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
When Carole comes home from her first semester at Oxford in tears, begging not to go back, Bummi insists that she return, not yet knowing how dramatically Oxford will change her. Soon her voice loses its Nigerian power, her body language changes, she looks down on their apartment, and she starts buying expensive clothes. Eventually, she stops coming home at all, spending holidays at a friend’s country estate instead. Bummi sobs at Carole’s graduation and wishes Augustine, Carole’s father, were there to see. Bummi hopes Carole will embrace her Nigerian culture, will eat with her hands again instead of looking at her mom like “a savage from the jungle” for doing so.
As a first-generation immigrant, Bummi has sacrificed so much so that Carole could have access to better opportunities in life. An elite university like Oxford is the pinnacle of opportunity and upward mobility, so Bummi won’t let her give it up. Simultaneously, Bummi expects Carole to embrace and preserve their Nigerian culture. What she doesn’t anticipate is that balancing those two identities is often impossible for second-generation children of immigrants. Bummi cries at Carole’s graduation both because she’s proud of her successes but also because she’s mourning the fact that this degree cost Carole her Nigerian culture and identity. She holds out hope that Carole will reclaim them once she leaves university. However, Carole has so completely separated herself from her culture that she judges her mother for eating with her hands. She’s internalized the racism of the white society around her.
Themes
Carole moves back in with Bummi in London. She hasn’t brought home any boyfriends, and Bummi reminds her how important it is to get a good job and a Nigerian husband. Carole goes out partying and Bummi is worried she’s sleeping around like “tarty English girls.” Carole quickly finds her respectable job at the bank, and Bummi finds three eligible Nigerian men that Carole refuses to meet. Bummi warns that past 30 she’ll be too old to find someone. Despite Carole’s partying, she and Bummi get along well for those few years after graduation, until one day Carole announces she’s engaged to a white man, Freddy.
Despite Bummi’s hopes that returning home from college will also mean Carole returns to her Nigerian culture, the divide between first-generation mother and second-generation child persists. Bummi’s understanding of gender roles is more traditional than Carole’s. Carole lives up to her mother’s expectations by getting a respectable and well-paying job. She achieves the upward mobility that immigrant parents want for their children. On the other hand, however, Carole defies Bummi’s expectations that she marry a Nigerian man by getting engaged to a white man.
Themes
Bummi is furious and asks Carole why she’s spitting on her father’s life, her people, and bringing shame upon the family. She wishes Augustine was alive to convince Carole otherwise, and wonders if Carole would have turned out different if she hadn’t had to raise her alone in the U.K. She feels as helpless as she did when Carole sank into her deep depression at 13. She remembers how glad she was when Carole reemerged as the girl with good grades who got into the “famous university for rich people.” Bummi was so proud that she made three framed copies of her acceptance letter. This was before Bummi realized that Carole’s going to Oxford meant turning her back on her culture.
For Bummi, getting engaged to a white man is a betrayal of Carole’s Nigerian identity, heritage, and culture. She betrays her people by siding with their oppressors. Bummi worries that Carole’s lack of a father figure is what led her to this decision. Perhaps if she’d grown up with her strong, Nigerian father figure, then she would have wanted the same for herself in a husband. In part, Bummi blames herself for encouraging Carole to pursue mainstream success within English society by going to Oxford. The three framed acceptance letters represent the overwhelming pride Bummi felt when Carole achieved what every immigrant parent dreams of. However, she didn’t realize that dream came at the cost of the culture that Bummi holds so dear. In just one generation their Nigerian identity and culture has been lost to assimilation and whiteness.
Themes
In her anger, Bummi has cornered Carole in the kitchen. She trades her anger for concern, explaining that marrying a white man means losing her culture. She’s Nigerian above all else and there’s no use in living a successful life in England if she loses her identity. Carole remains unmoved, so Bummi decides to ignore her. That night, when Carole expects that, as always, they’ll cook dinner together, Bummi’s thrown out all their food. Bummi ignores Carole for almost three months, afraid of what will come out of her mouth if she speaks. She doesn’t want to lose Carole, the only person left in her life whom she loves. She breaks her silence on the day that Carole announces that she’s moving in with Freddy.
