Girl, Woman, Other

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

A river of stories flowing thick with a web of characters starts running fresh and wild the moment one opens Girl, Woman, Other, Bernardine Evaristo’s 2019 Booker Prize-winning novel. The first character introduced is Amma, a polyamorous lesbian playwright who, long positioned outside of the establishment due to her identities as black, queer, and critical of capitalized, white-centric theater, has finally arrived or capitulated (depending on who you ask) and is having one of her productions staged at a major London theater. As she awaits the beginning of the production, Amma’s life is explored in quick-moving third-person, a breakneck roller-coaster’s eye view of Amma’s youth, her entry into theater, her rebellious, living-in-a-squat days, her decision to have a child—indeed, her whole life up to the point of this opening night, so that by the end of the section one is fully attached to Amma. Of course, turning the page then reveals that the next section is centered around Yazz, Amma’s daughter, instead. And the river flows on.

As with people in real life, the characters in Girl, Woman, Other sometimes share things in common and often starkly diverge. Some are young, some old; some pass—or don’t know they’re anything other than—white, most are proudly or complicatedly, diversely black. Some are new immigrants to Britain, others have lived their entire lives there. Some are straight, some are queer; some city-dwellers, some rural farmers. All have their struggles, despairs, and triumphs. Later in the novel, after so many stories, it admittedly grew difficult to remember who exactly was whose friend, mother, relative, how the various angles of the web intersected and interlocked, but the stories and perspectives presented were never dull or boring. Also, they were never harrowing: while the characters certainly encountered adversities from racism to depression to abandonment to abuse, the pace of the novel and the mass of stories included prevented any one story from becoming an overwhelming focus: the struggles each character encountered where a part of their story, not its totality.

The syntax and punctuation are designed for speed, with repeated words—often the name of the character at the center of a given chapter—serving almost as hooks to catch and propel the reader forward; scant periods interrupting the roiling narrative flow; short sentences arranged on the page almost like lines in a poem. The novel felt like something between a carousel, a tapestry, and space travel, an epic novel-poem for the 21st century where the focus isn’t on any one hero, heroine, or particular person in between, but on everyone together.

Subjects this book contains which some readers may be sensitive to: racism, abuse, miscarriage, death, depression.