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Bernadine Evaristo’s eighth work of fiction, Girl, Woman, Other, earned her the Booker Prize for Fiction in 2019, marking the first instance in which the prize has ever been awarded to a black woman. The novel centers on the experiences of twelve black women in Britain, all of whom exist in the same social universe, many of whose stories intersect in substantial ways, while other characters appear in multiple chapters on the periphery. The novel begins with Amma, a black lesbian theatre director, and then moves on to her daughter Yazz, then onto women (*Morgan is non-binary) called Dominique, Carole, Bummi, LaTisha, Shirley, Winsome, Penelope, Megan/Morgan, Hattie, and Grace. The novel is centered on female relationships; it is populated by mothers, daughters, mentors, lovers, friends, and partners.
The novel begins and ends with Amma, and one could make a case that she is the narrative’s center, as the characters come together for the premiere of Amma’s play at the National in the book’s final scenes. Amma’s play, which concerns African female warriors who were both comrades and lovers, is a crucial text-within-the-text here. The play shares many of the book’s larger central concerns: femininity, sexuality, the African diaspora, violence, and self-sacrifice/preservation. Like the warriors in the play who hold the lives of their female compatriots in their hands, the women in this novel are consistently leaning on one another and in turn offering support. It is also worth noting that on a meta-level, both the play and the novel have the express aim to center the diverse and underrepresented experiences of black women, and to celebrate community between them.
There is an immense amount of diversity within this novel, the characters range from ages 19 to 94, come from all sorts of ethnic backgrounds, and embrace various gender and sexual identities. Carole is a hyper-successful bank executive engaged to an aristocratically wealthy white man. Dominique is a lesbian artist who is transformed by an emotionally abusive relationship that plays out in a lesbian separatist community. Morgan is a non-binary individual who forms a relationship with a trans woman who helps them to explore their gender identity before they become a woke cultural personality and LGBTQIA+ activist. Hattie is a 94 year-old great grandmother who still wonders about the baby she was forced to give up in her youth. The novel is truly an exercise in diversity, one that tasks itself with probing virtually every corner of the black female experience, and by doing so opens up the possibility that there remain so many more corners to explore.
Intergenerational conflict is a crucial component of this novel, as the older generation of women, many of whom are immigrants, struggle with their offspring’s assimilation into traditionally colonialist and white-centric British culture. These tensions between characters offer some of the novel’s most interesting revelations, which the reader will relish as they are firm points of connection in a novel that can be overwhelmingly fragmented and varied. Intergenerational conflict also grounds the book in black female historicism, which has clearly been on Evaristo’s mind throughout her career.
With these lush and compelling characters, Evaristo argues that every woman in this book can and should have her own novel, and by dipping into each of their stories, she opens the door for black female writers to create a new canon.