Girl, Woman, Other: A Novel by Bernardine Evaristo
Grove Press
464 Pages

If you haven’t read Manifesto by Bernardine Evaristo who received the Booker Prize for Girl, Woman, Other in 2019, you are missing out! Especially, if you are a female writer intent upon the adventure of a literary life. By the time she received the Booker, an award she shared with Margaret Atwood, Evaristo was already esteemed for her highly original works. Among them are novels in verse including the semi-autobiographical Lara (1997), and The Emperor’s Babe (2001), about a Black girl growing up in Roman London 2000 years ago. The BBC adaptation of her 2013 novel, Mr. Loverman, appears later this year. Manifesto, is part coming of age story, part creative memoir, part romantic journal (chronicling relationships with women, then men), and part self-help guide. It charts the artistic evolution of the idiosyncratic Evaristo who was born in London in 1959 to a white British mother and a Nigerian father. She grew up, a tomboy, the fourth of 8 siblings, in an eccentric Victorian house out of the world Roald Dahl or Lemony Snicket. The residence, along with its Black inhabitants, attracted neighbourhood hooligans. Bricks came crashing through the windows on a regular basis. Her father, born ready, would chase the young white miscreants down, grabbing them by the scruffs of their necks and carrying them home to their parents of whom he demanded immediate reimbursement.

Her father’s hot-headedness contrasted with her mother’s easy, encouraging nature. Yet each devoted time to local politics, becoming leaders in their working-class community. Their sense of social responsibility shaped Evaristo‘s creative pursuits. She had toppled into love with theatre at the age of 11. After finishing school, and finally possessing a room of her own – she lived peripatetically -mostly squatting through a series of dilapidated London flats- she buckled down to writing plays and poems. An ardent feminist, Evaristo and her friends won acclaim after launching the Theatre of Black Women in 1982. Her novels incorporate this theatrical spirit, invigorating characters, dialogue and dramatic situations. Manifesto is subtitled On Never Giving Up; “Just get on with it,” her prosaic advice for literary success. To follow Britain’s contemporary literary scene is to encounter Evaristo at every turn, occupied not only with her own work, but with establishing creative initiatives for artists and awareness for audiences. In Manifesto we witness the growth of an aesthetic rooted in the theatre, her complicated family history and the equally complex history of her beloved London.

DBN: It’s good to speak with you again. I know how busy you are, so thank you for taking the time.

BE: It’s my pleasure, Donna.

DBN: May I ask, what moved you to write Manifesto?

Manifesto: On Never Giving Up by Bernardine Evaristo
Grove Press
240 Pages

BE: I initially wanted to put down a version of my life into book form to mark the incredible moment in my career, whereas everything changed when I won the Booker Prize in 2019. I was 60 years of age and I’d had this long career in the arts and I’d been talking about my life a lot in interviews. I just thought, wouldn’t it be great to explore how I reached this point in my life. What I think I wanted to put on the record, so to speak - what I think I would like readers to get from it, although I don’t usually second guess what a reader will think of my work- is inspiration and encouragement, especially for those who need it. Then for those who have had a smoother journey through life I hope the book shows them something of what it might be like for those of us who’ve had more to struggle with.

DBN: How have your particular struggles contributed to the richness of your work? I don’t mean to sound trite. It’s that I sometimes wonder how the absence of a certain kind of struggle might impact a writer’s work.

BE: So, if I didn’t have these struggles, I wouldn’t be me.

DBN: True.

BE: Also, I wouldn’t have the wealth of all my experiences and my perspectives and my issues with my status in this society as a Black woman. The things that I talk about as struggles were really the making of me. If you strip all that away, what is there left? If I had grown up as a Black child- a mixed-race child – where everybody looked the same as me and my family, and there was no racism and there was no sexism and there was no classism, I think I would have been a very boring person.

And also, I would not have felt motivated to become a writer. And if I had’ve felt motivated to become a writer, I don’t really know what I could have written about. I don’t regret anything. Sometimes people think that is a really smug thing to say. Because they say to me, “What would you have changed about your childhood?” And I say, “Nothing.” Of course, at the time, I would have changed everything! But actually, no: Nothing. Also understanding conflict, understanding struggle, not having things too easy in life gives you the grit to keep going, which is what I’ve had to do.

DBN: Somewhere in the Bible it says: Ask, ask and keep on asking? And I notice throughout your career you have done that. Even if the answer is no, you are little deterred.

BE: I learned never to say no to myself. I talk in Manifesto about personal development and of how that really shifted things for me. Because, until then I think I was ambitious, and I was strong, and I was creative. But I wasn’t focused in the way that I needed to be to achieve great things. Because the idea of achieving great things was beyond my thinking. Because I wanted to be a writer, but I wasn’t really thinking about being a great writer – however you define that- because it was beyond me. And then I go on these personal development courses and they encourage you to think big, to start planning your life, focusing on being ambitious and getting the “wheel of life” in place in your relationships, your finances, your home.

