Girl, Woman, Other features 12 women’s voices from the African diaspora. The women trace their ancestry back to different countries—Ghana, Nigeria, Barbados, Malawi, Ethiopia—and span the first, second, and successive generations of immigrants. The first generation of immigrants, directly tied to their homeland, bring their home cultures with them to the U.K. and fight to maintain them as they struggle to survive in a society that is openly hostile and discriminatory. For Amma’s father Kwabena, that means maintaining his radical, political identity. For Bummi, it means dressing in traditional Nigerian clothes, eating Nigerian food, and expecting her daughter to marry a Nigerian man. For Winsome, it means finding solace in a man who shares similar roots. The first generation wants to pass their cultural identities down to their second-generation children born in England, but whiteness and the pressure to assimilate threaten those cultural identities.
The second generation straddles the middle ground between their parents’ homelands and their native-born England. They are torn between their parents’ expectations that they adhere to the cultural norms of a homeland that is effectively foreign to them, while at the same time being rejected by a white-supremacist English society that views them as foreigners because of their racial and ethnic identities. Amma rails against her father who, despite his progressivism, has internalized sexist ideologies. The feminist identity that Amma has cultivated in her native country, England, becomes a cultural divide between her and her father. Carole rejects her Nigerian roots because assimilation into the white middle-class is, for her, the only clear path to financial and material stability. Though Grace loses her Ethiopian identity with her father, her mother, a white woman, fights to keep that identity alive for her through stories and by instilling in Grace a deep sense of racial pride. Eventually, however, Grace’s descendants will abandon their Black identities entirely, choosing to pass as white to escape the racism that traumatized them in childhood. Members of successive generations—like Yazz and Morgan— have the benefit of living in an England that is more diverse than ever, but they must also contend with the right-wing reactionaries who want to halt diversification. Through this chorus of stories, Evaristo’s novel reveals that for members of the diaspora, each successive generation reconfigures and reshapes identity, resulting in losses and conflicts but also new possibilities.
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Diaspora, Culture, and Identity ThemeTracker
Diaspora, Culture, and Identity Quotes in Girl, Woman, Other
look at it this way, Amma, she says, your father was born male in Ghana in the 1920s whereas you were born female in London in the 1960s
and your point is?
you really can’t expect him to ‘get you,’ as you put it
I let her know she’s an apologist for the patriarchy and complicit in a system that oppresses all women
she says human beings are complex
I tell her not to patronize me
she surprised herself at the strength of her grief
she then regretted never telling him she loved him, he was her father, a good man, of course she loved him, she knew that now he was gone, he was a patriarch but her mother was right when she said, he’s of his time and culture, Amma
my father was devastated at having to fell Ghana so abruptly, she eulogized at his memorial, attended by his elderly socialist comrades
it must have been so traumatic, to lose his home, his family, his friends, his culture, his first language, and to come to a country that didn’t want him
once he had children, he wanted us educated in England and that was it
my father believed in the higher purpose of left-wing politics and actively worked to make the world a better place
she didn’t tell them she’d taken her father for granted and carried her blinkered, self-righteous perspective of him from childhood through to his death, when in fact he’d done nothing wrong except fail to live up to her feminist expectations of him
you’ve really suffered, Yazz says, I feel sorry for you, not in a patronizing way, it’s empathy, actually
I haven’t suffered, not really, my mother and grandmother suffered because they lost their loved ones and their homeland, whereas my suffering is mainly in my head
it’s not in your head when people deliberately barge into you
it is compared to half a million people who died in the Somali civil war, I was born here and I’m going to succeed in this country, I can’t afford not to work my butt off, I know it’s going to be tough when I get on the job market but you know what, Yazz? I’m not a victim, don’t ever treat me like a victim, my mother didn’t raise me to be a victim.
did me and Papa come to this country for a better life only to see our daughter giving up on her opportunities and end up distributing paper hand towels for tips in nightclub toilets or concert venues, as is the fate of too many of our countrywomen?
you must go back to this university in January and stop thinking everybody hates you without giving them a chance, did you even ask them? did you go up to them and say, excuse me, do you hate me?
