Michael Collins | April 2020

Bernardine Evaristo

EXCERPT

If you were trying to concoct a cure for the plague of authoritarian simplemindedness that has brought us Donald Trump in the USA, Boris Johnson in the UK, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines (to name a few), a vision like that of the British writer Bernardine Evaristo would be a useful ingredient.

The child of a Nigerian father and a white British mother, Evaristo has published seven books—The Island of Abraham (a book of poems), and six novels (two of them written entirely in verse)—that paint a four-dimensional portrait of Britain, its class divisions, its sexualities, its collective genealogy and, especially, the ways in which it has shaped and been shaped by people of African descent.

But her vision is not limited to Britain: Her plots, including that of her wildly innovative new novel Girl, Woman, Other, take us all over the map of the human; from Brazil, to Iraq, to ancient Rome, to the United States, to the Caribbean, to Turkey, and beyond. Very deservedly, Girl, Woman, Other  won the 2019 Booker Prize. This interview explores it and her other novels.

Michael Collins: You are, among many other things, a writer whose work is tailor-made for the age of Ancestry.com, 23andme.com and other such gene-testing operations. Advertisements for those companies can be cringe-worthy in their triteness, but your work portrays the profundity of ancestry as a force in everyday life.

Thus, the major characters in your novels are rarely shown solely in the context of their social and political environments and their own intimate choices but in the context of the history and the travels and the choices made over time by their forebears and extended families. An ancestry.com-style test even plays a climactic role in your most recent book, Girl, Woman, Other.

This poetics of genealogy first emerged fully formed in your work, I think, in your autobiographical verse novel Lara (first published in 1997 and revised and expanded in 2009). How did you come to write that novel and why how did you come to make the family tree a sort of coprotagonist along with the title character?

Bernadine Evaristo: I love this idea of the family tree as a coprotagonist! OK, so I wanted originally to write about my parents’ marriage in the 1950s. My father was Nigerian and had arrived in the UK in 1949, and my mother was white English, raised in London. They married, had eight children in ten years (I’m the fourth) and stayed together thirty-three years—quite something for that time when mixed marriages tended to fall apart. My mother’s side of the family did everything they could to stop her marrying a black man, but she loved my father and that was that. Some of them cut her off forever, or almost forever, while my maternal grandmother, who was the most vociferously opposed to her only child marrying a “nigger man” reconciled with my mother once she saw that her first grandchild, my oldest sister, was light-skinned and, as it happened, very pretty. She’d thought that the children would be as dark as my father, who was very dark. However, although she was very much part of our lives, and loved us, she never really forgave my father for ruining the life of her only child, as she saw it, or accepted the colour of her grandchildren’s skin. This was the big story of my childhood—the fact that my parents married against such terrible opposition on account of racism. I began writing Lara in 1991 because I wanted to write about my parents’ marriage specifically, and in so doing to explore an interracial African British marriage of that era, which, hadn’t been featured in British fiction. I’m very interested in lineage and character psychology and motivation, so in fictionalizing this aspect of my family, I found the book expanding beyond their marriage and into the ancestry of both my parents. The book therefore ended up as a 200-page verse novel that fictionalized my ancestry and also my own childhood. It spans 150 years and seven generations as my predecessors are brought to life including those I knew such as my grandmother and many I did not. I have ancestral roots in England, Nigeria, Brazil, Ireland, and Germany, and writing the book involved research, travel, and interviews, and was ultimately a wonderful journey of discovery into my ancestral past. The book is a story of multicultural Britain and how we all have origins in other countries. It’s also a book about people dreaming of migrating for a better life, and then the process of adjustment when migrated, and also the prejudice people face through the ages, irrespective of colour. The eponymous Lara, based on my own life, growing up mixed-race in the ’60s and ’70s, inherits this family history, and by the end of the novel, embraces it.

