Girl, Woman, Other Study Guide

Bernardine Evaristo was born in South East London to an English mother and Nigerian immigrant father. Her father was the first black councilor of the Labor Party in his borough. Evaristo studied theatre and drama at various schools, eventually earning a doctorate in creative writing. Evaristo was at the forefront of several groundbreaking firsts for Black women creative writers and artists in England. In 1980, she cofounded the Theatre of Black Women, and in the 1990s, she organized Britain’s first Black writers conference. In 2019, she became the first mixed-race woman to win the Booker Prize. Evaristo has authored eleven books and seven plays over the course of her career. A common theme throughout Evaristo’s works, both fiction and non-fiction, is the African diaspora and the social and political complexities that migration creates in a postcolonial world. Girl, Woman, Other, like Evaristo’s other works, pushes the boundaries of narrative and stylistic conventions. Her work often moves across non-linear timelines and explores alternative realities. Her satirical novel Blonde Roots, for example, tells the story of a world where Africans enslaved Europeans.

Girl, Woman, Other spans generations through its long series of flashbacks, reaching as far back as the late 1800s, but the novel’s present is a single night sometime between 2016 and 2019. The novel takes place during England’s “Brexit” negotiations, a period when the country was embroiled in the debate over whether to remain a member of the EU or not. This debate sharply divided the country and inspired the resurgence of right-wing, nationalist rhetoric. Most notably, many saw leaving the EU as a way to tighten and control the country’s borders to reduce and restrict immigration, and as a way to assert English national identity. The novel references the concurrent presidency of Donald Trump (2016-2020), who activated and emboldened far-right groups in the U.S. and encouraged a culture of open hostility toward immigrants, people of color, women, queer people, and many other marginalized groups. The novel is also set against the backdrop of climate disaster. The late 2010s saw increasingly devastating wildfires, hurricanes, heat waves, flooding, and more. England specifically saw record-breaking temperatures and deadly heat wave.  

Evaristo’s novel Lara is a work of fiction based on her family history as well as her experiences growing up mixed-race in England. Girl, Woman, Other likewise tells family stories across generations and contains fictionalized references to her personal experiences. Evaristo’s novel is structurally and thematically similar to Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, a polyphonic novel that tells the story of a family across generations and explores slavery’s impact on the African diaspora in the United States. Girl, Woman, Other explores similar themes as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, which examines the African diaspora, the cultural impacts of migration, the pressures and losses of assimilation, and what it means to be Black in the white, Western world.