you must find the people who will want to be your friends even if they are all white people
there is someone for everyone in this world
you must go back and fight the battles that are your British birthright, Carole, as a true Nigerian
Carole amended herself to become not quite them, just a little more like them
she scraped off the concrete foundation plastered on to her face, removed the giraffe-esque eyelashes that weighed down her eyelids, ripped off the glued-on talons that made most daily activities difficult
such as getting dressed, picking things up, most food preparation and using toilet paper
she ditched the weaves sewn into her scalp for months at a time, many months longer than advised because, having saved up to wear the expensive black tresses of women from India or Brazil, she wanted her money’s worth, even when her scalp festered underneath the stinky patch of cloth from which her fake hair flowed
she felt freed when it was unstitched for the very last time, and her scalp made contact with air.
She felt the deliciousness of warm water running directly over it again without the intermediary of a man-made fabric
She then had her tight curls straightened, Marcus said he preferred her hair natural, she told him she’d never get a job if she did that
my point is that you are a Nigerian
no matter how high and mighty you think you are
no matter how English-English your future husband
no matter how English-English you pretend yourself to be
what is more, if you address me as Mother ever again I will beat you until you are dripping wet with blood and then I will hang you upside down over the balcony with the washing to dry
I be your mama
now and forever
never forget that, abi?
Bummi and Augustine agreed they were wrong to believe that in England, at least, working hard and dreaming big was one step away from achieving it
Augustine joked he was acquiring a second doctorate in shortcuts, bottlenecks, one-way streets and dead ends
while transporting passengers who thought themselves far too superior to talk to him as an equal
Bummi complained that people viewed her through what she did (a cleaner) and not what she was (an educated woman)
they did not know that curled up inside her was a parchment certificate proclaiming her a graduate of the Department of Mathematics, University of Ibadan
just as she did not know that when she strode on to the graduation podium in front of hundreds of people to receive her ribboned scroll, and shake hands with the Chancellor of the University, that her first class degree from a Third World country would mean nothing in her new country
especially with her name and nationality attached to it
Losing her dad the way she did was something LaTisha never talked about; whenever people asked, she told them he’d died of a heart attack
it was easier than explaining what had happened, people thinking there must be something wrong with her and her family
else why would he leave?
she ran wild, hated school, couldn’t concentrate, even Mummy couldn’t control her and she was a social worker, I’m sending you home to Jamaica where they’ll beat some sense into you, LaTisha
yeh, whatevs, I could do with a Caribbean holiday
Shirley
was praised by the headmaster, Mr. Waverly, as a natural teacher, with an easy rapport with the children, who goes above and beyond the call of duty, achieves excellent exam results with her exemplary teaching skill and who is a credit to her people
in her first annual job assessment
Shirley felt the pressure was now on to be a great teacher and an ambassador
for every black person in the world
Shirley
who’s never satisfied with what she has: excellent health, cushy job, hunky husband, lovely daughters and granddaughter, good house and car, no debts, free luxury holiday in the tropics every year
tough life Shirl
compared to Winsome who spent her working life standing on the open platform of a Routemaster bus
bombarded with rain or snow or hailstones
climbing stairs a million times a day with a heavy ticket machine hanging from her neck and big money bag around her waist that got heavier as the journey progressed giving her round shoulders and back problems to this very day
having to deal with non-payers and under-payers who refused to get off de dam bus who cussed her for being a silly cow or a nig nog or a bloody foreigner
she herself is a grateful person
grateful she had Barbados to return home to when her English friends had to stay over there and spend their old age worrying about the cost of heating and whether they’d survive a bad winter
grateful that as soon as she stepped off the plane to walk into the blast of heat, her arthritic joints stopped playing up
haven’t so much as muttered a word of protest since
grateful that the sale of the house in London allowed them to buy this one by the beach
grateful that she and Clovis, now in their eighties, have a reasonable pension, and won’t have to worry about money for the rest of their loves so long as they stay parsimonious, which is true of her generation anyways, who only buy what they need, not what they want
you go into debt to buy a house, not a new dress
Winsome counts her blessings every day and thanks Jesus for bringing her home to a more comfortable life
she thanks Jesus she made new friends with women who’d also returned from America, Canada and Britain and asked her to join their reading group
she was honoured, she’d been a bus conductor, they didn’t mind