Collins: One of the things your genealogical approach seems to do is force us to see the intimate connections between peoples who may otherwise seem to be natural antagonists. An element of the expanded Lara that seems especially relevant to today’s ethnic antagonisms concerns Lara’s great-great grandfather, Louis. Louis is a penniless German immigrant to England who rises to success and seeming acceptance, but then faces severe discrimination during World War I. Although he thanks God that when England goes to war with Germany, “I am a Naturalized Citizen not ‘Enemy Alien’,” he ends up being treated as an enemy—so much so that he starts insisting, “I am a man not a nation….” Is this latter line a play on the famous lines uttered by Derek Walcott’s mixed race character Shabine, when he says, “I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, / and either I’m nobody or I’m a nation”?

Evaristo: Not intentionally although Walcott is my favourite poet. I was interested in exploring the seeming acceptance of immigrants who might appear to integrate into their new country or community but when the situation or culture changes, such as Britain going to war with Germany, that social acceptance is revealed to be fragile. Louis marries an Englishwoman, has lots of children, runs a very successful bakery business that he started up from nothing, and has lived successfully in London for some fifty years. He feels that he belongs but when war breaks out in 1914, he finds himself persecuted, his business under attack, and he is made to feel like an alien who is complicit with the new national enemy—the Germans. This is exactly what happened to Louis, my great-great grandfather, who settled in Woolwich in the 1860s. Human beings are tribal, and prejudices can surface, resurface, and be cultivated when the culture adopts a scapegoating rhetoric, such as that which we are witnessing today.

Collins: In your 2001 verse novel, The Emperor’s Babe, you track the progress of the daughter of immigrants who travel from Africa to a London ruled by Rome’s “African emperor,” Septimius Severus. At one point, Severus recalls immigrating to Rome as a boy and being ridiculed “because of his thick African accent.” Is one of the goals of this book to affirm the importance of the long-standing African presence in and influence upon London? (You said something along those lines at a lecture I heard you give in June in Budapest).

Evaristo: Absolutely. I first read about Africans living in Britain in Peter Fryer’s 1986 book, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain, where he wrote about a legion of African Moors as part of the Roman army, stationed at Hadrian’s Wall in the north of the country in 311 AD. It was shocking to discover such an ancient presence of Africans in my country, when the received opinion was that we had arrived in the 20^th century. The Emperor’s Babe was my imaginative exploration of this still little-known history, through the character of Zuleika, a black Roman girl who grows up in Londinium 1,800 years ago, and whose parents are immigrants from ancient Nubia—in today’s Sudan. Zuleika has an affair with the Roman emperor, Septimius Severus, when he comes to town. He was a real historical figure from Leptis Magna, in today’s Libya. So, my black Roman girl has an African lover. The novel, set in Londinium, is both historically accurate and replete with anachronisms, thereby creating an alternate universe, which in this world Zuleika is married off to a rich Roman three times her age (historically accurate) but the rich people around her wear Armani and Versace. Zuleika is very dark-skinned because I wanted the reader to imagine a black-skinned presence in the city rather than a more socially acceptable, in our contemporary shadist society, light-skinned girl. The novel upends the white myth of British history in situating blackness deep in its history, and it’s anachronistic humour subverts the reverence shown to the Romans as one of Europe’s ancient civilisations. In researching the novel, I came across historians and museum curators who argued that there hadn’t been a black presence in Roman London because there was no evidence for it. I argued that in the Roman Empire spread over 9,000 miles, including North Africa and the Far East, Rome itself was a multicultural city, and the empire had a bloody good network of roads, so why wouldn’t there have been black people in the city? Within a few years of publication, evidence was unearthed of a black Roman London presence, aided by developments in DNA testing. The science of archaeology caught up with this writer’s imagination.

Collins: Your 2005 novel, Soul Tourists, combines narrative prose and poetry (including couplets, quatrains, syllabic, haiku-like stanzas, and other forms) that often captures the internal monologues of the major characters. One striking aspect of your work that the novel brings into focus is what might be described as your wrestling with the angel of the English language as it is transformed on the tongues of people of many classes, races, geographical origins, and historical eras. No less a personage than William Shakespeare himself turns up love sick for the dark lady of the sonnets, whom you, like a number of scholars, identify as a “certain Lucy Negro.”

In lines of verse, you actually enter into a dialogue with Shakespeare, having Lucy respond sometimes to portions of his sonnets. Is the dialogue with Shakespeare part of your staking a claim to the English language and to a rightful place in a grand tradition going back to Shakespeare?

