Tag Archives: writer: bernadine evaristo

Manifesto: On never giving up, by Bernardine Evaristo

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Romantic love. Random sex. Hopeless crushes. Short-lived flings. Proper relationships. All of these experiences contributed to making me the person and writer I became, one for whom the pursuit of freedom was paramount: freedom to move home, freedom from a conventional job, freedom to follow the whims of my sexuality, freedom to jump from one encounter to another, freedom to write experimental fiction. Even when my freedom was seriously curtailed, as it was during one relationship in my twenties, I broke free and carved out the life I wanted for myself again.

This is a tremendously entertaining and thought-provoking short book, the autobiography of the author of Girl, Woman, Other and of The Emperor’s Babe, taking her from childhood in Woolwich to fame and success as a Booker Prize winning author. As with all good autobiographies, there is a fair bit of self-reflection; I found her accounts of her love life (mainly lesbian in her 20s, mainly straight before and since) interesting (other people’s lovel lives are almost always interesting) and I also appreciated her frankness about the shortcomings of some of her earlier books, though I may try and get one or two of them anyway – in particular Blonde Roots, an alternate history which was on the 2008 Artchur C. Clarke Award shortlist. She is also very clear about the impact of racism and sexism on her career, which originally was intended to be on the stage (and she has done a good deal of stage work). Punches well above its weight, as does the writer. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book by a non-white writer. Next on that pile is Goliath, by Tochi Onyebuchi.

Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernardine Evaristo

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Second section of third chapter:

    she’s wearing a light grey pencil skirt and jacket, powder-blue blouse, grey neck-tie, black patent leather court shoes, and her pride
     as she passes through the formidable doors into the wood-panelled entrance
     wide staircases sweep up either side of the lobby ascending to the upper floors
     long corridors extend in two directions either side of her
     she’s way too early, wanders through the empty school, explores its light-filled classrooms, imagines its essence pouring into her soul, yes, her very soul
     she isn’t going to be a good teacher but a great one
     one who’ll be remembered by generations of working-class children as the person who made them feel capable of achieving anything in life
     a local girl made good, come back to generously pass on

A lot of people may have said “Who?” on hearing that Bernardine Evaristo had won the Man Booker Prize this year, jointly with Margaret Attwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. I did not; some years ago I greatly enjoyed The Emperor’s Babe, a narrative poem about a Sudanese girl in third century London. Girl, Woman, Other is a slightly different kettle of fish, with a huge range of characters across contemporary London (with some flashbacks to earlier decades), almost all women, almost all black, all telling their stories from their own perspective, but often those stories intersect and overlap, and we see the same relationships from different angles. I was preparing myself to write here that it was a very engaging, challenging, fascinating read; and then a twist in the last chapter caught me completely by surprise (though it shouldn’t have) and left me sobbing on the train on the way home from work. This does not happen to me very often. A brilliant book. You can get it here.

This was the top book on my unread pile by a non-white author. Next on that list is The Widows of Malabar Hill, by Sujata Massey.

April Books 1) The Emperor’s Babe, by Bernardine Evaristo

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Zuleika, the narrator of The Emperor’s Babe, is the daughter of Sudanese immigrants in London in the very early third century; she is married aged eleven to a Senator, and several years after starts a relationship with the visiting Emperor, Septimius Severus. I knew a little about him from Gibbon, who writes of him rather disapprovingly in Chapter V of Decline and Fall, though is more positive about him in Chapter VI when he goes to kill the Scots.

The Emperor’s Babe is a rather startling book. Evaristo apparently composed it while writer-in-residence at the Museum of London and it breathes an intimate connection between the Roman city and today’s geography – she uses mainly modern streetnames and toponyms, and has Zuleika a citizen of the racially and sexually diverse metropolis, attended by her Scottish slaves, educated by her husband to the point where she writes and recites her own poetry. Evaristo uses the setting to explore various obvious themes of race, class and gender, and does it vividly and thoroughly. Also her Septimius Severus comes to life as a much more sympathetic character than Gibbon’s portrayal, though still believes in astrology.

The whole of The Emperor’s Babe is in verse. For some reason I had not retained this fact from the reviews I had read on which inspired me to get it in the first place. It is a series of short digestible narrative vignettes, none more than a few pages long. Probably some of them refer to poems of the Classical era which I don’t know, but that didn’t hamper my enjoyment. I have a couple of other books of verse on the list for this month, so this has broken me in gently.