Girl, Woman, Other

Yazz, Amma’s daughter, walks through the world with the stereotypical arrogance of an adolescent. However, her assuredness of her understanding of the world and the way things should be, from feminism to identity politics, is shaken when she meets a dynamic group of friends at the beginning of her college career who defy all expectations of their positionality in the world, such as a young Muslim woman who fashions her hijabs in glitter and refuses essentialization based on her religious identity. Throughout the book, Yazz demonstrates dogged self-determination and curiosity about the world, indicating that Amma’s goal of raising a self-assured young woman has been accomplished. Yazz challenges her mother’s feminist views, which she perceives as outdated, in favor of a world in which gender does not exist. Through Yazz, Amma’s perception shifts, but Yazz’s contact with the world outside of her extended family life in London changes her outlook as well.

Cool, confident Dominique is Amma’s longtime friend, who experiences a crisis when she meets the charismatic American Nzinga. Dominique’s temporary transformation from sex symbol to domesticated partner weakened by abuse speaks to the complexity of queer relationships and uncovers the reality of queer abuse. Nzinga’s empty progressivism and its effects on Dominique indicate the danger behind utopian ideals that are merely performed instead of embodied in a community. Dominique’s distaste for contemporary feminism also speaks to the novel’s interest in how feminist politics and gender equity have evolved across generations.

Carole, the daughter of Bummi and one-time friend of LaTisha, is notable for her ambition and professional success, born of tendencies that the novel suggests define corporate life in a modern city like London: She works more out of compulsion than pleasure. She also works out of a sense of duty to exceed the expectations of her parents and justify the sacrifices her family made leaving Nigeria. This is not the only way Carole’s story comments on the experiences of many second-generation children, as Carole finds herself caught between her mother’s traditionalism, the urban poverty that she was born into, and the new wealth of her friends at university. Like other children of immigrants, her cultural identity is made up of fragments of her parents’ home countries and cultures as well as her adopted country’s culture. Her story is thus vital to the novel’s commentary on Diaspora in Great Britain.

Bummi is a Nigerian immigrant with a degree in math. She encounters many hardships throughout her life, from the early loss of her mother and husband to battling racism, xenophobia, and economic challenges upon immigrating to England. Bummi’s traditionalism is the source of additional conflict, causing friction with her daughter, who marries a white British man. Bummi also struggles with her attraction to and relationship with her employee Omofe. Bummi never resolves her queer shame, though she does eventually come to terms with Carole’s marriage and her broader hybrid identity: Bummi mourns the partial loss of both her and her daughter’s Nigerian roots but remembers her late husband Augustine’s hope that their daughter would thrive in their new country even if her parents could not.

The reader meets LaTisha in a time of personal growth. After enduring the abandonment of her father, a difficult education at an under-performing school, a childhood in low-income housing, and mistreatment at the hands of men that resulted in three children with different fathers, LaTisha is now committed to moving up in the ranks at the grocery store where she works. LaTisha is hyperconscious of the personal decisions that she makes, especially when it comes to men and the effects those decisions might have on her children. While she is surprised to find her absent father returned to her mother’s house, LaTisha decides to forgive him his past sins for the sake of her son Jordan, who needs a father figure. This act of forgiveness reveals empathy, maturity, and foresight on LaTisha’s part. LaTisha also serves as a foil to Carole’s life experience: Though they come from a similar background and were once friends, Carole’s life trajectory and circumstances are greatly influenced by her determination to succeed academically, coupled with Shirley King’s focused guidance.

Shirley is a teacher committed to helping the students at the underserved school where she works. By the end of Girl, Woman, Other, Shirley remains one of the most unresolved characters; she continues to be dissatisfied with her job, underappreciated by her community, and in the dark about her husband’s affair with her mother, Winsome. Winsome herself believes that Shirley is prone to such dissatisfaction. From Winsome’s perspective, Shirley is upwardly mobile, the head of a strong and healthy family, and supported by a handsome and ambitious husband. However, Shirley has been historically taken for granted by those close to her, including Amma and Amma’s daughter (Shirley’s goddaughter), Yazz. However, Shirley has also been key to several characters’ emotional health and success, including Roland’s and Carole’s. Through Shirley, Evaristo sketches the intimate, at times fraught link between teachers and their star pupils. Shirley’s desire for recognition undercuts the idea of teaching as selfless. As Carole herself realizes in seeing Shirley after many years, however, a teacher’s attention can make all the difference. Carole’s delayed gratitude seems to give Shirley some relief from her resentment, though the reader is left to wonder how much.

Though Winsome sees herself as a “grateful person,” she, like her daughter, Shirley, suffers from dissatisfaction with her life. When her granddaughter Rachel asks Winsome about her life before marriage and children, Winsome is surprised to realize that this is one of few times that she has been directly asked about her life. Winsome resents her husband, Clovis, for his prior poor decisions and idealizes Shirley’s husband, Lennox, though Evaristo’s narrative voice notes that Winsome fails to see how similar Clovis and Lennox are: “Lennox is more like Clovis than [Winsome] likes to think, physically and temperamentally” (266). Winsome still harbors lust for Lennox as well as pain at his abrupt ending of their affair, though she never divulges this to Shirley.

Penelope Halifax is a more senior teacher at the school where Shirley works. She begins the book as an embittered elderly woman and ends it as a woman who has discovered her family roots. At the beginning of her life, she subscribes to gender roles, marrying men to be adored or cared for. However, she diverges from this social norm when she insists on returning to work. When her first husband refuses, they divorce. Her habit of pleasing men continues in her second marriage, with her partner Jeremy, for whom she becomes a “Fun Person.” After her teaching career ends and her children move away, Penelope’s life seems to have stagnated until she takes a DNA test and discovers that her birth mother, Hattie, is alive. Following a lifetime of prejudice, Penelope is shocked to find out she is part African. Upon meeting Hattie, Penelope finds that all of her racial bias falls away, and she is imbued with the realization that the only important thing in life is being with the ones you love. Her story is key to the novel’s exploration of The Impact of Family Legacy.

Morgan is Hattie’s great-grandchild. Morgan’s character arc represents the evolution of the queer, trans, and feminist movements, as ignorance of the possibilities of nonbinary existence gives way to their embrace of an existence unlinked to gender. Morgan’s early experience of being marginalized for both their orientation and their race reflects Girl, Woman, Other’s preoccupation with the intersections of identity. Morgan’s mother’s instrumentalization of Morgan as a symbol of her racial tolerance signals the dangers of performative liberalism and the “white savior” complex. Through Morgan, Evaristo shows how the internet can be used as an educational and a community-building tool. Morgan builds a career from public interest in their journey as a nonbinary person.

Though finally slowing down, 93-year-old Hattie is independent, prideful, self-sufficient, and wary of the inauthenticity of her relatives. Hattie’s observation of her own children’s disapproval of their darker grandchildren touches upon colorism in minority communities. When her children are growing up, the treatment they receive in rural English schools due to their race, and Hattie’s husband Slim’s dismissive response, reveals how personal experience informs perspectives on racial discrimination. Hattie’s commitment to keeping the Greenfields farm alive—she even goes so far as to leave it to Morgan in place of her children or grandchildren—drives home the book’s theme of family legacy. However, Evaristo complicates this theme by introducing Hattie’s ancestors’ involvement in the trade of enslaved Africans, as well as Hattie’s DNA test and subsequent discovery of her daughter Penelope, who appears white.