Evaristo: I think I’m more interested in disrupting the grand tradition of the English language, although you’re right, there is that dialogue between Shakespeare and Lucy Negro, my actualized “dark” lady of the sonnets. I am constantly finding ways to create language anew, or to represent spoken tongues. My father spoke broken English and I’ve been breaking it up as soon as I started writing. In Lara, I tried to replicate my father’s speech patterns and vocabulary through the character based on him called Taiwo, as well as writing Louis’s speech as a German speaking broken English. There are other registers there too, including Irish. Soul Tourists is my most formally experimental novel with not only the forms you mention but also prose poetry, a script-like form, and even some nonliterary devices. As a writer, I find the form to fit each book, which often means some degree of experimentation. I tried to capture the voices of all the ghosts of colour in Soul Tourists who range from the Chevalier de St Georges, to Pushkin, Mary Seacole, and Alessandro dei Medici. In The Emperor’s Babe, I employ a mixed bag of slangs and registers, as well as invented dialects. My lexical concoction, appropriate to various characters, ranged from liberal doses of Latin, both real and bastardised, a Scots-Latin pidgin, cockney rhyming slang, Americanisms, some Arabic, as well as standard English. In this way, I aimed to create a linguistically heterogenous society that in some way mirrored our own, while writing about the ancient past in a way that made it feel both historical, relevant, and contemporary. I could have written verse in standard English, possibly with a few Latin phrases thrown in, but my urge to experiment and disrupt overpowers my creative impulses, and through deliberate intention and free exploration, the novel’s lingua franca resembles in some small way, the melting pot origins of the English language, and English history and Rome’s global demographics.

Collins: Speaking of the varieties of English, your 2010 novella, Hello Mum, takes us into the world of an adolescent young man struggling to navigate a part of London that for him is divided up into gang territories. At one point he realizes that he cannot even cross a street because the other side is a different area code controlled by “B-Block Boys” who will beat him up if he trespasses on their territory. His answer to his mother’s query about why he does not “speak properly anymore” is “No way could I speak all la-di-dah like Harry Potter and survive in this hood.” What inspired you to write about this aspect of London and this sort of tragic inversion of a My Fair Lady-like story?

Evaristo: At the time of writing the book, young boys killing each other because of turf wars in our inner cities were starting to make headline news in the UK. I remember thinking that these boys were being discussed and generally vilified in society, and by the media, but were not being heard from directly. They were silent and objectified. The pathology of teenage fratricide has deep-rooted causes that I wanted to explore through creating a fiction about a boy who gets into trouble. He lives in a poor area of London; his father is absent and there are no black male role models in his life, not even black male schoolteachers; his responsible, professional, well-spoken mother wants the best for him but can’t control what happens to him when he leaves their tiny flat on a council estate where drug lords are just waiting to recruit boy soldiers to do their dirty work for them. Jerome is fourteen, but aspires to a manhood he is not ready to join. All of these factors contribute to the dangerous situation he finds himself in during a hot summer when he becomes a drug runner. In order to write the novel, I had to carry out a good deal of research, talking to teenage boys in particular who live in certain areas of London and who have been in trouble with the police and excluded from school. Their world was not my world, and it was an eye-opener that the city I experience is not the one they have to navigate. Jerome says at one point that it was safer to leave the city than move across it into another postcode where he’ll be in danger from the gangsters that are running the area. The novel also looks at the pressures on Jerome to fit into his peer group in his London district, to speak street slang, and to wear the latest fashions, which his mother cannot afford to buy him. He is a vulnerable, impressionable child who wants to belong to a peer group. As a writer, it’s my job to get inside the skin of my characters and to tell their stories from inside out. Hopefully the book humanized the kinds of British boys who are otherwise demonized.

Collins: Your 2009 book, Blonde Roots, is your first one written entirely in prose. It also stands out in your oeuvre because it inverts the history of the slave trade by having Europeans captured, enslaved, and shipped to colonies by Africans. At the same time, you preserve many of the toxic mileposts of the map of slavery: the pseudoscience of phrenology (which was used to argue for Black inferiority), for instance, become the pseudoscience of “Anthropometry,” used to argue for European inferiority. The West Indies, the former slave colonies where many of the characters in your other books come from, become the West Japanese Islands. Maroon communities of escaped Black slaves become Maroon communities of escaped white slaves, and so on. What audience (or audiences) did you have in mind when you were writing this book, and were you pleased with how that audience or those audiences received it?

