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Girl, Woman, Other

Bernardine Evaristo

Start date: March 1, 2021

Finish date: March 28, 2021

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Why we're reading this: March Bonus Read- Women's History Month

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Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

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Jan 12, 2021 Jeanne rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-around-the-world, read-2021, read-women, african-african-american, lgbtq

Girl, Woman, Other is told through the eyes and lives of 12 women, girls, and others, most of whom are Black, many of whom are lesbians or bisexual (some homophobic), most from a large, loose network of friends. Each of the 12 has a chapter of their own, some wandering through other chapters (especially Amma and Yazz), but most showing up at the after-party to Amma's play, The Last Amazon of Dahomey.

Girl, Woman, Other explores the lived experience(s) of Black women, but what is the Black Woman' Girl, Woman, Other is told through the eyes and lives of 12 women, girls, and others, most of whom are Black, many of whom are lesbians or bisexual (some homophobic), most from a large, loose network of friends. Each of the 12 has a chapter of their own, some wandering through other chapters (especially Amma and Yazz), but most showing up at the after-party to Amma's play, The Last Amazon of Dahomey.

Girl, Woman, Other explores the lived experience(s) of Black women, but what is the Black Woman's Experience? Evaristo says this is a question to be answered in the plural. There are women who buy into corporate life and those who choose counterculture; those who prefer women and those preferring men; those who are abused or abandoned (by men and women), and those who exude power, confidence, and strength. There is no single experience, but there are families of experiences, each chapter being comprised of three women/girl/other's stories.

The stories are personal but also political (the personal is political), always coming back to context. We need to know their backstories, their mothers and friends' backstories to understand them:

sit quietly, don’t fidget now, we don’t exist in a vacuum, children, no talking at the back, please, thank you, we are all part of a continuum, repeat after me, the future is in the past and the past is in the present (p. 253)

Evaristo's language takes some getting used to, as she used little punctuation and few capitalizations. This not quite poetry, not quite prose felt manicky and rushed to me – I like stories that roll out slowly – but I came to enjoy all that Evaristo packed into a few short lines.

I tell Mum she married a patriarch

look at it this way, Amma, she says, your father was born male in Ghana in the 1920s whereas you were born female in London in the 1960s

and your point is?

you really can’t expect him to ‘get you’, as you put it

I let her know she’s an apologist for the patriarchy and complicit in a system that oppresses all women

she says human beings are complex

I tell her not to patronize me (pp. 23-24)

Still, I enjoyed the ways that most of her stories, even those of the most uptight of Evaristo's characters, exposed power, oppression, and privilege and described how these play out in different ways. Her characters skewer the "reality" they perceive, as Shirley does in this imagined rejection letter, although that sword can cut both ways if not handled well (and several get slashed in the process).

‘Dear Mrs King,

We had an exceptionally strong field of candidates for this position and unfortunately for you we decided to make an offer to someone younger, prettier, slimmer, less experienced, more enthusiastic, gullible and pliable

as opposed to a bitter old workhorse such as yourself who should be sent out to pasture henceforth!

Yours Very Truthfully’ (p. 276)

I appreciate Evaristo's characters and language, their thinking, but her verse kept me from feeling close to them – or even to tell their voices apart. Nonetheless, I would like to spend Friday evening with many of them, to sit over coffee, to go for a walk. Even writing about them makes me smile. ...more

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