Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Girl, Woman, Other, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Diaspora, Culture, and Identity
Love, Sexuality, and Race
Home and Community
Contradiction, Complexity, and Intersectionality
Radical vs. Reformist Social Movements
Summary
Analysis
It’s early morning, and Amma Bonsu is walking along the River Thames in London. A violinist plays an uplifting tune in the near distance as the sun is rising. Tonight her play, The Last Amazon of Dahomey, will premiere at the National Theatre. Amma thinks back to when she first started out in theater. She and her friend Dominique protested shows that were in conflict with their political beliefs. They believed in bold and disruptive public displays of protest. Amma remembers pouring a beer on a director whose play featured semi-naked Black women running around on stage “like idiots.” She and Dominque ran from the scene and into the streets of London laughing.
By premiering her play at the National, Amma risks becoming what she once protested. The National is one of London’s most esteemed theaters, but for years it—and the mainstream theater world in general—excluded actors and directors of color like Amma and Dominique. When stories featuring Black women made it to the stage, they were often demeaning, stereotypical, or problematic, like they play they so boldly protest. Amma and Dominique’s commitment to daring acts of protest situates them as radicals, working from outside of society’s preexisting institutions to either change or dismantle them altogether.
Themes
Amma thinks about the decades she spent excluded from the mainstream theater world. Now radical theater is becoming mainstream, and Amma was invited in by the National Theatre’s first female artistic director, who loved her play. As Amma continues to walk, the National Theatre comes into view, and she reflects that years ago people dressed up to come here and would have looked down on someone like her, clad in a Che Guevara beret, PLO scarf, and feminist buttons. Now the theater is considered progressive, and Amma is an insider. Her own style has changed now, too, preferring sneakers or Birkenstocks, black slacks or patterned harem pants and bright, asymmetric tops. She wears dreadlocks, hoop earrings, African bangles, and her signature pink lipstick.
Amma’s plays were rejected by the mainstream theater world for years, but now the National is seeking radical stories. As society has become increasingly diverse, so too has the theater, earning a progressive reputation that it wants to keep. It’s the theater’s first female art director, someone who worked to reform the institution from the inside, who brought Amma and her radical story onto the stage, which demonstrates how the reformer and radical achieve social change side by side. At the same time, the theater threatens to erase Amma’s radical identity. By working from within the mainstream, Amma risks losing her edge. Her art, like her clothes, might become more modest and moderate over time in this new context.
Themes
Amma’s daughter, Yazz, describes Amma’s style as the “mad old woman look.” Yazz is embarrassed to be seen in public with her mother. At 19, she thinks her 50-something mother is old, but Amma is not ashamed of aging. However, she feels she’s the only one among her friends who considers aging a privilege. Gathered at her house in Brixton for a potluck dinner, she tells them that aging is preferable to dying prematurely, but rather than agree with her unconventional interpretation of middle age, they smile and talk about their typical middle-age maladies.
Yazz enforces a clear generational divide between herself and her mother. Amma’s style represents something old-fashioned and embarrassing to Yazz. Like she does with most things in life, Amma views aging through a radical lens. She’s frustrated with her friends who are settling into conventional middle age, rather than questioning or rebelling against it.
Themes
Amma is nervous for opening night. She worries that critics will call her an imposter and write negative reviews. She reminds herself that she’s experienced—having written 15 plays and directed over 40—and has a fantastic cast of actors for the play. She’s suddenly reminded of a young actress in her cast who, full of herself after landing a job at the National straight out of school, complained that Amma was working them too hard. This interaction made Amma miss Dominique, who left for the United States years ago. Amma feels Dominique should be in London to share this long-awaited moment in her career.
Now that she’s inside the mainstream theater world after years of being shut out, Amma is struggling with imposter syndrome, a feeling that she’s not qualified for or deserving of the esteemed stage. She’s internalized the years of rejection and racism, causing her to doubt her own skills and experience. Amma’s young cast member reveals how much the theater world has changed since Amma started out. While she complains about having to work too hard, she’s landed a role in a play by and for Black women right out of college, while Amma and Dominique struggled to find any work at all at that age. It’s unclear why Dominique isn’t in London, but it's clear Amma feels hurt by her absence.