Evaristo: I try not to have audiences in mind when I’m writing my books, because it’s impossible to second-guess reader responses. Blonde Roots addresses the realities and perceptions of race and power, in history and today, which might be perceived differently according to where one is on the spectrum of what we call race. I tend to write the books I’m driven to write with as much freedom, imagination, enjoyment, and integrity as possible, and I’ll find out where and how they land eventually. Blonde Roots is how I wanted to explore the transatlantic slave trade because I felt the need to do something different with it, to take the reader on an unpredictable moral journey, unlike most slave narratives where one is steered to produce the usual predictable responses—often empathy, anger at what happened or even resentment/guilt at airing such a terrible wound. My novel was a big “what if” project—to write a race-reversal novel where Africans enslave Europeans in an alternate universe that could be contemporary, medieval, feudal, or set in the 18^th century. In this universe, the geography of the world is turned on its head with Aphrika located where Europa is, and the novel’s racial inversions expose not only the transatlantic slave trade, its lived history, economic imperatives, and consequences, but also the ideology that developed to justify it—racism. The novel has an unsettling effect because of this, but also because the slaves are “whyte” from “Europa” and their masters are Africans, or rather Ambossans, from the United Kingdom of Great Ambossa. My protagonist, Doris, is taken into slavery as a child and renamed Omorenomwara because the Ambossans can’t pronounce Doris. You get the picture. Doris is a thin, white blonde woman, who is considered ugly in their world where women who are large, dark-skinned, and have kinky hair are the most desirable. The novel is a satirical tragedy. Some readers find it unsettling because of the ways in which I’ve inverted our racist associations. Europa, for example, is “the dark continent” with a history of the utmost savagery of warmongering, genocide, witch burnings, and torture, and so on. White readers have told me that they were able to connect to the suffering of those who were enslaved during this slave trade because my protagonist is white. I expected to receive a critical mauling but the opposite happened and it was critically celebrated.

Collins: In your hilarious 2014 comic novel, Mr. Loverman, a closeted gay grandfather who crows about passing on his “super-lexical gene” to one of his daughters struggles with his desire to dissolve his loveless (at least on his side) combative marriage, and move in with the man who is the true love of his life. A self-made intellectual, he remarks at one point, “I am an archaeologist of the human character.” That strikes me as a phrase that applies to you as you portray layer after psychological layer of not only him in all his wit and verve and sexism and fear of homophobia, but also his deeply frustrated and embittered wife, and their strikingly different children and grandchildren and friendships. Along the way you seem to be exploring what your protagonist sums up as the “four categories of love” that “those Ancient Greek eggheads came up with—“agape is unconditional love; eros—intimate; philia—brotherly; and storge—a deep, familial affection.” Are you engaged in part in an archaeology of these kinds of love and their disfunctions in this novel and elsewhere?

Evaristo: Perhaps in Mr. Loverman, because it is a book about love and betrayal, as much as other things, but not intentionally in my other books, although it’s hard to write fictional characters without exploring different types of love through various relationships. My starting point for Mr. Loverman was to explore homosexuality through the prism of Barrington, an older black, Caribbean Londoner of seventy-four who has been in the closet since he was fourteen, at which age he became lovers with his best friend Morris, a love affair which has lasted sixty years. He has been married to Carmel for fifty years, who has no idea her husband is gay. She has endured half a century of deception by the man she fell in love with as a teenager. The romantic love in the novel is between Barrington and Morris, who have been lovers so long their relationship is also quite brotherly as well, while also having a sexual dimension. Theirs is a great love by two men who know each other inside out and accept each other for who they are, while still occasionally falling out with each other. Barrington feels unconditional love for his younger daughter and favourite child, Maxine, a middle-aged fashion designer with whom he goes out drinking. His relationship with his eldest daughter, Donna, a social work trainer, is less bonded, in no small part due to her taking her mother’s side in the problems of their toxic marriage. Daniel, Barrington’s son, is also loved unconditionally. Love, even when it is unconditional, is never uncritical for Barrington. He considers himself a great observer of human behavior, and while he can see the weaknesses in others, he is incapable of seeing it in himself. He has held on to the “respectable” façade of marriage in order to camouflage his true homosexual identity and his wife, Carmel, has paid a terrible price for this. In turn, she has remained in a terrible marriage because she can’t let go of the idea of marriage being for life—for better or worse. She has thus denied herself finding lasting love elsewhere. As a writer, I am not so much an archaeologist of the human character, as an analyst of human behavior and motivation, which I find exciting to create and work out.

