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
LaTisha KaNisha Jones, or “Major General Mum” if you ask her kids, walks through the supermarket 15 minutes before opening. She’s a supervisor, the “Chief Fucking Bitch,” and checks off all her morning tasks. Her delivery and inventory records are spotless. The fruit and vegetable section, her territory, is perfectly organized. She thinks about her kids, how she tries to make learning fun for them because they need to do well in school or else be chained up in the basement for 24 hours.
LaTisha is a fierce and powerful woman and mother. She works hard at her job and strives to achieve. She’s dedicated to her children and their education, seeing it as the key to their upward mobility.
Themes
LaTisha is dressed in her crisp navy blue uniform looking smart and professional. She’s reinvented herself after escaping the “horror movie” that was her adolescence. She’s great at her job in retail, having won colleague and supervisor of the month many times. She doesn’t make a lot of money but hopes to make general manager someday through hard work and the right amount of sucking up. A promotion requires focus, and for LaTisha that means no dating. When she first started at the supermarket, right out of high school, LaTisha didn’t take orders from anyone. The supermarket, like school, was full of senseless rules.
LaTisha has turned her life around. She’s buying into the myth of meritocracy because it’s her only way forward, even though her hard work hasn’t paid off financially yet. LaTisha used to challenge society’s often arbitrary rules, but society punishes people who try to exist outside of its confines. Now she complies with society’s demands, seeing it as the only way to achieve success and a better life for her children. For LaTisha, love and dating have distracted and derailed her in the past.
Themes
LaTisha remembers Mrs. King, who told her she wasn’t stupid, she just didn’t apply herself. She rebelled against everything, dreamed of rallying her generation to mass rebellion. She wanted to create the havoc she felt when her dad, Glenmore Jones, left her. Her dad was an exterminator and he loved his job. He was funny and tall, with long dreadlocks and strong muscles. He worked as a bouncer at a club frequented by famous soccer players who gambled away their fortunes in the back. They’d offer him private security jobs, but he declined in order to be home with his family, which was his life: “L is for love, I is for immortal, F is for family, E is for eternal.”
Like Amma, LaTisha becomes radical and rebellious in high school, but LaTisha’s rebellion is rooted in the emotional aftermath of her father’s abandonment. Her father, Glenmore, was a model, loving father before he left. He was devoted to his family, and his sudden abandonment is especially painful because it betrays the eternal love he professed for his family as LaTisha was growing up.
Themes
LaTisha’s parents took her and her sister, Jayla, to museums and aquariums, and on vacations. Her mother, Pauline, explained that these were the things children needed to be successful in life. Pauline immigrated to Liverpool from St. Lucia when she was two years old. Glenmore immigrated from Montserrat at 13. He was singled out in school. When he complained about the cold his teachers said he had behavioral problems, held him back a year for speaking Patois, and sent him alone to the “Sin Bin” when he and his white classmates got into trouble. His teachers labeled him as aggressive, and when he threw a chair at a teacher he was sent to juvenile detention.
As first-generation immigrants, LaTisha’s parents worked hard to give their second-generation children the privileges and enrichment that help foster success and are typically reserved for the white middle and upper classes. Her father was subject to the same racism, bias, and stereotypes that LaTisha will face in England’s schools. Glenmore’s teachers internalized the bias and stereotype that Black boys are violent and dangerous, so that’s all they could see when they looked at him, when really he was a young, immigrant boy struggling to adjust to his new home. In this way, Glenmore gets caught up in the school to prison pipeline, a system that continues to trap young, Black boys.
Themes
Get the entire Girl, Woman, Other LitChart as a printable PDF.
Determined not to turn out like the other boys there, Glenmore got out and worked hard creating a life he wanted to live, channeling his anger into bodybuilding. When he told these stories to LaTisha and Jayla he was really speaking to LaTisha, his favorite. The Jones family was happy until Glenmore left with no warning. He left when the girls were at school and Pauline was at work, with no explanation beyond a note saying he was sorry. LaTisha’s mother panicked and found out from his friends that he’d left the country. LaTisha waited by the window hoping he’d return. She and Jayla stayed home from school and their mother from work. Her Aunty Angie had to force her to bathe, eat, and sleep.