Themes
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Amma has a flashback to meeting Dominique in the 1980s at an audition for a movie about a women’s prison. They bond over their frustration with being typecast for roles like slave, servant, nanny, and prostitute and still not landing any jobs. After the audition, in a café in pre-gentrification Soho, Amma admires Dominique. In stark contrast to the subservient roles available to her, she’s a gorgeous woman, tall and thin with sharp cheekbones, smoky eyes, and thick lashes. She exudes coolness when she bikes around the city decked out in leather and sporting a short haircut. Dominique confidently shouts, “can’t they see I’m a living goddess?”
Amma and Dominique initially bond over their shared experience of discrimination in the arts. The only roles available to Black women were either stereotypical or subservient. The nature of these roles is so far from the reality of the Black women seeking roles out, like Dominique. When Amma looks at Dominique, she sees a multi-dimensional goddess with many stories to tell. But when casting directors look at Dominique, they only see a handful of potential stories.
Themes
Dominique was born in Bristol to an Afro-Guyanese mother whose ancestors were enslaved and an Indo-Guyanese father descended from indentured laborers. Dominique knew she was a lesbian from a young age but kept this a secret from her friends and family for fear of being a social outcast. At 16, Dominique left home for London, where she could proudly be herself. She learned everything she could about Black history and devoured Black feminist books in independent bookstores. Politically radicalized, she enrolled in drama school, where she pushed back against traditions that limited the roles women and people of color can play. The other students remained silent when she spoke this way, and she was threatened with dismissal.
Growing up, Dominique feels pressured to keep her sexuality a secret, fearing rejection from both her immigrant parents and the discriminatory, white British society she was born into. She leaves her childhood home in search of a new home and community where she will be accepted for who she is, both as an artist and a lesbian. In London she finds home and community in the stories and histories of other powerful Black women. She grows into a radical, political identity. However, London fails to provide the theater community she hoped to find. She’s told to accept a tradition that limits who and what she can be, and when she speaks up to assert herself and her beliefs, she’s not only rejected but threatened with being cut out of that community entirely.
Themes
Amma’s own political passion comes from her father, Kwabena, a Ghanian journalist forced to flee to the UK after supporting the independence movement. Amma’s mother, Helen, grew up mixed-race in Scotland at a time when that was rare. She felt ugly until she moved to London where African men, like Kwabena, started to tell her she was beautiful. Amma’s three older brothers lived up to her father’s expectations to become lawyers and doctors. He expected Amma to become a wife and mother, viewing her acting as a temporary hobby. Amma describes him as a patriarchal revolutionary. As Amma tells this story at the café, Dominique reminds Amma that she can’t expect her father—a man born in 1920s Ghana—to understand a woman born in 1960s London. Amma tells Dominique that she’s an “apologist for the patriarchy,” but Dominique argues that humans are complex.
Amma’s mother grew up in an England even less progressive than the one Amma comes of age in. As a mixed race woman growing up in a white-supremacist society that upholds a white beauty standard, she was made to feel ugly. She finds a new home and community in London where being Black means being beautiful. Amma’s home growing up was likewise imperfect. Although her father was himself a radical, he still held her to traditional gender roles and expectations that conflicted with her identity as a strong feminist. With her outsider’s perspective, Dominique understands that Amma’s father is a first-generation immigrant shaped by wildly different social and political forces than his second-generation, English-born daughter. She can see him in all his complexity, as a man who is neither wholly good nor wholly bad. Amma’s proximity as his daughter leaves her unable to be forgiving of his shortcomings, and instead her identity cultivated in the West becomes a cultural divide between parent and child.
