The first time I heard about Bernardine Evaristo, I was giddy in lust driving from To Sua Trench back to our resort on the other side of Upolu, Samoa. At the bottom of the trench, I had asked my lover if we could make it official and we were revelling in the glow of sunset lovin’, coconut water and the wonderful things the sun does for melanated skin. In the process of introducing our favourite podcasts to each other, we learnt that a Black woman had won the Booker Prize for the first time.
While we were slightly side eyeing that the award had been split between joint winners for the third time in the history of the award, what quipped my interest about ‘Girl, Woman, Other’ was the queer, Black women and migrant stories the book centred.
As a bookish person who was coming into her queerness, I turned to stories to anchor me and expand the horizons of what could be possible. I was thirsty for stories that would reflect or at least provide the language to articulate what I was flowing through.
A few months later, a copy of ‘Girl, Woman, Other’ arrived. The stories were about the ways bodies of culture are connected through the subcultures they create in the diaspora intergenerationally. These subcultures are micro-level societies that exist within and alongside the dominant culture with their own sets of norms, rules, values and sometimes institutions, such as the Black theatre productions and initiatives that characters in the book start, join or critique.
At the time I read the book, I needed to see queer Black characters existing in community with other bodies, histories, and experiences of culture. I needed to see Black women across generations exist alongside each other, the sisterhood, the disapproval and what informs it from racialisation, notions of success, the cultural and familial expectations and our desires whether fulfilled or suppressed.
I needed to see how they navigated their similarities and the differences that caused disconnection between them. I needed to see stories of Black women and Black queer people that were interconnected through African diasporic subcultures, yet not happening in a vacuum because each character’s experiences and interactions differed due to sexuality, class, or age.
It was refreshing to read about how these folks interacted because while we do encounter racism, we also encounter each other in the spaces that we create. The biases that we have, informed by religion and culture. The cliques and animosities that can arise. The aunties.
About a fortnight ago during a conversation with Paula Morris at the Auckland Writers Festival, Evaristo spoke about the interventions she was able to contribute to as a second-generation daughter of an African migrant and the subcultures that her generation had to not only create but sustain over decades.
As she described the 60s publishing industry in the UK, I couldn’t help but whisper to my partner how it awfully sounded familiar to the present-day local scene in Aotearoa. From the one to two Black people that are highlighted and rotated every couple of years to the fallacies of firsts.
In a discussion about ‘Black British, Writing Back’, a programme curated by Evaristo that republishes books by Black British writers dating to 1939, she made a comment about the fallacies of firsts that stuck with me.
The obsession with firsts is a disappearance of the contributions of previous generations. It often happens when there is a cultural void for non-white experiences so when singular Black narratives are highlighted in the mainstream, it’s like a discovery.
And while I’ve chuckled about the things that have been dubbed as first in Aotearoa that aren’t necessarily first – maybe first ASM (After Social Media) – I couldn’t help but wonder what happens to the legacies of the subcultures that are being created with such constant disappearances. And whether these disappearances are due to unethical remembering, i.e. claiming things are first when they aren’t, or shortages to funding, or the realities of burnout in creative industries.
I guess, as Evaristo highlighted in her talk and in her book ‘Manifesto, On Never Giving Up’, part of the response is we never give up. We continue to create and nurture our subcultures because in the grand scheme of things they are our cultures, an extension of who we are.
Another response that Evaristo offers and models is the power of situating ourselves and our contributions in a lineage of sorts. One where we can name the people or practices that have supported, informed, influenced or contributed to our respective fields, interests, and activisms.
When asked by a Writers Festival audience member who inspired her writing, Evaristo responded that the formation of ‘for coloured girls’ by Ntozake Shange informed ‘Girl, Woman, Other’. On page 158 of ‘Manifesto’, she notes Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Buchi Emecheta amongst the writers whose experiences differed from hers in many ways but who’s work foregrounded Black women’s lives. Their stories gave Evaristo permission to write.
As I read this, I reached out for the copies of the books I had by the aforementioned authors. I time-travelled to my early 20s when Audre Lorde’s ‘Sister Outsider’ was making the rounds in my friend group at the time and how this informed our feminisms.
I remembered marvelling at the queer undertones in Alice Walker’s ‘The Colour Purple’ when I first read it in high school. It was and will always be the little bit of tenderness between Celia and Shug for me.
I thought about when I first fell in love with Ntozake Shange in 2013 after picking up a copy of ‘Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo’ at a secondhand bookstore in Hamilton. The book opens with ‘where there is a woman, there is magic’ a sentence I borrowed till my mid-20s (thank heavens old habits die hard) to sign off all my cards, birthday texts and spoken word promotional material.
I remembered the ways Buchi’s ‘Joys of Motherhood’ reminded me that womanhood manifests differently across cultures and freed me from Eurocentric beauty ideals.
I reflected on Toni Morrison’s quote about how racism is a distraction and how this framing informed my reorientation in 2017 from creating counter narratives to no longer creating work in opposition to mainstream narratives. At the time I was exploring the pressures of Black creatives to respond to mainstream representations and what this does to our creative output and spirit.
In ‘Manifesto’ Evaristo refers to this as the “limiting critical gaze surrounding our work” and comments on whether certain labels persist “because those who are unused to our stories feel that they are learning about our identities, and that skewers their perception of our creativity”.
Flipping through these books after Evaristo’s conversation at the Writers Festival, and reflecting on how each author contributed to my lineage and situating myself as a first-generation daughter of African migrants in Aotearoa was incredibly grounding.
It was a reminder of the deep whakapapa of diasporic storytellers and the waters they traverse to nourish each of us. Whether it's seeing an aspect of ourselves in their stories or meeting new possibilities through the stories of those who embody realities different and distant from ours.
*The headline of this piece is inspired by Jamila Wood's album Legacy! Legacy!, where she names the Black thinkers that have contributed to her artistry and sound
