Why Everyone Should Read Bernardine Evaristo’s ‘Girl, Woman, Other’: A Tribute to #pridemonth
Prologue:
I grew up in the officers’ quarters of a steel-making plant in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, a port-city that served, and continues to serve as a soup pot for communities from all over the sub-continent, and it is amidst this hotch-potch of cultures and sub-cultures that I built the foundations of my personality, quite modern, quite woke. Or so I’d loved to imagine.
Upto the ages of 12–13, I’d successfully rejected all forms of femininity. I refused to don pink. I refused to (and wasn’t even allowed to, for that matter) let my wild, curly mane free. Make-up was an alien experience. I hung out with boys, in a friendly capacity till when it was socially acceptable, and played all sorts of boisterous games that involved jumping drainages, climbing trees, and running around, and I scoffed at anything remotely traditionally woman. Perhaps that is why, when I got my first Period, my reaction was to wail about this curse that be-fell me, and when I started growing breasts, I did all I could do avoid acknowledging their presence in my life. I developed a stoop, that made sure my body contours stayed flat, and I got into all kinds of sports, to ensure I was different from all the girls in my class. To slow the effects of the disease. Sex Education classes? Menstruation awareness workshops? I avoided them all like the plague, and the ones I did not manage to get out of, I slouched low in the back rows to make fun of the ‘stupidity’ of it all. That was I.
Don’t get me wrong, these were not signs of my own struggles with my gender and/ or the early signs of an alternate sexual preference, that I was exhibiting, but these were the basis for my deep-rooted internalized misogyny that I had worn like a crown for so long, ’cause my mother, God bless her, constantly explained how women needed to know their places and their own strengths (or the lack of) and that I could not be like the boys, even if I wanted to. I had started to believe, with a force that is still hard to overthrow, that anything womanly is a sign of weakness, a sign of restrictions, a sign of shortcomings, and boundaries, and failure. That was I.
I can’t say, quite proudly, that my understanding of the ways of women and/or the concepts of ‘gender’/ ‘sex’/ ‘feminism’ became apparent to me in College. I had transformed over the years. I was no longer the pink-rejecting loud-mouthed ‘funny’ girl from school, but a complete player, if I may say so, taking on men and flinging them around based on whim and fancies alone and experimenting with sexuality (obviously, the heterosexual variety, I had not come that far that soon) with the passion of a curious cat. But I had a lot to learn just yet. I had issues with mixing with women that were out and out proud of their gender. I looked at quintessential women and automatically concluded they were weak on the intellectual front, and those that weren’t, the aberrations, the anomalies in my understanding of the system, they scared me, they quietened my voice. I could not accept that the ideas of femininity and might co-exist. There was some malfunctioning in my wiring. I tasted make-up and a variation in my clothing, alright, but my mind refused to work when I experimented thus. I could not get an interesting word out, when I was donning this ‘woman’ role and hence, I decided to structure my days in a way where: A. The days when I needed to be smart, for examinations, or competitions, or engaging in basic debates, I’d look my worst and thus, take my own attention away from my beauty (if any), and B. The days when I needed to be reckless, I’d bring out the scanty clothing and the rouge and the kohl, and go make myself the Barbie that most typical men desired, and I’d do things that were absolutely against my own basic moral principles, since it was on those days. That was I. Living dual lives.
Thus, began the cracks in the perfect bracket of women-hating. A few consequences of these cracks was that while I did have female friends, I refused to hug them or show any signs of emotions, lest I be accused of being a lesbian, and we were all out-and-out homophobes, blissfully unaware of our erroneous ways. I could not bring myself to say ‘I love you’ to any of them, lest it be misinterpreted for wrong emotions (I remember this incident where I’d worn a formal red and black checkered shirt to college one day and a woman called me ‘butch’ and I cried for days after and refused to wear that shirt again in public for long) and I thus grappled with fear each day of suddenly discovering I leaned the other way (the horror!). I compensated the same with hiking my trysts with men, of course, saving my affections for them (Have you ever done the same? Have you felt the same?).
I came around, of course. After I got dumped on my face for having a flaky personality (god bless the man), I started reading. I understood and accepted my gender (a woman, yes) and I picked up their (our) cause. I read about oppression and suppression and the constant putting-down we women do to each other (a colony of traitors, we are). But not just that. I flipped through a few porn comics, studied the ways of modern day sexuals. I understood what I liked and what I didn’t (not dare not). I am 26 now and I do not look down on the sisterhood as a source of embarrassment, and am careful not to slip into the cauldron of misandry (there’s a very narrow line that runs in between these two spheres, and one must trudge that path, before entering better lands of, first, equality, and second, being non-binary and gender free), and I do take a second before drawing any absolute conclusions about my brethren, or sistren. I found myself a man who deals with gender and sexuality in the same way that I do. Delicately and scientifically. A man, yes. I boast of friends that do lean the other way and I do not retreat in terror. I accept. I embrace.
I concluded, after years, that I had been forced to view the world through patriarchy-colored glasses and worse, through traditional black-and-white lens that refused to up and out and get modern, get some color in. And this world needs people to get comfortable in their skin, whatever skins they choose.