Themes
Amma explains that Helen worked full-time and managed the household with no help from Kwabena, who was preoccupied with fighting against capitalism and colonialism and advocating for socialism. Amma is still frustrated with her mother for continuing to put up with her unaffectionate father. She thinks Helen is unfulfilled and oppressed, never standing up to her husband. Amma now admits he’d probably be an important person in Ghana if he’d returned after independence, but instead he became “President for Life” of his family, who became the involuntary audience for his political preaching. Amma is gay, which her mother still thinks is a phase and insists she keep secret from her homophobic father.
Amma’s anger extends to her mother, who likewise fails to live up to her feminist expectations. Again, Amma fails to see the impact of the social and political forces that shaped her parents. She acknowledges that her father’s life would likely be very different if he’d been able to stay in his home country, without realizing that these missed opportunities and his forced migration have left him deeply wounded. He remains a fervent activist, so he doesn’t lose touch with the radical identity his migration threatened to erase. While it’s not fair that Amma must contend with a homophobic father, it’s yet another example of how social and political differences between the first-generation parents and their second-generation children fracture family bonds.
Themes
After exchanging these stories about their families, Amma tells Dominique about her first time attending a Black women’s group, where they discussed their experiences as Black women encountering white feminism, sexism, and racism. It felt like “coming in from the cold.” Amma stayed after the meeting to make out with a woman, which felt like another “coming home.” When she returned to the meeting the following week, she was disappointed to see the woman snuggling with someone else. She never attended another meeting.
Like Dominique, Amma is in search of a new home in her early 20s. She craves a community that, unlike her childhood home, will accept her entire identity as a queer, Black, feminist woman. The discussion and her connection with one of the women in the group felt like a warm, joyful homecoming to a place where she is finally valued for who she is. When the woman has already moved on from her a week later, Amma feels cast out from that community and gives up on it.
Themes
That day in the café, after several hours and glasses of wine, Amma and Dominique decide that the only way to stay true to their politics and be actors is to open their own theater company. The Bush Woman Theatre Company will give voice to women of color silenced by mainstream theater. They come up with a motto: “On Our Own Terms or Not At All.” At first their constant fighting threatens failure, but once they decide Amma will be the artistic director and Dominique the company manager, they begin to find success. They employ a crew, put on shows at small community centers, and even start to draw the attention of the alternative press. Most importantly, their shows adhere to their feminist mission.
Frustrated by their many failed attempts to enter the mainstream theater world, to be reformers from within, Dominque and Amma decide to pursue radical change by opening their own theater company completely outside of the mainstream. Rejected by their families and by the existing theater community, they carve out their own home that exists on their own terms, allowing them to be their full selves. Amma and Dominique see their struggles as Black women as interconnected with the struggles of all women of color. The company focuses on telling different stories from diverse women who are all united around their common experiences of marginalization in a white-supremacist England.
Themes
In the early years of the company, Amma bounces between shabby apartments until finding a permanent home in an old office building that, with the rich owner’s permission, becomes a commune called the Republic of Freedomia, made up of all types of political and artistic outsiders. Amma starts sleeping with multiple women in Freedomia, and her behavior starts to anger her lovers. She views commitment as imprisonment and doesn’t sleep with the same woman twice because she thinks they’ll become too needy and attached. She brags that she’ll sleep with any woman of any culture, race, or class.
In her continued quest to seek home and community, Amma settles into the radical Republic of Freedomia, made up of fellow outsiders who accept each other as they are. To Amma, Freedomia represents a truly radical way of life. However, there’s a clear contradiction inherent to the set-up. They are squatting in the building with permission of the rich owners, which undermines the alleged radicalness of the act. Amma believes that her approach to love and commitment are radical without acknowledging how her behavior is hurting others. Her boasting about her multi-cultural love interests borders on fetishization.
Themes
As they become more and more popular in the art community, both Amma and Dominique have their choice of lovers, but Dominique is a serial monogamist who falls for blondes. Amma’s friends suggest therapy might help her settle down. Insulted, she points out that promiscuous male rockstars are never told to seek therapy. In her present middle-age, pieces of her past have started to haunt her as former “conquests” call her out for her behavior on social media. Amma no longer sleeps around, and instead has settled down in a non-monogamous triad with her long-term partners, Dolores and Jackie.
