40 pages • 1 hour read
Girl, Woman, Other
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Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2, Section 1 Summary: “Carole”
Carole, a young financial executive, reflects on her struggle to succeed in a male-dominated workplace. She traces her love of math to her mother. She recalls how she used math to endure the pain and humiliation of being gang-raped as a teenager at her friend LaTisha’s party: “Carole forces herself to think of her favourite number, 1729” (126). A young man named Trey was the ringleader.
After the rape, Carole told no one but decided to turn her life around. With the help of her teacher, Mrs. Shirley King, Carole began to excel in school. She eventually got into the prestigious Oxford University, where she felt like a misfit due to her race and working-class background. When Carole suggested that she might drop out of school, her mother, Bummi, replied, “[Y]ou must go back and fight the battles that are your British birthright, Carole, as a true Nigerian” (143). Heeding her mother’s words, Carole befriended a host of wealthy students who exposed her to a new side of life. She began coming home less and turning her nose up at her mother’s traditional Nigerian food.
She is now engaged to Freddy, a wealthy white British man who admits to her that he skated through college and his career search on his parents’ connections. Carole loves Freddy because he is kind and makes her laugh. She accepted his marriage proposal to the horror of Bummi, who wishes Carole would marry a Nigerian. Freddy has bought Carole tickets to see Amma’s play The Last Amazon of Dahomey at the National Theatre in London that very night.
Chapter 2, Section 2 Summary: “Bummi”
Bummi immigrates from Nigeria to England as a young newlywed with her lawyer husband, Augustine. Before meeting Augustine, Bummi had a tragic life. After her father died, her mother worked several harsh jobs to support Bummi until she too died in a factory accident. While working as a nanny and maid for her wealthy aunt Ekio, Bummi met Augustine Williams, a young graduate student. Bummi felt that she and Augustine were “two halves of a circle moving towards completion” (165). After completing his doctorate in economics, Augustine insisted that he and Bummi move to England, convinced that he could go further and faster with his degree in London.
Once in London, August cannot find work with his doctorate and resorts to becoming a taxi driver. Bummi works as a cleaner instead of using her degree in math. After Augustine dies unexpectedly of a heart attack, Bummi starts her own cleaning company. She procures a loan for the business by performing a sexual favor for a corrupt pastor. Her first client is a well-to-do former teacher named Penelope Halifax, who instructs Bummi not to “indulge in social discourse” while she works but proceeds to talk Bummi’s ear off (175).
After Carole leaves for college, Bummi becomes close with one of her cleaners, a woman named Omofe. To her surprise, Bummi begins to think of Omofe romantically, eventually accepting Omofe’s offer to sleep over. Bummi and Omofe continue their relationship until Omofe’s sons return home to live with her. Bummi becomes uncomfortable with the arrangement and breaks it off. Omofe begins a relationship with another woman, while Bummi eventually marries a Ghanaian man named Kofi, though she still thinks of Omofe often.
Chapter 2, Section 3 Summary: “LaTisha”
LaTisha Jones is a grocery store supervisor committed to turning her life around. She recalls her father, Glenmore, a pest control worker by day and a club bouncer by night.
LaTisha underperformed at school, though not for lack of smarts. Rather, she did not respect the school’s bureaucracy and institutional racism. Her school performance went further downhill once her father unexpectedly left LaTisha, her sister, Jayla, and their mother to live with his mistress and secret family in the United States. LaTisha fell into a series of dysfunctional relationships with various men and now has three children—Jason, Jantelle, and Jordan—by three different men. One of the men is a former classmate, Trey.
Though her mother is deeply disappointed with LaTisha’s life decisions, she is a kind and loving grandmother. LaTisha, Jayla, and their mother work together to raise LaTisha’s children. While Jason is responsible and Jantelle kind, LaTisha worries that Jordan’s school suspensions are a sign that he takes after his father, Trey. LaTisha comes home one day to find that her father has returned and that her mother has no intention of kicking him out. As LaTisha contemplates how to address her estranged father, she notices Jordan warm to Glenmore. She realizes that “her youngest son needed her father in his life” (216).
Chapter 2 Analysis
Chapter 2 looks more closely at the effects of Diaspora in Great Britain over time. Bummi’s fraught relationship with her daughter Carole’s hybrid English Nigerian identity exemplifies the simultaneous loss of culture and gains of privilege and economic security experienced by many diasporic communities in Great Britain. Bummi’s begrudging acceptance of Carole’s white husband, Freddy, shows the growing pains of cultural mixing and paints a portrait of a woman coming to terms with her daughter’s evolving national and cultural identity. Ironically, Bummi herself facilitated Carole’s assimilation by insisting she return to college. Her remark that doing so was Carole’s “birthright” as a “true Nigerian” carries particular baggage, as the British Empire did frame its colonial subjects as “British”—but only to a point. Attending a British university and marrying a white man are not Carole’s “birthright” in practice, even in a postcolonial world.
In a similar vein, both Bummi and Carole’s stories give further dimension to the effects of racism and xenophobia in Great Britain. Bummi experiences an everyday racism in which assumptions are made about her based on her race, sex, and profession. Her otherness as a Black woman and her class status as a cleaner render her invisible to white British society. Though a highly successful finance executive, Carole too feels the repercussions of racism and xenophobia in England. Despite her accomplishments, Carole knows that, as a Black woman, she must work much harder than her white male colleagues to earn the same accolades.
Besides illustrating her tenancy, Carole’s success contrasts with the fate of her former high school friend LaTisha in a way that broadens the book’s theme of Human Connectivity and Interdependence. The women’s juxtaposed stories illustrate how people who come from similar backgrounds can grow up to lead very different lives. Trey’s relationship with each woman provides a further point of connection, though an ironic one; though it was Carole whom Trey raped, it is LaTisha whose life seems to have spiraled out of control in the years since.
Bummi’s relationship with Omofe touches on the complexity of orientation, including queer shame. Evaristo paints the tension between queer identity, religion, and cultural tradition to ground the reader in Bummi’s conflicted feelings around her relationship with Omofe, which eventually drive her to end the affair.
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