Bummi realizes that their Nigerian identity matters more than success in a white supremacist, English society. Material success seems arbitrary compared to the spiritual satisfaction that comes from maintaining a strong identity and connection to one’s ancestors. Bummi’s anger is so fierce that she retreats into silence, temporarily cutting Carole out of her life to ultimately salvage the relationship in the long run. She lost her husband to England, after he worked himself to death just to survive as a first-generation immigrant. Now she’s lost her daughter to her success that she sacrificed so much for. It’s a biting irony.
Themes
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Bummi gestures to the rice she’s sifting through and tells Carole that English people give immigrants like her dirty looks for buying affordable food from immigrant-owned stores rather than fancy packages from overpriced supermarkets. The point, she explains, is that no matter how “high and mighty” or “English-English” she pretends to be, no matter how “English-English” her husband, Carole is forever Nigerian. Bummi threatens to beat her if she ever refers to her as “Mother” again, a post-Oxford change. She’s her mama and will be forever. Carole is sobbing, happy that Bummi is finally speaking to her again. When Carole leaves for work Bummi realizes that soon Carole will “belong completely to them.”
Bummi’s anger stems from the way that immigrants are treated by white people in England. She’s endured so much racism and discrimination from white people that she can’t understand why Carole would marry into a rich white family that no doubt are the kind of people that judge immigrants for both their class status and their race. Bummi understands that no matter how successful a Black person may be within English society, white people will still see their Blackness first above all else, and with it will attach stereotypes, microaggressions, and discrimination. Carole adopting English language and calling Bummi “mother” represents how English society and the pressure to assimilate into white culture threatens to destroy the relationships between first-generation parents and their second-generation children. Bummi realizes that Carole marrying a white man means she’s lost her completely to white, Western society.
Themes
Bummi thinks back on her own childhood. She and her mother, Iyatunde, ran from their home in the Niger Delta after her father, Moses, was killed while illegally refining diesel. This was the only option for people living in the Delta, where big oil companies destroy the land that produces profits and fuels the world. Moses’s family takes his farmland after his death, claiming that Iyatunde wasn’t his legal wife and that they don’t want to see her again. They abandon their hut and go to live with Bummi’s grandparents. Iyatunde’s father wants to marry Bummi off as soon as she hits puberty, but Iyatunde doesn’t want this traditional life for her daughter.
Bummi thinks back on her childhood and the suffering she endured to get to the point where she is in life, the life that granted Carole the opportunities to be successful but ultimately led to her assimilation. Bummi’s oppression at the hands of white supremacist society started long before she migrated to England. Bummi’s father was killed by the white man’s greed that has destroyed the Niger Delta in order to reap immense profits and fuel the daily lives of white Westerners in countries that import the Delta’s oil. In addition to enduring the effects of white supremacy’s global reach, Bummi had to contend with sexism in her early life. Like her mother, Bummi was expected to marry young, but her mother fights back and disrupts this cycle of tradition that keeps women beholden to men.
Themes
The two sneak away early one morning, making a treacherous journey across burning oilfields to Lagos, where they settle in Makoko, a floating slum. They share a bamboo hut on stilts and a canoe with another family. Iyatunde begs for work around Lagos, and Bummi follows, embarrassed. Finally, she finds work at a sawmill. She funds Bummi’s education, determined that her daughter will one day have a good job and an educated husband. When Bummi is 15, her mother dies in an accident at the mill.
There are clear parallels between Iyatunde and Bummi’s mother-daughter relationship and later Bummi and Carole’s mother-daughter relationship. Both Iyatunde and Bummi moved to new places where they were forced to work hard and live in poverty to give their daughters a chance at a better life. Iyatunde wanted Bummi to have an education and a husband, just like Bummi encouraged Carole to stay at Oxford and insisted she marry a Nigerian man. Ultimately, Iyatunde died in order to give Bummi greater opportunities in life, just as Augustine died for Carole and Bummi sacrificed so much.