Dominque’s story highlights the intersection of race, sexuality, and love. Although she has her choice of lovers, she always ends up with the blonde, white women who fit England’s white-supremacist beauty standard. Her choice of lovers reflects how she may have subconsciously internalized society’s messaging about who and what she should find desirable. Meanwhile, Amma’s story highlights how internalized misogyny shows up in the lesbian community. She treats the women she has sex with as conquests, people to be dominated and then forgotten, and defends her behavior by positioning it as a feminist argument: if a man can do it then so can she. Under the banner of feminist freedom, she’s replicating misogynistic behaviors she’s internalized from living in a patriarchal society that says women are meant to be dominated. Even when women start to speak up about how her actions affected them, she refuses to acknowledge the problematic nature of her behavior.
Themes
When she thinks back nostalgically on her youth spent with Dominique, Amma remembers a trip they took to a legendary gay bar, The Gateway. Inside they found only a few people. Two middle-aged lesbians, sporting old fashioned suits and men’s haircuts, looked like they were “straight out of the pages of The Well of Loneliness.” An old couple, one in a suit and one in a dress, danced to Dusty Springfield. Amma noticed that the dancefloor was dark, with no disco ball to sprinkle “stardust on to them.”
The two middle-aged lesbians at the once legendary, but now empty and forgotten, gay bar foreshadow the future in store for Amma and Dominique. The women at the bar are from a different era, a time when lesbianism was far less accepted, when it was forced to remain furtive and hidden and adhered to stricter gender roles of butch and femme. Both The Well of Loneliness (a 1928 lesbian novel by Radclyffe Hall) and Dusty Springfield are cultural relics of this time. To Amma, a member of a new generation, these women are sad and pathetic. They’ve lost the shine and “stardust” of their youth. Amma and Dominique, like many young people, think their youth will last forever, but in the present day, Yazz, who represents the next generation, sees Amma and her friends the way Amma once viewed this older generation of queer women.
Themes
Back in the present, temporarily shaken from her flashback, Amma walks into the National Theatre and onto the stage. She stares out at the seats where more than 1,000 people will sit tonight. The play’s entire run has sold out in advance, everyone eager to see something “different.” The play is based on the 18th- and 19th-century women warriors of the West African state of Dahomey. The warriors, all married to the king, were forbidden from any other sexual relations and commanded to kill off any male children they bore. Amma’s certain that this forced sexual segregation meant the women must have been in relationships with each other, and this idea inspired her play.
Amma stands on the stage she was excluded from for so long. The fact that a large audience is about to see her play accomplishes what she and Dominique always wanted: to get the voices of women of color heard. However, putting the radical play onto a mainstream stage threatens to undermine its radicalness altogether. The middle-class audience eager to see “something different” may in fact be more eager to prove themselves as tolerant and liberal connoisseurs of diversity. Their interest in the play may have more to do with what their attendance says about them, rather than what the play itself is saying. Amma’s play is centered around powerful, Black woman characters, in stark contrast with those stereotyped and subservient roles once available to her and Dominique.
Themes
The main character of Amma’s play, Nawi (who is unable to bear the king’s child) is forced to become one of the king’s warriors. She becomes a legendary general with many women lovers. Even after she tires of a lover, she remains loyal by protecting her from the king’s wrath. Eventually, old and alone, Nawi reconnects with the holographic ghosts of past lovers and relives the wars she battled in. Controversially, the king did business with outlawed slave ships, exchanging prisoners of these wars in order to build his own wealth. The play ends with Nawi’s death.
Amma’s experience with her many lovers is reflected in Nawi’s story, but unlike Amma, Nawi is loyal and protective of her past lovers. While Amma’s play is radical for its centering of powerful Black woman characters, it’s simultaneously imperfect. Nawi fought in wars that contributed to the continuance of slavery in a post-abolition world. This reality highlights the complexity and contradictions of people, history, and stories. Amma was always tired of being typecast, but her own play contains traces of the very things she fought against.