Glenmore survives and escapes the fate that awaits Black boys trapped and condemned by society’s racism. LaTisha admires her father’s strength and basks in his loving attention, thus the sting of his abandonment hurts her even more severely. Inexplicably, Glenmore abandons the life he worked so hard to create. In the process, he devastates the three women he leaves behind, highlighting the ways in which men disregard others, especially women, for their own benefit.
Themes
In LaTisha’s memories, Pauline finally gets Glenmore on the phone and finds out he’s in New Jersey living with one of Pauline’s friends and the daughter they have together. Pauline burns his clothes, takes down his photos, and rids the house of anything connected to him. LaTisha and Jayla are banned from talking about him, but his ghost haunts LaTisha. He lives in the memories triggered by every room in their house. Her mom starts overeating and drinking to excess. One day Pauline sits the sisters down and reveals that Jayla’s father was a violent ex-boyfriend who she’d escaped and who never knew she’d had his child. She met Glenmore at the end of her pregnancy, and he vowed to love the child as if it was his own.
Pauline tries to erase Glenmore from their lives entirely in efforts to erase the pain of his abandonment. However, his absence becomes a searing presence in their lives. He is impossible to erase. He lives in the house they once shared, and in the alcoholism that Pauline develops as she struggles to cope. Because their happy home and family are already broken, Pauline shatters the façade further by revealing the truth about Jayla’s father. The men in Pauline’s life have consistently disappointed and betrayed her. Like many women, she’s been subject to violence and abandonment, tools of sexism and misogyny that men wield against women.
Themes
After this revelation, Jayla refuses to talk to LaTisha about it. One morning Jayla declares that she wants to meet her father. Pauline warns that she shouldn’t seek him out. Aunty Angie takes Jayla to her parents’ house. Her father’s mother is shocked when Jayla shows up looking exactly like her father, and not happy to see that her son has another child. She speaks to him on the phone, then tells Jayla that he can’t meet her because he already has too many children. She tells her she’s better off without him, but Jayla is devastated. LaTisha tells her he’s just another bastard like Glenmore, who called LaTisha on her birthday a year after he left to apologize. LaTisha hung up on him.
Just as her mother has been devastated and betrayed by men, Jayla is, too. The women in her life, all too familiar with the ways men abandon and disappoint, try to protect her from this emotional devastation, but she has to find out for herself. Jayla’s father highlights the ways in which some men move irresponsibly through the world without regard for the women they enter into relationships with or for the children they have only to leave behind.
Themes
When people asked LaTisha about her dad, she lied and said he’d died of a heart attack. The truth, she thinks, would make people assume there’s something wrong with her family. She starts acting out, and not even Pauline, a social worker, can stop her. She throws a big party when she’s 13 and is caught when her mother comes home earlier than expected, finding her house destroyed. Her mother beats her as a punishment, which she’d never done before, and views the incident as a turning point in their relationship.
LaTisha is ashamed of the truth about her father. She’s internalized his abandonment as an indication that something is wrong with her, rather than the other way around. She doesn’t want the world to see her family as a stereotype, a Black single mother with fatherless children, but that’s exactly the lens through which her teachers view her family. White-supremacist, English society judges families like LaTisha’s without acknowledging how oppressive systems and structural racism create generational trauma that keeps families broken and unstable. Glenmore’s abandonment not only destroys LaTisha’s father-daughter relationship, but her relationship with her mother, too. Her behavioral issues, a direct result of her father’s abandonment, devastate their relationship and lead to abuse.
Themes
Not wanting to be beaten again, LaTisha promises to behave at home, but still runs wild at school with her crew of friends that included Carole until she decided to be studious and cut LaTisha off. Even as an adult Carole ignores her old crew. When Lauren, another friend, saw Carole on the train recently she’d looked past her as if Lauren didn’t exist. LaTisha looks Carole up online and discovers she’s a Vice President at a bank. Her picture shows a professional and satisfied woman who is not the Carole that LaTisha knew. LaTisha still wants to prove to Carole that she’s not the delinquent teenager she once was, that she’s good enough to be her friend now.