Themes
Bummi survives alone in Lagos until a distant cousin, Aunty Ekio, offers to take her in and fund her schooling in exchange for housework and nannying. Bummi arrives at Aunty Ekio’s expecting a warm family greeting, and instead is told to be grateful for her Aunty’s offer. Aunty Ekio’s house is the first concrete house Bummi’s ever been in, and Aunty lives a life of luxury and leisure. She bosses Bummi around, commanding her to complete tasks as minor as changing the TV channel. Despite her aunt’s harshness, Bummi has nightmares about losing this home, too. She enrolls in university to study mathematics, but dozes off in classes, exhausted after waiting on her aunt all day.
When Bummi moves in with her aunt, she’s thrown into a new and unfamiliar realm of the upper-class, just like Carole experienced when she arrived at Oxford. Bummi’s new home is inhospitable, too, but for vastly different reasons. Bummi puts up with her aunt’s incessant demands because she has no other home to turn to. Since both her father and mother’s deaths, Bummi has been continuously displaced, without a stable home and community.
Themes
One day a teaching assistant, Augustine Williams, wakes her up, calls her pretty, and invites her to lunch. They quickly fall in love. Unlike other university boys, Augustine respects Bummi’s body and waits a long time to kiss her. Augustine completes Bummi and her loneliness fades. Augustine grew up in a progressive family with educated and well-off parents. When he proposes to Bummi, his parents accept her wholeheartedly regardless of the fact that she has no family or dowry. Unable to find work in Nigeria, even with his PhD in economics, Augustine dreams of moving to England where he envisions a successful future as a businessman.
Bummi describes Augustine as completing her because he gives her the home that she has lacked since her parents died. Augustine’s progressive background has honed his feminist outlook on love and dating. Bummi’s mother’s sacrifice has paid off. She’s both in college and with an educated man who respects her autonomy as a woman. Although both Bummi and Augustine are highly educated, they have to leave Nigeria to find work, highlighting the economic realities and lack of opportunities in developing, post-colonial countries. So, as soon as Bummi’s found a home in Augustine, she is forced to leave another home, her native Nigeria. Augustine believes that England is a land of opportunity where an educated man like him will be able to succeed.
Themes
Bummi and Augustine immigrate to the U.K. where he’s unable to find work and forced to drive a taxi. He dreams of saving money to open an import-export business, but that dream is quickly crushed when the Nigerian economy nosedives and he has to send money home. Both Bummi and Augustine quickly see through the façade of meritocracy in England. Augustine puts up with passengers that look down on him, while people view Bummi as a cleaner, not an educated woman. Her name, nationality, and “Third World” degree leave her unemployable, and the constant stream of job rejections she suffers is why her daughter, Carole, doesn’t even have a Nigerian middle name.
Bummi and Augustine arrive in the U.K. and discover what many highly educated immigrants do upon arrival: their degrees are deemed worthless because they’re from a university in a developing nation. British people see them as two Black immigrants meant to work for the English, not alongside them. Augustine’s dreams come crashing down as he realizes that meritocracy and the narrative that immigrants can succeed so long as they work hard are just myths. Like many immigrants, Augustine has to send money back home to his family, where his British pounds are highly valuable. Forced into service jobs, they work hard to try and make that myth a reality for their second-generation daughter. Part of striving to make that myth reality is already setting Carole down the path of assimilation by giving her an English name. Surrendering pieces of their culture becomes a survival mechanism. Now there’s one less way for Carole to be discriminated against.
Themes
Augustine’s mother reminds him to be a good father. He’s affectionate and loving rather than authoritarian and emotionless. Bummi loves how Augustine fathers Carole, and is heartbroken when he hopes that Carole will make it in the U.K. even if they can’t. Both Bummi and Augustine work hard, until Augustine works himself to death, suffering a heart attack while driving his cab on New Year’s Day. When Bummi sees Augustine laid out in his casket she loses her faith. Without Augustine and without God she’s completely alone. In the face of her new life as a single mother, Bummi is determined to open her own cleaning company.