Collins: And, as you mentioned earlier, you find forms to help you do this. One of the striking things about your new novel, Girl, Woman, Other, is its form, which seems to be a hybrid of prose and poetry that can do the work of narrative prose and yet also take advantage of the suggestiveness of line breaks in poetry. Is this form something you have arrived at after a career spent exploring the possibilities and limits of prose and poetry?

Evaristo: I’ve termed it a “fusion fiction” in that the writing is almost patterned and punctuated like poetry which allows a free-flowing reading experience, while the twelve protagonists each have their own chapter while being fused into the other characters’ narratives. The form first emerged in Mr. Loverman with the parallel narrative inserts of Carmel’s section, which were juxtaposed with Barrington’s main first person voice. Her sections were slightly more poetic than the form in Girl, Woman, Other, but it’s a very similar shape. I really enjoyed the way in which this “fusion fiction” allowed me to encompass huge temporal swathes and shifts, a nonlinear chronology, flowing back and forth from the past to the present for each character, while dexterously shifting the gaze from the external to character’s interiority, line by line, as well the unorthodox presentation of dialogue—the many other voices that float in and out of the novel. Some critics have called it a verse novel, and I don’t much mind if they do. I wasn’t intentionally writing poetry but it does have those poetic elements, especially a poetic compression and fragmentation redolent of the multiple characters sequences in Lara. It’s written in the third person but it feels like the first person, so it’s also a close third perspective. The novel also fuses the twelve primarily black British women protagonists together. They are aged nineteen to ninety-three, and are of different cultural backgrounds, classes, sexualities, occupations, and with different geographical UK relationships. Each woman has her own dedicated chapter, but their stories are fused into each other’s with X degrees of separation. For example, there are four mother-daughter relationships, as well as other family relationships, friendships, lovers, and colleagues. As a writer, I am driven to experiment, to find the form that suits the story I want to tell, in this case to people a novel with multiple black British women who won’t otherwise appear in literature and the “fusion fiction” form enabled me to do this. There are so few of us writing in the UK, and black, female polyphony was a way for me to address our otherwise near-invisibility in British fiction.

Collins: That’s a wonderful phrase—“female polyphony.” But Girl, Woman, Other is not a pure diversity-fest: one of the coolest things about the book is that it also explores the whole spectrum of woke. You expose the fact that someone who was a woke feminist lesbian in the 1980s and 1990s might be an uncomprehending elder when faced with a trans activist in the 2010s. Is part of the mission of a book like Girl, Woman, Other both to both affirm the value and the glory of often-marginalized or persecuted identities and yet warn those who risk all to inhabit those identities that they should not carry too big a chip on their shoulders?

Evaristo: The former but not the latter, which sounds as if the novel might be preachy. I’m not interested in sending messages like this through my fiction. The characters are so varied that most of them won’t have a clue what “woke” means. A few of them are obviously politicized but most of them are not. The novel might be called a feminist novel in that it’s exploring a wide variety of black womenhood, and some of the women are feminist, but most of them are not, or have an evolving relationship to the idea of feminism, or are even anti-feminist. I enjoyed exploring the different experiences between Amma’s coming-of-age, lesbian feminist ’80s generation and the latest, young feminists of colour who are increasingly powerful, in no small part due to the mass communication and connective properties of social media, and who aren’t particularly interested in discovering or acknowledging the British trailblazers who paved the way for them.