I’m an academic at Brunel University. I was supervising a Ph.D. candidate who applied for a funding source, but she didn’t get it. She sent me an email saying, “I’m really sore; I’m really upset; I don’t know if I’ll try again; I don’t know what to do.” And I thought to myself: You haven’t read my book Manifesto! Because, for God’s sake! Just because they rejected you, it doesn’t mean to say you give up! What are you? Some kind of lightweight! In the first obstacle in a life where things have gone pretty smoothly - the first time somebody says no- she says, “That’s it! That’s it! I’m not going to go through it again!” It is so important that we teach people- especially those from marginalized communities who aren’t growing up with certain kinds of privileges- that you just keep going for it until you get it.

Bernardine’s parents, Julius Evaristo and Jacqueline Brinkworth, on their wedding day, London, 1954. (Photograph courtesy of Bernardine Evaristo)

DBN: I know your father was difficult, that the family didn’t have a lot of money, that your parents’ marriage was a little rocky and that the London of that time was a very racist place. Yet you speak of your past and especially your parents with tremendous tenderness and respect. Can you tell me about them and what each of them gave you?

BE: My Mom is still around. A white English woman. She came from a genteel working-class family that was very aspirational. She was trained to be a schoolteacher and became a schoolteacher. She met and married my father when she was still a student. And everything went mad from her side of the family because they didn’t want her to marry a Black man. In the 1950s, marrying my father changed the course of her life completely. She had 8 kids with him - 8 kids in 10 years. So that was hardcore. She was very much in a Black environment in a way. She took a break from teaching. But once the youngest was of school age, she went back. My Dad came over to Britain in 1949. He was from Nigeria. He was a welder, so he worked in factories. He was a very powerful individual. He was a very dominant person in my childhood. Very oppressive. He never talked to his children. He believed in corporal punishment in a very Nigerian way.

My parents were kind of yin and yang. My mother was very soft and Earth Mother and very communicative and developed lovely relationships with her children. Whereas my father was distant and uncommunicative and authoritarian. But they were both political: My mother became politicized through my father. She was also Catholic until she wasn’t anymore – gave up on it. My father was a member of the trade union. Very political and politically activist. My mother also became activist: She became a shop steward at the school where she worked. They were both strong individuals, although my mother would never describe herself as strong.

DBN: But she was a strong individual: Falling in love with a Black man and determining to marry him in London at that time.

BE: That’s right. And she didn’t bow to pressure from her family, who did everything they could to stop her marrying him. My mother was interested in literature and conversation and communication. She was a compassionate, lovely person. My father was strong in a different way. They were both very stubborn, so I inherited that from them. I definitely inherited my activism from both of them.

DBN: One of the things I get from Manifesto is your compassion, for your Dad and for your Nan – your mother’s mother- who could be racist. You say people change and that we should allow people to change and that you have to be allowed to forgive.

BE: That’s me: St. Bernardine. Ha! There is a St. Bernardine, actually. I guess I have grown more compassionate as I’ve grown older. I read an interview very recently of a famous singer and he said, “People are so boastful. They are always talking about how compassionate they are.” And I thought, well, I say that. That’s not to say I’m always compassionate, because I can be a right bitch. But I do try to see where people are coming from, and I think that’s something I learned to do as a writer for fiction; that you have to try to understand where people are coming from in order to write truthful, complex characters.

So that’s the standpoint I have today. And if that’s a message that comes out of Manifesto, then I think that’s a really good thing. Because there is so much intolerance out there, especially on social media—always taking the moral high ground. But if you accept that you are as flawed as anybody else, then it’s much harder for you to take the moral high ground. It’s trying to understand the complexity of everything instead of being so judgmental. As a writer of fiction, this is what I teach. You can’t be judgmental about your characters. You’ve got to let them breathe. If the reader wants to judge your characters, fine. But you have to create these very real human beings, rather than saying this is a bad person and I’m going to write a character that is a bad person. It’s going to come out as some kind of cardboard, cut-out caricature. But I can also be very unforgiving. I ain’t no saint.

DBN: I love this. But I also want to push back a bit. There’s a passage in the book where your mother takes you children to the country to visit her friend and the friend’s children call you names. And another time, a malicious school girl conducts a secret study to see how many of your classmates would like to live next to coloured people. Sure, we can say they didn’t know better. But that doesn’t mean they have to be mean; steal your dignity; steal your house; throw bricks through your window.

BE: Let me respond to that: The girl who did the report on whether girls in my class would live next to a coloured family was being mean. She relished coming up to tell me this. But when I say they didn’t know any better, I am referring to the girls who said they wouldn’t live next to a coloured family. This was a form that they filled out in private. Looking at the context of Britain in the 1970s, in that area where the school was, they didn’t know any Black people other than me. The representation of Black people in the media was invisible or incredibly negative. So where would they get their positive affirmation about what Blackness was? They wouldn’t.

DBN: But what about your mother? Where did she get her positive affirmation of Blackness?

BE: My mother was religious.

