Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other: Breaking Forms
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Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other branches and coils through a dozen lives (all the metaphors that come to mind are natural: trees, rivers, lava), unfurling beautifully and peaceably in some places, wildly in others. I’ve been thinking off and on about this book for years, have taught it, sometimes start an MPP entry about Evaristo, decide this isn’t a format in which I can capture anything about what she does, realize that “capturing” is antithetical to this book’s project (though analysis and second guessing are part of what Evaristo does so brilliantly), give up. And start again. So today, without capturing anything at all, I’m going to go ahead and celebrate the way she breaks forms.
The book doesn’t operate by paragraphs but through long flights of poetic prose that break the idea of sentences. Evaristo frames her (experimental) (also page-turning) story with the opening night at the National Theater of a piece by an experimental playwright/director, Amma, wrestling with what it means to be an outsider/insider. The novel weaves, a chapter at a time, through the minds and histories of nearly all of the central characters, each section’s triad of characters bound together, other connections more apparently loose and tangential but tightening as the novel goes on.
In talking with Anita Sethi for The Guardian, Evaristo described her own book:
I have a term I came up with called fusion fiction – that’s what it felt like, with the absence of full stops, the long sentences. The form is very free-flowing and it allowed me to be inside the characters’ heads and go all over the place – the past, the present. For me, there’s always a level of experimentation – I’m not happy writing what we might call traditional novels. There’s a part of me that is always oppositional to convention – not only counter-cultural and disruptive of people’s expectations of me, but also of form. That goes back to my theatre days, when we would write very experimentally, as we did not want to, as we saw it, imprison our creativity in traditional forms.
In Girl, Woman, Other, Evaristo inhabits each of her characters with a free-form mixture of direct reporting of thoughts, narration, sometimes dialogue that may be summed up or reported with no quotation marks, There’s always a confident and omniscient narrator who sometimes seems to inhabit the character and then departs freely and at will to roam about through exposition and explanation, as in the opening of the book:
Chapter One
Amma
1
Amma
is walking along the promenade of the waterway that bisects her city, a few early morning barges cruise slowly by
to her left is the nautical-themed footbridge with its deck-like walkway and sailing mast pylons
to her right is the bend in the river as it heads east past Waterloo Bridge towards the dome of St Paul’s
she feels the sun begin to rise, the air still breezy before the city clogs up with heat and fumes
a violinist plays something suitably uplifting further along the promenade
Amma’s play, The Last Amazon of Dahomey, opens at the National tonight
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she thinks back to when she started out in theatre
when she and her running mate, Dominique, developed a reputation for heckling shows that offended their political sensibilities
their powerfully trained actors’ voices projected from the back of the stalls before they made a quick getaway
they believed in protest that was public, disruptive and downright annoying to those at the other end of it
she remembers pouring a pint of beer over the head of a director whose play featured semi-naked black women running around on stage behaving like idiots
before doing a runner into the backstreets of Hammersmith
howling
Amma then spent decades on the fringe, a renegade lobbing hand grenades at the establishment that excluded her
until the mainstream began to absorb what was once radical and she found herself hopeful of joining it
which only happened when the first female artistic director assumed the helm of the National three years ago
after so long hearing a polite no from her predecessors, she received a phone call just after breakfast one Monday morning when her life stretched emptily ahead with only online television dramas to look forward to
love the script, must do it, will you also direct it for us? I know it’s short notice, but are you free for coffee this week at all?
Amma has more vulnerability than we guess from this bravura opening, but she also has this freedom and power throughout. In a To the Best of Our Knowledge interview with Shannon Henry Kleiber, Evaristo called Girl Woman, Other “…an ode to Black British women. It's a book that travels over 100 years, well over 100 years. So it’s like a tapestry.”
The breaking of the form and the breathlessness that keeps evolving so that it’s as compelling as watching the movement of water echo something crucial in the characters’ lives. It’s not always a movement toward freedom, power, knowledge, but so often it is laying siege to empire, as in Arundhati Roy’s famous quote from War Talk, where “another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
Evaristo’s form embodies and demonstrates both the world we live in and the world we can see/imagine arriving, worth fighting for and celebrating in its every particular incarnation. The microlevel of this book expresses the macrolevel, that mixture of sophisticated analysis and visceral voice-y surprises. Though the characters in the novel are all so different, and each of them feels distinct, still there’s this voice running through that can celebrate and investigate them at every level of focal distance. The piece below expresses Amma’s own knowledge and opinions, though probably she wouldn’t be thinking exactly this way:
Amma’s play, The Last Amazon of Dahomey, opens at the National tonight
or
when she and her running mate, Dominique, developed a reputation for heckling shows that offended their political sensibilities
their powerfully trained actors’ voices projected from the back of the stalls before they made a quick getaway
The broken paragraphs capture the texture and rhythm of thinking, dipping in and out of the present and the past, creating a portrait of Amma in her city via both her surroundings and her memories. The grouped line breaks, commas, and the occasional question mark demarcate or guide the river of thoughts (a period—final closure—has to wait a very long time), while the long, open lines and the breaks to new paragraphs add further thoughts or change the subject. All of this makes even the exposition feel light, airy, as if we’re overhearing thinking and listening to the character ruminating on her own past and future.
In other places, though, the prose delivers her exact thoughts, transitioning from “she remembers” into the kinds of words that might be running through her mind:
she remembers pouring a pint of beer over the head of a director whose play featured semi-naked black women running around on stage behaving like idiots
before doing a runner into the backstreets of Hammersmith
howling
Less analytical, less Latinate, less instructive, more vernacular, more funny and outrageous. Here that narrative voice isn’t delivering a history lesson with one character as the focus, but giving us a specific instance in units (paragraphs, beats, lines) that focus down to a single word to directly convey that experience of howling in rage and glee and triumph.
And then the lines get longer again as the book returns to gorgeous, apparently careless but superbly omniscient narration:
Amma then spent decades on the fringe, a renegade lobbing hand grenades at the establishment that excluded her
until the mainstream began to absorb what was once radical and she found herself hopeful of joining it
which only happened when the first female artistic director assumed the helm of the National three years ago
And then we drop into the recent past, and an inciting moment of dialogue:
after so long hearing a polite no from her predecessors, she received a phone call just after breakfast one Monday morning when her life stretched emptily ahead with only online television dramas to look forward to
love the script, must do it, will you also direct it for us? I know it’s short notice, but are you free for coffee this week at all?
Now the book is on its way, the outsider is no longer pouring beer over the heads of the establishment but invited to join it, and what does that mean for her and everyone around her? It sets up the book’s inquiry into who does and does not have power, into inequities and internalized struggles, and into an exuberant embrace of life, which shows up in the characters, events, thinking, and speech, a long intertwined conversation, the paragraphs/beats/lines winging us forward through the book and sweeping us up in their movement.