The debate around the value of marginalized communities is a big one. When we are absent from literature, from the arts, from culture, the effect is one of invalidation. This is why it was important for me to not only have a feisty nineteen-year-old student in the novel, Yazz, but also a phenomenally independent ninety-three-year-old Northumbrian farmer, Hattie—with women of every generation in between. I’ve noticed that young women tend to write young protagonists, and when they venture into the upper years, their female characters tend to be sad or mad. With so few middle-aged black British women writers, because those who emerged in the past have since stopped publishing, I feel duty bound to write about all ages with this novel.

Collins: The novel has now won the 2019 Booker Prize (in a tie with Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments). What does winning the prize mean for you as someone who in the 1980s cofounded the Theatre of Black Women?

Evaristo: It’s been an incredibly long journey from rank outsider black feminist theatre maker in the 1980s to Booker winner in 2019. It’s not an abrupt transition because I have been operating at establishment levels for some time now, but my radical heart has never changed. I’m still a believer in egalitarianism and an activist for inclusion for people of colour in the arts, and I use my influence to promote my values. Since winning the Booker, my reach has gone global and that’s incredible.

I love that I won the Booker with an experimental novel about twelve diverse women, some of them on the queer spectrum. That such a novel has won this award is mind-boggling when I consider what the Booker represented until this moment.

Collins: What has the Booker been?

Evaristo: As a black woman has never previously won the Booker Prize, it has always been an elusive rather than inclusive prize for us. I hope that my win signals a new direction for the honour, and that it’s not too long before another black woman is awarded it. 

Collins: In your Budapest talk, you said very pointedly, I thought, in the capitol of a country whose Prime Minister has averred, “[w]e do not want to be diverse” or to have “our own color, traditions and national culture to be mixed with those of others”—you said, “I am multiculturalism.” Was that a gentle way of responding to people like Viktor Orbán and to Brexiteers back in Britain?

Evaristo: Without a doubt multiculturalism and liberal values are under threat in Britain due to the politics around Brexit, and with the rise of the far right across Europe. We’re not living in unprecedented times because many of us are aware of how the Nazis came to power in the ’30s, spreading intolerance, promoting nationalism and anti-Semitism. I realize now that a progressive society can quickly regress when charismatic demagogues are given too much of a platform and scapegoat certain sections of society, and when politician’s personal ambition outweigh their principles. This is what has happened in the UK with Brexit. We need to resist, to speak out, to protest now—because later might be too late.

Excerpt

from Girl, Woman, Other

Amma then spent decades on the fringe, a renegade lobbing hand
grenades at the establishment that excluded her

until the mainstream began to absorb what was once radical and
she found herself hopeful of joining it

which only happened when the first female artistic director
assumed the helm of the National three years ago

after so long hearing a polite no from her predecessors, she
received a phone call just after breakfast one Monday morning when
her life stretched emptily ahead with only online television dramas to
look forward to

love the script, must do it, will you also direct it for us? I know it’s
short notice, but are you free for coffee this week at all?

Amma takes a sip of her Americano with its customary kick­-
starter extra shot in it as she approaches the Brutalist grey arts
complex ahead

at least they try to enliven the bunker-like concrete with neon
light displays these days and the venue has a reputation for being pro­-
gressive rather than traditionalist

years ago she expected to be evicted as soon as she dared walk
through its doors, a time when people really did wear their smartest
clothes to go to the theatre

and looked down their noses at those not in the proper attire

she wants people to bring their curiosity to her plays, doesn’t give
a damn what they wear, has her own sod-you style, anyway, which
has evolved, it’s true, away from the clichéd denim dungarees, Che
Guevara beret, PLO scarf and ever-present badge of two inter­-
locked female symbols (talk about wearing your heart on your sleeve,
girl)

these days she wears silver or gold trainers in winter, failsafe Birk­-
ies in summer

winter, it’s black slacks, either baggy or tight depending on
whether she’s a size 12 or 14 that week (a size smaller on top)

summer, it’s patterned harem pants that end just below the knee

winter, it’s bright asymmetric shirts, jumpers, jackets, coats

year-round her peroxide dreadlocks are trained to stick up like
candles on a birthday cake

silver hoop earrings, chunky African bangles and pink lipstick

are her perennial signature style statement

Excerpted from GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER copyright © 2019 by Bernardine Evaristo.
Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Black Cat, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc.
All rights reserved.