Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo, thoughts

“It’s easy to forget that England is made up of many Englands” is a quote near the end of Girl, Woman, Other that best describes the experience of this book for me. It is an innocuous sentence about the tidy reductive mindset that can be applied to anything, positively or negatively, but in the context of this book, it speaks directly to a collective tendency humans have to see groups of people as the same. This book tries for something different. A remembering of the many women who make up womanhood. A glorious survey and an expansive experience of Black Womanhood.
No stereotypes. No reductions. In fact, this book is really an antidote to stereotypes. Every human being gets a full and complex life all their own. There is no one woman, and so there is no figurehead for Black Women, no pretense that we should pay attention to any one person more than another.

The sentence about England might as well be…
It’s easy to forget that Black Womanhood is made up of many Black Women. In this book’s case, 12 mostly Black women. It’s easy to forget that Womanhood is made up of so many different experiences. It’s easy to forget that Womanhood, Black White Mixed Trans, is made up—
by us. Now. Something we are making up as we go.
Yes, Bernardine Evaristo, may we all be “Women waking up to the possibility of taking ownership of our world as fully-entitled human beings.”