Culture, News
BERNARDINE EVARISTO: GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER
16 January 2023
Megan was part Ethiopian, part African-American, part Malawian, and part English
which felt weird when you broke it down like that because essentially she was just a complete human being most people assumed she was mixed-race, it was easier to let them think it
Bernardine Evaristo is a British writer and the first Black woman to win the 2019 Booker Prize. Born in London to an English mother and Nigerian father, she has also won other awards including the British Book Award’s Fiction Book of the Year and the Indie Book Award of Fiction, thanks to the novel Girl, Woman, Other.
The novel follows the lives of twelve women, most of them British Black Women with very different stories, aged between 19 and 93. It is divided into four chapters, each of which recounts the lives of women who are connected in some way, more or less by chance. This exploration takes us on a journey through the themes of racism, feminism, politics, patriarchy, gender and sexuality. Passing through the relationships, the successes, the defeats, one has the feeling of looking at the composition of a large tapestry of which one feels part, and finding insights to update the debate and confrontation on inequalities. It is a journey into the various dimensions of oppression and those of social privilege. The impression, as we read, is that of moving along a path that has branches that lead us to meet people who are there to help us better understand the meaning of our journey and make self-analysis. What makes this path harmonious, pleasant, exciting, is the writing that is very close to poetry. There is no punctuation beyond the use of commas, no capital letters at the beginning of sentences. After the first impact, the narrative seems like a stream of consciousness in which the use of punctuation becomes superfluous.
the future is in the past and the past is in the present
In order to narrate the present and look to the future, it is impossible not to look to the past, a very clear message that runs through this novel.
Hattie remembers she took her body for granted back then, when it automatically did what her mind instructed it to
She remembers when she could milk thirty cows every morning and every evening, slowly straining the warm milk into cans, then muck out the milking parkour, was and sterilize the utensils and help the dairymen load the milk on to their horse-drawn wagons
Without feeling tired
Now her body fights her over the simplest things like putting on her overalls, getting out of chairs, and climbing stairs
Constantly multiplying points of view and experiences, Bernardine Evaristo guides us through the complexity and variability of the intersectionality concept, supporting reflection on our own beliefs, misconceptions, and the backwardness of various stereotypes and prejudices.
Courtney replied that Roxane Gay warned against the idea of playing ‘privilege Olympics’ and wrote in Bad Feminist that privilege is relative and contextual, and I agree, Yazz, I mean, where does it all end? Is Obama less privileged than a white hillbilly growing up in a trailer park with a junkie single mother and a jailbird father? Is a severely disabled person more privileged than a Syrian asylum-seeker who’s been tortured? Roxane argues that we have to find a new discourse for discussing inequality
Gifting a book is like gifting a journey: this journey was gifted to me by a friend, and it took me to wonderful places, stimulating emotions and reflections that I suggest all of you to experience, in order to learn history from a different perspective, to understand how to go forward you always have to look back.