This month, as a part of my Book Club’s theme viz., celebrating ‘Pride Month’, I picked up Bernadine Evaristo’s ‘Girl, Woman, Other’ and it’d be of great disservice if I tried to explain my experience with this book in 240-characters or worse, as an Instagram brief for my 60-something followers, so here I sit to tell you what I thought.
The Book:
‘Girl, Woman, Other’ erupts on the steps of the Royal National Theater, in London, where the famed, and controversial black, lesbian, feminist, playwright Amma Bonsu’s play ‘The Last Amazons of Dahomey’, about black lesbian warriors from the Amazon, is on its opening night. Quite full circle. On the stairs of the ‘Establishment’, no less. Amma, along with her soulmate (strictly platonic) Dominique, had been dreaming about making it to the National, for twenty long years, right from their days of getting thrown out of the very theater for rejecting traditional (and backward) performances (there might have been some catcalling and stone pelting involved on her part), and getting shunted into regressive, repressive roles,the only ones black women could get at that time (slave girl, women prisoner, prostitute, drug dealer) and she’s finally made it and her audience is a mixture of women, and men, from all walks and races and sexualities, converging on the occasion of this epic tribute she’s managed to make to her people, her ghetto, her coterie. The book lives to examine the lives of all these characters, from start to the finish, but just their loglines, just enough to leave an impression, and it ends at the after-party of the Play, where we catch a glimpse of each of these characters in present day, fulfilling their destinies, sipping their celebratory martinis. A perfect end. Neatly tied. Now, why do I recommend this book so much?
Sexuality for Dummies:
The Book strips down the understanding of one’s gender and sexuality to its rawest version, as told through the stories of its various protagonists, and its patient. It dare not judge.
It explains that it’s alright for one to experiment with men before acknowledging discomfort with that notion.It’s alright to discover your sexuality after turning 50 or 70, it’s alright to thirst for younger men or for your daughter’s husband, for women who are more in touch with their needs than you, for women who were not even born women. It’s alright to not know that there’s more than two genders and that there’s an idea of no genders at all (they, them, their), to be a man who longs to be a woman or the other way round and to not get your sex re-assigned, since the concept of your gender exists in your head anyway. It’s alright.
It’s alright for one to not understand the idea of equality well and fall into man-hatred to a point of ludicrousness (one of the characters rejects men to such a maudlin extent that she refuses to engage with them completely, read their literature, buy any products/ avail any services provided by them, and even take names given by them, yes, until she ironically turns into a domestic abusive, traditional chauvinistic man herself (you can’t live a womanist life and have male voices in your head)).
It’s alright to reject monogamy, be it a woman or a man, and to enjoy multiple partners at once or one-by-one.
It’s alright for one to be a socialist and not a feminist at the same time (can they not co-exist?).
It’s alright to be a feminist and still want a child and love a child, and it’s alright to choose your career over everything else and decide on getting a hysterectomy only to avoid the difficulty of periods or children ruining your hard work. Besides, ‘falling hopelessly and helplessly in love, by itself, is a highly selective process’. And it’s alright to choose men who’d want to hold up your house while you don your cape and save the world before bedtime, to believe in eugenics, to want to ‘be a person in your own right’ before launching into being a woman for the others. And it’s alright to reject feminism altogether, for you longing for companionship after already having divorced a ‘sexist pig’ that brought to you someone who ‘can’t get past the first chapter of literature written by a woman, since the man mind biologically rejects it’. It’s alright.
It’s alright to marry and re-marry, and give birth and another birth, for having made emotional choices (not mistakes) based out of a scarring on account of your father having left you, your having found out you’re adopted, your having been gang-raped by school boys as a child, your need to pro-create out of your race. It’s alright.
The bottom-line being: You may look just like a woman (or a man) with a one-line story, based on your clothes or your speech, or the color of your skin, even, but there’s a not-small part of a full-length novel about why you made all your decisions that way and those are all alright.
Others:
The story boasts certain simplistic narratives (wrapping up every character nicely, too nicely) which may disorient you, were you looking for depth in story by itself. But in ideas and thoughts, there’s nothing amiss. You’ll find the piece rich with those. We’re talking ideas ranging from recognizing a a writer’s literature with their nationality (Is a poem good because you related to it, or it is good in and of itself?) to whether the uniform education system stifles creativity in learning or encourages basic learning for all. The language is music and, I dare not joke about this, when you read it, the voice in your head is the rich and powerful baritone of a black woman performing poetry upstage. The book reads that way, too. Structured that way. The vocabulary is a gold mine (Patois, Rambustious, parochial, languorous, saccharine, caterwauling, sartorial, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, indeed).
I chose to zoom in on the theme of sexuality in this book, to explain its relevance if you’re grappling with your own take on these concepts. But ‘Girl, Woman, Other’ has a whole other aspect that kisses race. I did not mention that these characters are all predominantly black, existing first in the United Kingdom and venturing to different continents henceforth, and it touches on their journey battling racism even. But, as a good friend of mine constantly says, that’s for another day.
I rate a good 5/5 for this tome of ideas and I push it forward for all of you, any one of you, who has been brought up confused and made to dance on eggshells about your identity. Read. Educate. Sing praise. I take leave on this note.