Augustine defies stereotypes of men as distant and disengaged father figures. His feminist identity extends to his parenting. Despite all that has happened since they came to the U.K., Augustine still holds out hope that they can make the myth of meritocracy real for Carole. This optimism breaks Bummi’s heart because she feels this dream is too far out of reach. Augustine’s death represents the extreme sacrifices immigrants make for their children as well as the terrible labor conditions immigrants are forced to endure just to survive in their new countries. His death directly parallels Iyatunde’s. He dies while working to give his daughter more opportunities in life. Augustine’s death, so much like her mother’s, breaks Bummi but at the same time inspires her to make Augustine’s dream of owning a business in the U.K. come true.
Themes
Bummi dreams of employing immigrant women from all over the world. She dreams that they’ll become the “Worldwide Army of Women Cleaners” and will fight the oil companies out of Nigeria, and restore the Delta where her father will fish, her mother will take it easy, and Augustine is a Green Finance Economist. Bummi needs money to make her dream into a reality, and the only person she knows with money is Bishop Aderami Obi. Obi objectifies and harasses the women in his congregation, including Bummi after Augustine dies. Bummi feels it’s her right to ask him for a loan after years of donating to the church, a scheme that Bummi knew filled Obi’s pockets.
Bummi’s cleaning company has a feminist mission that parallels both Amma and Dominique’s Bush Woman Theatre Company as well as The Last Amazon of Dahomey. Like the women warriors of Dahomey, Bummi envisions an army of women who will defend and restore her native Nigeria, ridding it of the destruction wrought by the neo-colonial oil business. Like the Bush Woman Theatre Company, Bummi dreams of giving jobs to brown, immigrant women overlooked and discriminated against in white British society. The starting costs of opening a business are what stand in the way of this dream. Bummi must turn to Bishop Obi who, although both Black and an immigrant himself, still has more power than Bummi because he has male privilege in a patriarchal society.
Themes
Bummi and Obi meet to discuss the loan. She has sex with him, pretending to enjoy it, and afterwards he gives her an envelope of cash that she will pay back with low interests over two years. This is her first transaction as a businesswoman. At home that night she runs a bath with salts, and bathes for hours until she’s sufficiently clean of Obi. She never tells anyone what she’s done to provide for herself and her daughter. When she closes her eyes, she’s transported back to that moment with Obi. She feels his hot breath on her body as he calls her a whore and “spear[s] the most sacred part of her body.”
Bummi uses the only asset she has to exchange with Bishop Obi for a loan. She compromises her body for her dream as well as for Carole, again highlighting the extreme lengths immigrant parents go to for their children. Bummi is traumatized by her sexual encounter with Obi. She cleanses her body to try and reclaim it from his degradation.
Themes
BW Cleaning Services International’s first client is Penelope Halifax, who lives in an old house with servants’ quarters in the attic, a vestige from a time when people could afford more than a weekly cleaner. Penelope’s wealth is greater than any Bummi has ever seen. Penelope is a retired teacher who used to work at Carole’s school, and when Bummi goes to share this fact with her, Penelope tells her she’s meant to work, not socialize. She tells her to never open any drawers, cupboards, pockets, or bags. Bummi bites her tongue, suppressing her desire to cuss Penelope out. Penelope follows Bummi around the house divulging stories about her sexist ex-husbands. Bummi feels bad for Penelope, clearly lonely without her children, as she cleans up her dozens of empty wine bottles.
Penelope’s servant’s quarters highlights how society hasn’t progressed nearly as far as mainstream narratives claim. Although the circumstances and language have changed, Black people are still forced into positions of service to white people. Bummi is stunned by Penelope’s wealth, just as Carole will be stunned by her classmates’ wealth years later at Oxford. Penelope stereotypes Bummi, associating her Blackness with criminality and assuming that she’ll steal from her drawers and bags. Bummi is forced to bite her tongue because defending herself against this gross discrimination could cost her her business. Penelope maintains her white supremacy by silencing Bummi, but then quickly breaks her own rule to unload her emotional baggage on Bummi. This follows a pattern of white women demanding emotional labor of Black women. Penelope complains about her sexist husbands while simultaneously oppressing a Black woman. This situates Penelope within a long history of white feminists oppressing and silencing Black women, whose racism blinds them from seeing their intersecting oppressions. Bummi, Carole, and Penelope’s stories surprisingly intersect through Carole’s school.
