked to spend more time with. I’d also have liked to hear from Amma towards the end, but I suspect there could be entire books written about a character like her.
Evaristo has been criticised for raising simplistic or naive arguments, particularly around the ‘scales’ of privilege that exist across society, but personally I found these dialogues important. For many readers, some of the points Evaristo raises may not have been on the table for conversation and reading this book will absolutely spark a deeper review of the ways we all take up space in the world. This is something many are already beginning to turn over in light of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Overall, Girl, Woman, Other is about struggle, but also about how struggle is piled with moments of joy, love, desire, imagination, resilience and empowerment. Evaristo shows us the complexity of characters rarely allowed the spotlight in normative and mainstream stories. It’s a powerful look at - as it claims - a version of Britain not previously explored. This is one that is well worth knowing.
Elaine Mead is a freelance writer and book reviewer, currently residing in Hobart, Tasmania. She is passionate about the ways we can use literature to learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves and obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her online under @wordswithelaine.