Themes
While Dominique won’t be in the audience tonight, Amma’s friend Shirley, a teacher, will be, having never missed one of her shows. Shirley is Amma’s oldest friend. They met at 11 when they were the only two brown girls at school, and Shirley has always been Amma’s opposite. Shirley is neat while Amma is messy; she’s ordinary compared to Amma’s eccentricity. Amma’s friends think Shirley is boring, but Amma always defends her. She frequently babysat Yazz, a favor Amma rarely returned, and she often lent Amma money, which Amma usually never repaid. Amma assuaged her guilty feelings about the seemingly one-sided nature of the friendship by convincing herself that she made Shirley’s boring life more exciting.
Amma and Shirley found community with each other when they were young girls each yearning to connect with someone who looked like them in a society that was predominantly white. Although they are opposites in terms of their personalities and ideologies, they bond over their shared racial identity and the isolation that has often come with it. While Amma defends Shirley when her radical friends criticize her for being too normal or mainstream, the way Amma conceives of her relationship with Shirley is itself problematic. Amma justifies her selfishness in the friendship by belittling Shirley’s life choices, and uncritically assuming her own superiority.
Themes
Amma thinks about the rest of her friends. She misses who they were in their youth before they changed with age. Mabel “went straight,” Olivine—who Amma suggests is “too dark” for success in the UK—is a star in Hollywood, and Katrina settled down as a “born-again Anglophile” with her wife outside of London. Lakshmi, who will be there tonight, is a saxophonist who once composed for Amma, but she now plays avant-garde music that Amma scoffs at. Amma gives Lakshmi, who is in her late 50s, a hard time for exclusively dating people in their 20s and 30s.
Amma’s assumption of superiority extends to many of her other friendships. She looks down on them for exchanging the radical lifestyles of their 20 for more settled lives in middle age. Amma mocks Mabel’s bisexuality and discounts Olivine’s mainstream success after years of struggling against racism and colorism in the U.K. She criticizes these women while she herself stands on the precipice of surrendering her radical identity by premiering her play at the National. Amma fails to see her own hypocrisies, that her friends could say the same about her as she does about them. Amma’s criticism of Lakshmi’s avant-garde music and choice of romantic partners may indicate her own anxiety that someone’s work and lifestyle is more radical than her own.
Themes
Amma remembers their friend Georgie. Disowned by her religious family, she drank, did drugs, and had trouble attracting women. Deeply insecure, she thought she was too ugly to attract women, and nights out often ended in tears. The last time she saw Georgie, Amma had to force her to throw up pills she took in a bar. For the first time, Amma felt fed-up and angry with Georgie’s insecurity and hopelessness, and she was frustrated that Georgie was failing at being an adult. A week later, Georgie fell from her balcony in a likely suicide. Amma still wonders if it’s her fault.
Georgie serves as a reminder that not everyone survives in a world that is dead set against them and their identities. Amma wonders if she failed to be the home and community that Georgie so desperately needed.
Themes
Then there’s Sylvester, who never misses an opening night and whose own theater work is inspired by avant-garde films. Sylvester used to be Sylvie, and he and his life partner, Curwen, lay claim to being on the forefront of what’s now become the trend of challenging gender norms. Recently, he and Amma got drinks at the Ritzy after he called her a sellout. At the bar they glare at the yuppie gentrifiers interloping in this space full of people like Amma and Sylvester who arrived when the neighborhood was cheap and crime-ridden.
Sylvester stood on the radical, cutting edge of gender in a time when it was more difficult to do so. He fought to make progress, but now contradictorily denigrates how that progress has made freedom of gender expression and identity mainstream. Sylvester criticizes Amma the way she criticizes the friends she believes have abandoned their radical identities. Both Amma and Sylvester fail to see their own hypocrisies when they glare at the gentrifiers with disdain. The first wave of gentrification is often made up of artists, radicals, and outsiders who initially descend on neglected and marginalized neighborhoods. In other words, Amma and Sylvester refuse to acknowledge their own complicity in the very thing they now hate.