Themes
Bummi accrues regular clients and has 10 immigrant woman employees by the time Carole starts working at the bank. Sister Omofe is her best employee. Omofe is a single mother after her husband returned to Nigeria to live with his second wife, and she pledges to poison him if he returns to the U.K. Omofe laments that her boys are getting into trouble without their father around to discipline them. She can’t control them and they’re getting in trouble with the law, headed, she thinks, to early deaths by a gangland shootout or life in prison. Bummi tells her to send them back to Nigeria to attend boarding school, and Omofe does.
Bummi and Carole both have successful careers. In their own ways each has achieved what Augustine always dreamed of. Bummi and Omofe are drawn together as single, immigrant mothers. Like many children who have been abandoned by a father figure, Omofe’s sons are struggling emotionally. Omofe recognizes that they’re at risk of being trapped by the fates that commonly befall Black men in white supremacist societies. White society manufactures the conditions that sentence Black men to death or life in prison. England has failed to deliver on the promise of a better life for her second-generation children, so Omofe sends them back home where they’ll be free of the racism that condemns them and threatens their freedom.
Themes
Now both Bummi and Omofe are alone, and Bummi finds herself falling in love with her. What should make her feel bad just makes her feel right. One night Bummi sleeps over at Omofe’s. Omofe emerges from the shower wrapped in a towel and invites Bummi to sleep in her bed before dropping her towel and climbing in bed. Bummi joins her, and when they have sex Omofe’s body feels like home. Bummi stays at Omofe’s as often as she can, realizing that she’s satisfying a hunger unsatiated since Augustine’s death. She never found another husband because Augustine was irreplaceable, but Omofe is different because she’s a woman.
Bummi, who has felt without a home since Augustine’s death, finds a new home in Omofe. Bummi understands her bisexuality as a way of filling a void that’s existed in her life since Augustine’s death without betraying her love for him.
Themes
When Omofe’s children return from Nigeria, she and Bummi have to meet at Bummi’s place, but Bummi feels ashamed sleeping with a woman in the apartment she’d shared with Carole and Augustine. She cuts Omofe off without explanation, and eventually Omofe moves on to another cleaning company and shows up at church with Sister Moto. Bummi sits behind them and feels the intimacy that radiates between them, wondering if other churchgoers noticed the same between her and Omofe. She’s surprised that she’s so upset about Omofe moving on so quickly.
Bummi is able to set aside her internalized homophobia when her bisexuality exists outside of the home and life she once shared with Carole and Augustine. But when she's forced to merge these two homes together, she’s overcome with shame. In her mind, these two lives cannot coexist. Bummi loses another home, this time not to death but to the suffocating norms of society. The jealousy and sadness she feels when she witnesses the intimacy between Omofe and her new partner reveals how much she truly loved this woman.
Themes
Soon Bummi starts a relationship with Kofi, a retired Ghanian who starts working for her to make extra money. For their first date he takes her to the Ritzy for a Ghanian fusion night. Bummi is unused to seeing people of different races socialize, and people being openly gay, but notices Kofi is comfortable. She loves the way Kofi looks at her. When he asks her about her life she simply shrugs, and he assures her that he’ll listen when she’s ready to talk. Kofi continues to take her out, cooks for her, which she loves, and tells her that he’d like to enter a sexual relationship with her after a respectable amount of time has passed.
Kofi offers Bummi another home. He is loving and supportive, and, unlike Bishop Obi, respectful of Bummi and her body. His progressiveness leaves Bummi in awe, but also suggests he might not be upset if he were to ever find out about her past with Sister Omofe.
Themes
Bummi asks herself if he is what she wants. She questions if she should be with a Ghanian man. She decides that Kofi is what is being offered to her. Carole approves of him and suggests it’s time for Bummi to remove her wedding ring, which takes fifteen minutes of scrubbing with dish soap. He takes her on vacation and she opens up to him about her early life. Kofi offers to visit her hometown with her, but Bummi tells him she can’t face the harsh realities that await her there. She tells him that she’s terrified he’ll die, just like everyone else in her life.
