They say if you have nothing nice to say, then say nothing at all. I usually abide by this adage, but not today.
Certainly you’ve heard about the scandal surrounding 2019’s Booker Prize, which was split for the second time between two winners: Margaret Atwood for her Handmaid’s Tale sequel, The Testatments, and to Bernadine Evaristo for Girl, Woman, Other. (The first time was in 1992 for Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger.) Evaristo is the first Black woman to win the prize, and there were many (myself among them) who felt this monumental (albeit embarrassing) moment was somewhat shrouded by the twinning of the award. To me, the split felt unnecessary. Does Atwood need another accolade of this sort (and the privileges that accompany it) for her duly praised dystopian tale, now entering its 35th year? The answer is no. Evaristo, on the other hand, has written eight books and had yet to receive international acclaim, yet has been touted as an exceptional writer and a longstanding advocate for writers of colour in the UK.
So, it is armed with this empathy that I began to read Girl, Woman, Other. I was immediately confounded by the scarcity of punctuation and found myself tripping over the abrupt line breaks (an awkward attempt at poetic meter). I would have put it down immediately if it weren’t for the promising structure: twelve stories of Black British women organized in trios. If I found one story stereotypical and hollow, perhaps the next would inch that much closer to authenticity, is what I told myself. Reader, it did not happen. There are many problems with this text, mainly that Evaristo is attempting to encapsulate certain types of Black personhood with which she appears to have no familiarity. The stories take very strange turns, most notably (spoiler alert) an affair between a mother and son-in-law. With about 100 pages to go, I saw no path forward and gave up. All the same, I can appreciate Evaristo’s ambition, even though it falls short of its potential. There are very few moments that I believe the characters, mostly when they are older and Nigerian, and if that’s not an exhortation to write from your own experience, then I don’t know what is.