40 pages • 1 hour read
Girl, Woman, Other
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Themes
Human Connectivity and Interdependence
Evaristo uses the vast complexity of Black British womanhood as an example of human diversity. The structure and interlocking narratives of Girl, Woman, Other imply an overarching theme of human connectivity and Interdependence. As Evaristo unspools the fate of each character, it becomes clear that one character’s life trajectory would not be possible without several other characters. This weaving of storylines posits that humans are always connected, however tangentially. These connections build throughout the novel, culminating in Penelope’s discovery of her birth mother as Hattie, which both exposes and assuages her prejudices. Evaristo writes, “[W]ho cares about her colour? […] [W]hy on earth did Penelope ever think it mattered?” (452). Penelope’s narrative arc embodies the idea that bonds of family can heal prejudice.
However, this tree-branch narrative structure also highlights the negative aspects of human interconnectivity, most notably through Slim’s discovery of Hattie’s ancestors’ accumulation of wealth through the trade of enslaved Africans. That Hattie’s paternal relatives’ contributed to the very industries that enslaved and exploited Slim’s ancestors reveals the complex inherited traumas and lingering effects of colonialism. Lennox’s affair with Shirley’s mother, Winsome, likewise posits that there are more connections between people than they care to know.
Within Evaristo’s deep study of human interconnectivity and Interdependence is a call for intersectionality, defined as the interconnected nature of issues including race, gender, and class inequality. All of Girl, Woman, Other’s characters struggle to reconcile their intersecting identifies. Carole must grapple with her racial, cultural, and economic background as she ascends the class ladder. Amma and Dominique respond professionally and creatively to their statuses as Black, queer women in Britain. Yazz commits her budding academic career to interrogating the intersections of identity, though sometimes these interrogations lead her to stereotype or essentialize the people around her. Morgan too explores the many facets of their identity, though they approach their inquiries in a far less scholarly way than Yazz. Where Yazz and Morgan embrace these intersections, Bummi hides them, as evidenced by her shame around and eventual abandonment of her lesbian relationship with Omofe. Penelope discovers the dynamic contours and intersections of her racial heritage late in life but, upon meeting her multiracial birth mother, Penelope decides to embrace those intersections. The diversity of the characters’ relationships to intersectionality—and the ways those relationships themselves overlap or diverge—represents yet another iteration of the novel’s interest in Interdependence.
Diaspora in Great Britain
Evaristo presents several responses to the effects of diaspora in Great Britain. For Roland, bringing race into his public discourse feels like a crutch he fears weakens the public perception of his capabilities. He believes that if he speaks about race, people will see him only as a working-class immigrant and nothing more. They’ll ignore his hard work and expertise. However, for Amma, racism and xenophobia are integral subjects in her creative practice. Part of Amma’s life’s work is combating racism and xenophobia, not ignoring them.
Girl, Woman, Other suggests that many of the differences in diasporic communities are generational. However, those differences do not necessarily manifest in the same way in each family. While Roland avoids the topics of race and culture, these intersecting issues are woven into the fabric of Yazz’s college friendships. The implication is that Yazz and her friends have grown up in a world in which there is less (though certainly not no) risk in celebrating difference. However, in other parent-child relationships, the attitudes are reversed. Bummi sees herself and her daughter as Nigerian, though Carole sees herself as British. Though Bummi wants a better life for her daughter, she resents that her culture is in large part lost in Carole, having been subsumed by the British traditions of Carole’s upper-class college peers. Morgan’s relationship with their mother, Julie, presents another iteration on the pattern, exemplifying how identity is exploited in progressive circles. Julie can only see Morgan as a “validation for her love of an African man” and an aspirational symbol for tolerance in the world. Julie believes that birthing a multiracial child “made the world a better place” (308). However, this instrumentalization of Morgan leads to pressure on Morgan to perform femininity in a way that feels unnatural to them.
Through this exploration of immigrant families, Evaristo unpacks the expectations of assimilation and gratitude placed on migrant and immigrant communities who settle in the West. Shirley King feels pressure to represent her community in addition to performing her job. This expectation of gratitude is internalized by her mother, Winsome, who views Shirley as a complainer and an “emotional dumper” who is never satisfied with what she has. In contrast, her mother, Winsome, faced physical danger as a person of color in rural England—an experience that translates to limited sympathy for her daughter’s struggles, which seem benign by comparison. The experiences of characters such as Winsome, Hattie, and Morgan also contrast diasporic life in rural versus metropolitan areas. Though Carole’s childhood experience of London is one of extreme poverty, for Winsome and her husband London represents a beacon of safety as compared with their treatment in the far South of England.
The Impact of Family Legacy
Throughout the book, Evaristo unpacks what humans inherit from their predecessors, from fractured cultural identities to personal and racial trauma and the dark, reverberating history of colonialism. The strongest symbol of family legacy in the book is Greenfields farm. What will surely become a haven for Morgan’s extended queer community is a product of the trade in enslaved Africans that has been inherited by two generations of women of multiracial descent.
This transformation is emblematic of the novel’s broader treatment of family legacy, which is as much a matter of transmutation as it is of continuity. For instance, while Bummi strongly identifies with her Nigerian background, Carole only feels a tangential connection to her Nigerian culture as filtered through her mother. Having not grown up in Nigeria, Carole only knows of the country and culture her mother passed down and increasingly gravitates toward her British identity. Shirley, the teacher who has such a marked influence on Carole, is similarly removed from her Dominican heritage. However, her husband’s affair with her mother, Winsome, symbolically suggests that enmeshment with one’s past is unavoidable. Nor is that enmeshment a necessarily negative thing. Penelope’s discovery that she is multiracial allows her to overcome longstanding prejudices, implying that the recovery of family legacy can heal.
The ambiguities surrounding inheritance inform the novel’s particular interest in mother-daughter relationships and, more broadly, the characters’ heritage as women. Amma and Yazz’s discussions of feminism show how an ideology can be passed down across generations while also evolving, but the novel avoids suggesting either that Yazz and her friends have abandoned their mothers’ roots or that Amma and her cohort are simply behind the times. If it is sympathetic to Yazz and Morgan’s “queering” of gender, it also celebrates Amma’s play, the title of which evokes a strain of lesbian feminist separatism more commonly associated with second-wave feminism than third. Indeed, the play itself reaches into the distant past to make its points about contemporary Black lesbian feminism, drawing on but also reinterpreting history.
Girl, Woman, Other thus comes to no conclusions and makes no generalizations about legacy but merely presents a myriad of lenses through which to understand how the individual and their history intersect. In a greater sense, the entire cast of characters represents a “family” of the greater African diaspora in England, presenting an ever-changing understanding of what it means to be Black and British.
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