Bummi is unsure if she should be with a Ghanian, as she’s breaking her own conviction that Nigerians should be in relationships with other Nigerians. She accepts Kofi because he’s what’s being offered to her in this life that has taken so much from her. These losses haunt her, so she fears the worst at all times. She fears that she’ll lose Kofi and the new home he provides her, too. That it's so hard for Bummi to remove her wedding ring represents how hard it is for her to let go of Augustine, the truest love of her life and her greatest loss. Bummi hasn’t been back to Nigeria since she left all those years ago, and she’s too traumatized to return to the country that was her first home and is filled with too many heartbreaks. For Bummi, as for many immigrants, returning home is impossible.
Themes
Bummi tells Kofi about Carole and Freddy. She explains how Carole’s marriage to Freddy will wipe out their “pure Nigerian family line” in just two generations because Carole and Freddy’s children will be mixed, then their grandchildren will look white. She questions if this is what they came to England for. When Bummi finally meets Freddy she is ready to hate him. Freddy is kind and cheerful, watches Nollywood movies with Bummi, loves Nigerian food so much that Carole has started eating it again, and overall makes Carole a happier person.
Bummi fears that Carole’s marriage to Freddy threatens the Nigerian culture that she’s tried so hard to preserve in her adopted home. These fears are justified. Carole and Freddy’s interracial relationship represents, on a small scale, the ways in which Western, white-supremacist society erases the cultural and racial identity of immigrants through assimilation, which often feels like the only path forward for second-generation children. Bummi assumes the worst-case scenario, without considering that Carole and Freddy’s mixed children may end up with other people of color, that the possibilities for love and identity in a more modern, progressive England are endless. Freddy complicates Bummi’s narrative by bringing Carole back to her Nigerian culture through his enthusiasm, suggesting that he’ll likewise make an effort to help their future children connect with their Nigerian identities.
Themes
Bummi, Carole, Freddy, and his parents meet for dinner, and Bummi looks forward to the occasion. Freddy explains that while his parents warmed up to Carole after they saw how “classy, well-spoken, and successful” she is, they are still “old-fashioned snobs.” Throughout the dinner, Freddy’s father looks uncomfortable and Freddy’s mother condescendingly explains what hors d’oeuvres are while looking at Bummi like “she was a famine victim.” Carole wears a fake smile the whole time. Bummi hopes the wedding will be the next and last time she has to see them and is relieved when Freddy and Carole are married in a registry office.
Freddy’s parents accept Carole only because she defies the stereotypes they’ve internalized about Black people, the same stereotypes that Carole’s teachers imposed on her and her classmates all those years ago. “Old-fashioned” functions here as a euphemism for racist, and couching that condemnation in less harsh language functions to shield both them and Freddy from confronting and challenging their biases. Freddy’s parents impose their stereotypical understandings and imaginings of Africa on Bummi, assuming that she’s ignorant and regarding her with pity. Carole and Bummi both suffer through the encounter, highlighting how people of color in interracial relationships must shoulder microaggressions and racism from withing their new homes and extended families, while the white people involved are not asked to change or correct their behaviors and assumptions.
Themes
Bummi lies sunning in the garden while Kofi is in the house cooking dinner. Like Carole and Freddy, they married in a registry office. Bummi misses Omofe more than ever and wishes she could have both her and Kofi, like how men are allowed to have multiple wives. Bummi hears Omofe works in Moto’s salon, and that they may even live together. Freddy and Carole come over to Bummi and Kofi’s house on Sundays bearing gifts. Freddy calls Bummi “Mum.” Sometimes Kofi’s children and grandchildren come, too. She sits back, sipping the lemonade Kofi’s made her, thinking: “see me now, Mama, see me now.”
Although Bummi is content with her new life, she years for an unconventional romantic relationship, akin to the polyamorous triad that radical Amma maintains. Bummi is held back by tradition and the need to survive. As a first-generation immigrant her options for love and life in general have been more limited. Survival and sacrifice limit Bummi’s ability to be radical, despite what she ultimately wants for herself. So she accepts the cards she’s been dealt and settles for what she has. Bummi has built a life and home that her mother would be proud of. Her life lives up to the dreams Iyatunde had for her and that she ultimately sacrificed her life for.
Themes
