The women who make up the cast of Girl, Woman, Other are all, in their own ways, in search of home and community. Each of the characters struggles to carve out a place for themselves within an often hostile and exclusionary English society. The first-generation immigrants—like Bummi, Winsome, and Amma’s father Kwabena—mourn the loss of the home they’ve been forced to leave behind while they struggle to survive in a new place that will never feel fully like home. The second-generation immigrant characters born in England are disconnected from their parents’ homelands, but their racial and ethnic identities cause their communities in their native England to treat them as outsiders, as well. Tired of dealing with the overt and covert racism embedded in the mainstream theater world, Amma and Dominique create a refuge for themselves and other women of color when they found The Bush Woman Theatre Company for women of color in the arts. Carole spends her childhood desperate to escape her low-income community where cycles of violence, addiction, and broken families make upward mobility a rare opportunity. She’s forced to leave behind her mother and her friends like LaTisha to make a new home within white, middle-class English society. Hattie’s sense of home is deeply rooted in the land that her family has stewarded for two centuries, but that legacy contains secrets that will complicate her firm sense of home.
Finally, the third generation represents new possibilities. They are most at home in England, but they still face similar struggles, especially as renewed right-wing movements threaten the progress their parents’ generation made. Yazz finds solace in two other brown girls on the mostly white Oxford campus, and Morgan finds a home in the trans community. On a meta level, the characters look for community in stories. Amma’s play—like the book itself—is a story that brings these disparate women together. Even though a single play can’t fully represent or speak for all the women, they sit together in the audience as witnesses to Amma’s groundbreaking moment that shatters barriers enforced by a white-supremacist society. Ultimately, the story ends with a literal homecoming between Hattie and her long-lost daughter Penelope that reinforces Evaristo’s overall message that though home and community are tenuous and ever-changing, affected by loss and sacrifice, people can also find and (re)construct home and community in unexpected places.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Home and Community ThemeTracker
Home and Community Quotes in Girl, Woman, Other
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
after Joseph died, Slim broke open an old library cabinet when he couldn’t find the keys, said that as the man of the house he needed to know what was in it
he found old ledgers that recorded the captain’s lucrative business as a slave runner, exchanging slaves from Africa for sugar in the West Indies
came charging like a lunatic into the kitchen where she was cooking and had a go at her for keeping such a wicked family secret from him
she didn’t know, she told him, was as upset as he was, the cabinet had been locked her entire life, her father told her important documents were inside and never go near it
she calmed Slim down, they talked it through
it’s not me or my Pa who’s personally responsible, Slim, she said, trying to mollify her husband, no you co-own the spoils with me
she wrapped her long arms around his waist from behind
it’s come full circle, hasn’t it?
this metal-haired wild creature from the bush with the piercingly feral eyes
is her mother
this is she
this is her
who cares about her colour? why on earth did Penelope ever think it mattered?
in this moment she’s feeling something so pure and primal it’s overwhelming
they are mother and daughter and their whole sense of themselves is recalibrating
her mother is now close enough to touch
Penelope had worried she would feel nothing, or that her mother would show no love for her, no feelings, no affection
how wrong she was, both of them are welling up and it’s like the years are swiftly regressing until the lifetimes between them no longer exist
this is not about feeling something or about speaking words
this is about being
together