Carole betrays LaTisha by viewing her through the same damaging, stereotypical lenses that white society views her through. Carole condemns LaTisha to a bleak future and leaves her just like Glenmore did, compounding LaTisha’s trauma and fear of abandonment. Once again, the abandonment suggests that she’s not good enough or worth sticking around for. All these years later LaTisha still yearns for Carole’s approval, perhaps even more so now that Carole is successful by mainstream standards as someone who’s made it and is reforming white supremacist society from within its existing, elite institutions. Carole represents what LaTisha could have been. They are both second-generation children of immigrants who grew up poor, in single-parent, fatherless households, and attended an under-resourced public school. Carole, like Glenmore, was one of the few able to escape the cycles that trapped many of her peers like LaTisha.
Themes
LaTisha heads to the hot foods section to cover for the manager who’s late. One of the employees in this section was fired last week for eating chicken wings without paying, and this reminds LaTisha of how she had to steal from the store. Her story, she thinks, gave her a more valid excuse to steal. LaTisha suddenly flashes back to her early days at the supermarket when she met Dwight in the lunch room at work. Dwight showered her with attention and took her on dates. He was the first person LaTisha opened up to about her dad’s abandonment. Dwight tried to comfort her, but soon abandoned her himself when a new girl came along. By then, she was pregnant with his child, which she didn’t discover until she was seven months along.
LaTisha stole from the store because she had no choice, highlighting how the intersecting societal injustices of race and class function to criminalize those who are struggling to survive. When LaTisha meets Dwight he takes advantage of her emotional vulnerability, still fresh from her father’s abandonment. She finds a home in him that she’s been missing since her childhood family was shattered, but Dwight abandons her, too. Like Glenmore and Jayla’s father, Dwight leaves a woman and child behind in pursuit of his own pleasure. LaTisha remainstrapped in this cycle of abandonment that reinforces the false notion that she is worthless and forgettable.
Themes
When she tells Dwight, the two argue, blaming each other. LaTisha is livid because Dwight refused to use condoms, and he tells her she should have known better than to let him not. Pauline is outraged when LaTisha breaks the news. One night, after her son Jason is born, LaTisha and her mother fight. Her mother is angry and ashamed that her daughter is a “babymother.” When LaTisha smarts back that she’s not one to judge, her mother throws her out of the house and onto the pavement. LaTisha throws a brick at the living room window, it shatters, and her mother threatens to call the police. Her mother tells her that she works with girls like her and doesn’t need one at home, too. She gives LaTisha an emergency number as she leaves with Jason.
Dwight blames LaTisha for the pregnancy, placing the burden of birth control and family planning on women, the way that society does as a whole. In this case, Dwight actively refused to use protection, refusing to take no for an answer, placing his pleasure over LaTisha’s comfort and safety, and asserting a sexual dominance that men too frequently wield against women. Then, Dwight blames and gaslights her when he’s faced with the consequences of his own actions. Pauline is ashamed that LaTisha is fulfilling society’s stereotypical expectations of young, Black women. She’s been trapped by a narrative that society imposed and forced upon her. Pauline’s shame is rooted in the fact that she, too, was abandoned by a man and forced to be a single mother. She feels she failed to live up to her own dreams of giving her second-generation children a better life. This conflict escalates to more violence, and like the brick through the window, shatters their relationship and home further.
Themes
The phone number leads LaTisha to emergency housing for young mothers. She can’t believe the one person who could teach her to be a mother has kicked her out. Dwight’s only effort to help is making sure his shifts as the store’s security guard line up with LaTisha’s so she can steal as much for the baby as possible. A week passes, and Pauline comes to pick her up. Back home, Jayla watches Jason when LaTisha is at work all day.
LaTisha has been abandoned by yet another person in her life, but this time by her mother, not a man. This betrayal is especially painful now that LaTisha needs her mother to guide her through motherhood. Her mother eventually reclaims her to give her the support she lacked after Glenmore’s abandonment.
Themes
LaTisha settles back into life now that Pauline and Jayla are there to share the responsibilities of motherhood. A single mother at 18, LaTisha’s dating prospects are dim. She meets Mark at the club she goes to with friends once a month. He has a solid job, takes her on real dates, and tells her they were meant to be. She dreams he’ll be a father to Jason, but instead winds up pregnant with Jantelle. Mark doesn’t know about Jantelle because he gave LaTisha a fake number. While her friends are out living their young adult lives, responsible only to themselves,LaTisha is 19 with two kids. Her mother and sister are her only support system because her friends abandoned her once she became a mother.