DBN: Well, they can be the worst!

BE: My mother was Catholic. But she wasn’t hypocritically Catholic. She was a genuine Catholic, a genuine Christian.

DBN: You are so good about singling out emotion on the page, even your own. When you first attend youth theatre school at age 12 you immediately say to yourself, “This is it!” How did you recognize so quickly that drama was the thing for you?

BE: I don’t know. I went. I thought I was quite shy. But obviously, I wasn’t ‘cause I joined in. I enjoyed it and I went back the following week and went every Friday until I was 16 or 17 to the local youth theatre which was the making of me. I can be very decisive, actually. I do know what I like. I’m the kind of person, you can’t get presents for me. I say to people, just get me candles, but make sure you get this scent and this scent. Don’t get me any clothes because it’s not going to work. I’m very specific about my tastes and what I like. I never thought about before really. But it’s true.

DBN: You travelled with the drama school.

BE: Yes, I went to Norway for 2 weeks. Summer of 1975. Sun was shining; Fjords were beautiful; the Norwegians were beautiful. It was absolutely glorious. The theatre was really the making of me. A) It was a welcoming community that didn’t exist elsewhere in my community. It didn’t really exist in my school. And B) It was a creative space. I got to use my imagination and play and have fun right through my teens. And make great friendships – that in one case has lasted right through to today. And it was affordable. Because we had no money. It was pennies to attend. My heart bleeds, really, because we don’t have great provisions now for young people in this country.

DBN: What are they losing out on, these children?

BE: Oh, so much. They’re losing a chance to explore their creativity; to maybe go into the arts eventually. And also, just to be entertained; to develop confidence and a sense of self – a sense of self-expression. The theatre is generally for people who are unconventional. You don’t have to fit in to be a theatre person. It often attracts people who feel like outsiders. Today, in this country if you want to send your children off for theatre activities, you’ve got to pay for it. It limits the accessibility of this kind of activity for poor kids.

DBN: You were accepted into the prestigious Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama where you discovered a group of activist Black women. Tell me about that.

BE: I have three sisters. And I very, very kind of loosely had a friend at a Saturday job where I worked – a Black woman. But we didn’t really socialize together. But other than that, and other than family members, I didn’t know any Black women. I didn’t have Black friends. And lo and behold, I get to this drama school and there are four other Black women. Of course, as is the way – we hung out together- and I found my Blackness in a way. Because I had been identified as half-caste, which was not an insult at that time. It then became mixed- race and now also bi-racial. But I was in this space where I felt really accepted by other Black women. It was a very political theatre course. A lot of feminists came in to teach us. By the time I finished, I was a powerful Black feminist, which I still am today.

DBN: How did the Theatre of Black Women come out of that?

BE: We graduated in 1982. There was no work for us because Black women didn’t get any work in theatre. They didn’t want us. So, we formed Theatre of Black Women and that was Britain’s first Black women’s theatre company. And we ran it six years. It was by and about Black women, for everybody. I would say that the majority of our audiences were Black women, and maybe Black men and white women. But we didn’t get a lot of white men. We put on plays and initially myself, Patricia St. Hilaire and Paulette Randall wrote and directed plays ourselves. Then we brought in other writers, actors and directors and so on. Yeah. It was really important for its time.

DBN: For those who may not understand- can you explain a little more about what you mean when you say you discovered your Blackness.

BE: The environment I’d grown up in – with a Nigerian dad and my Black siblings – was a very white environment. Britain was much whiter then. There were some Black areas. But I wasn’t growing up in one of those areas. And so, my encounter with Blackness was really non-existent. My father didn’t really pass on his Nigerian culture, so I didn’t know anything about Nigeria. I knew nothing about African history. I knew a little bit about African American music, because that was global, Michael Jackson and so forth. Michael Jackson was huge in Britain as well. When I say I encountered my Blackness, I mean I began to move in more Black circles. I was mixing with other Black people, not just the girls from the drama school, but communities I became a part of when I left - especially Black women’s communities. I researched African history, and also Black British history- (There was such a thing as Black British history!)- and that was shaping my writing. I was hungry to know more of the history that hadn’t been taught to us in schools.

Promotional folder for Theatre of Black Women, 1986

I was encountering aspects of Black culture, and also different African cultures. There was a centre called The African Centre. They had a shop where they used to sell sculptures. So I used to go and buy African sculptures. And wear African jewelry and occasionally African headwraps. I was immersing myself in a Blackness that I needed to. Because I was defined by the society I was growing up in as other. As Black or half-caste. I was not seen as belonging, and yet the side of me which didn’t belong- which was my Dad’s side- I knew nothing about. In a sense, what I did was integrate my father’s side of me into me as a young woman, then took on a Black identity. But always, within that, being bi-racial.

DBN: Thanks for sharing so generously. I appreciate that.

BE: You’re welcome!

Bernardine Evaristo is the author of nine books including the Booker Prize winning Girl, Woman, Other. We spoke by Zoom in February 2022.

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