Themes
Amma notes that Sylvester is as revolutionary as ever but that this is not always a good thing. Sylvester calls Amma a sellout again. He still runs his socialist theater company, and thinks Amma should still be running hers, too. He wants her to return to community centers, making her plays accessible to all. She argues that she has the right to direct at the National and that the theater should be trying to attract more diverse audiences, not just the middle-class. Amma holds back from reminding Sylvester of his economically privileged background, but when he tells her she’s abandoned her political principles for the sake of ambition she walks out on him.
While Amma criticizes her friends she deems not radical enough, she simultaneously criticizes Sylvester for being too radical. She positions herself as above everyone else. Her path alone is the most noble one. Sylvester wants Amma to reclaim her radical identity, to go back to working for change from the outside. Amma takes up the argument in favor of reforming society from within its existing institutions. She asserts that her work at the National is an important marker of progress, and while this may be absolutely true, it flies in the face of her professed radical beliefs and identity. Sylvester, who fails to acknowledge his economically privileged roots at odds with his radical identity, reflects Amma’s hypocrisies back at her, but she still fails to see her own. They both ignore anything that blatantly contradicts who they profess themselves to be.
Themes
Amma walks home from the National, thinking about how grateful she is to be a homeowner. When the tenants at Freedomia were finally evicted, she bounced between places until her parents died. Helen died of cancer, which Amma saw as a symbol of her oppression. Amma’s father, Kwabena, died shortly after, and his death filled her with a grief she didn’t expect. Amma was overcome with guilt for not recognizing he was a product of a different time and culture and never expressing her love for him. She regrets taking him for granted and holding him to her unforgiving feminist standard. In her eulogy, she reflected on the trauma he must have endured when leaving his country. Her brothers gave her the largest share of the inheritance, which she used to buy her house.
Amma argues that her mother’s cancer grew out of her acceptance of the subservient, repressed life she led, which comes close to suggesting that her death was in part her own fault because she failed to be a feminist. She imposes her own narrative onto her mother without ever having asked her how she felt about her life choices. It’s only after her father dies that Amma can see him through the compassionate lens Dominique tried to get her to see him through all those years before. Amma finally understands the weight of the trauma he endured as a first-generation immigrant exiled from his homeland, but it’s too late for them to reconcile. Amma criticizes Sylvester for his financial privilege, yet, meanwhile, she’s benefitted financially from her own inheritance.
Themes
Amma thinks about Yazz’s birth 19 years ago. Determined to raise Yazz unconventionally, she decided to co-parent with her gay friend, Roland, Amma’s sperm donor who took Yazz on weekends. She breastfed in public, let Yazz wear whatever she wanted, and let her speak her mind. Amma wanted to raise a powerful feminist. As Yazz got older, however, men started to notice her and Amma became protective, policing her clothing and worrying about her boyfriend. Yazz identifies as a humanitarian, more interested in the non-binary present than her mom’s old-fashioned “women’s politics.”
As she did all things, Amma was determined to parent radically. The way she conceived and raised Yazz, while radical then, is now increasingly common. Amma contradicts her own radical beliefs once more when she starts policing Yazz’s body and sexuality. Defying the objectifying male gaze herself is one thing, but watching her daughter go up against it and the constant threat of harm is another. Even the feminism that Amma wished to pass down to Yazz is outdated by the time Yazz is grown and developing her own political identity.
Themes
Now that Yazz is away at college and Amma misses her, she doesn’t miss the hurtful words Yazz spews her way. Young people, she says, think they’re the only ones with feelings. But she misses her presence in their home, her noise and chaos and her idiosyncratic ways of being. Still, she hopes that Yazz, like most people her age living in a now unaffordable world, will come home after she’s finished at university. Amma wants Yazz to come back home forever.
Amma is now on the receiving end of the same incessant criticism she used against her parents. From her new position as a parent, she understands the emotional pain her words must have caused back then. The cycle of generational criticism continues. Regardless, Amma misses the home she created for herself and her daughter. With Yazz’s departure, Amma has lost another home.
Themes