Mark offers LaTisha the promise of the home she still yearns and searches for. He’s a man she hopes can fill her father’s void. Not only is she abandoned once more by another man, but her friends abandon her as well. They are preoccupied with their independent twenty-something lifestyles, an important life phase of self-discovery that LaTisha’s young motherhood takes away from her. LaTisha transitions straight from childhood, when her life wasn’t fully her own, to motherhood that leaves her beholden to her children.
Themes
LaTisha gets pregnant with her third child, Jordan, with Trey. LaTisha remembers that she wanted him when he came to the party she threw at 16, but Carole beat her to it. Carole denied sleeping with him, but LaTisha knew she was lying. Trey asks LaTisha out on Facebook, and LaTisha accepts, excited but determined that she won’t have sex with Trey at first, and when it did eventually happen she’d demand a condom. They were supposed to go to a restaurant, but instead he changes the plans and takes her back to the place he shares with roommates for a “private romantic meal.” When she sees his place, she wants to walk out, but he convinces her to stay and dance. Still determined not to have sex with him, Trey suddenly shoves her hand down his pants. She wants to leave, but no words come out.
In a tragic coincidence, both Carole and LaTisha encounter Trey’s violence. LaTisha knows that Carole and Trey had sex, but has no idea that Carole was actually raped. Carole never told anyone about her assault because she was ashamed and had internalized blame. That silence leaves LaTisha unaware of the threat he poses and allows Trey to continue his pattern of behavior. It’s in this way that society wields shame and blame against women to protect men and allow violence against women to continue unabated. LaTisha’s experience with Trey highlights how difficult it can be for women to say no and escape when confronted with a man’s power and entitlement.
Themes
LaTisha is giving Trey a hand job on the bed, when suddenly he beings to penetrate her. She tells him to stop, but he doesn’t. Trapped underneath him she gives up, blaming herself for leading him on. After he finishes, he falls asleep on her. Afraid to wake him up, she waits until he moves enough for her to escape. When she gets home she takes a long shower wondering if what happened was her fault. She thinks maybe he didn’t hear her ask him to stop, or maybe she was so irresistible that he couldn’t stop himself. She waits for him to call her, but he never does. Instead, nine months later, Jordan arrives. She’s not even yet 21. LaTisha blames herself for being so stupid. Her mom alternates between blaming LaTisha for being irresponsible and blaming herself for raising someone so irresponsible.
Like Carole, LaTisha internalizes the blame for her own assault. When she gets home she takes a long shower trying to rid herself from what just happened, much the same way as Bummi did when she got back from her encounter with Bishop Obi. All three women in chapter two now unknowingly share sexual trauma. They represent the larger truth that too many women experience sexual violence, and that shame and internalized blame imposed by society keep women silent and alone in their experiences. LaTisha’s mother unknowingly compounds her internalized blame when she berates her for being irresponsible. Her mother’s own shame is what fuels her biting comments. The myth of meritocracy promises first-generation parents that their second-generation children will succeed in their new country, but LaTisha’s story highlights how that story is only for a select few. Unlike Carole does for Bummi, LaTisha doesn’t live up to Pauline’s first-generation dreams for her daughter.
Themes
In the present, the New LaTisha is a “good citizen” who plays by the rules and suppresses the old LaTisha who lashes out and fights. The New LaTisha is 30 years old, pursuing a retail management degree while holding out for the right man who will be a good father to her children, but she’s done getting pregnant. She still lives her mother and Jayla, and together they parent her children. Jordan, the youngest, looks like Trey and causes trouble at home and school. So when one day LaTisha comes home from work and finds Glenmore inside the house with Jordan snuggled up alongside him, she decides to take him back because she realizes he needs a father figure in his life.
LaTisha is reinventing herself as someone who is going to work within society’s systems in order to succeed. Like Carole, but in her own way, LaTisha sees assimilation as the most viable path to success. Although society often either pities or condemns single mothers, LaTisha isn’t raising her kids alone. She’s created an alternative version of home and family for her children who have three mothers in their lives. LaTisha’s life is getting back on track for the first time since her father left when he finally shows back up in her life, threatening to upend her again. However, she takes a risk on letting him back into their lives in order to give Jordan the father figure she lost and so desperately wanted.
Themes
