Mixed Race Studies

How Bernardine Evaristo Conquered British Literature

The New Yorker
2022-02-03

Anna Russell
London, United Kingdom

In a new memoir, the writer describes how she was long excluded from the halls of literary power, and how she finally broke in.

hen the British author Bernardine Evaristo was in her early twenties, she and her drama-school friends would go to London’s theatres and heckle the performances. “It wouldn’t have been anything like ‘Rubbish!’ because it was a political heckling,” Evaristo, now sixty-two, told me recently. They would have been more likely to yell “Sexist!” or “Racist!” and then disappear, giddily, into the night. Recounting the habit this past December, Evaristo put on a mock posh accent and called it “appalling, appalling behavior.” The week prior, she had been named president of the U.K.’s Royal Society of Literature, becoming the first person of color to hold the position in the organization’s two-hundred-year history. (She is also the first who did not attend at least one of the following: Oxford, Cambridge, Eton.) Evaristo has some sympathy for her younger, angrier self. If social media had been around in her youth, she thinks she might have been one of what she calls the “Rabid Wolves of the Twittersphere.” “But we do need these renegades out there, don’t we?” she said. “We do need these people who will just lob a verbal hand grenade.”

Since 2011, Evaristo and her husband, David Shannon, have lived on the outskirts of West London, where she has dubbed herself “Mz Evaristo of Suburbia.” When I met her at her home recently, the doors to each room were painted a different bright color: blue, yellow, pink. Evaristo is tall, with a booming laugh. It’s been a long time since she has heckled anyone. These days, she sees herself as a diplomatic, modernizing force at the top of the British literary establishment from which she was long excluded. “The person I am today no longer throws stones at the fortress,” she writes in her new memoir, “Manifesto: On Never Giving Up,” which was published in the U.S. by Grove Atlantic last month. She used to laugh when people told her to think before she spoke. Now: “I’m so careful about everything I say.”…

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Manifesto: On Never Giving Up

Grove Atlantic
2022-01-18
240 pages
5.5″ x 8.25″
Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-5890-1
eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-5891-8

Bernardine Evaristo

From the bestselling and Booker Prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other, Bernardine Evaristo’s memoir of her own life and writing, and her manifesto on unstoppability, creativity, and activism

Bernardine Evaristo’s 2019 Booker Prize win was an historic and revolutionary occasion. The first Black woman and first Black British person ever to win the prize, Evaristo’s breathtaking Girl, Woman, Other was dubbed “godlike in its scope and insight” by the Washington Post, named a favorite book by President Obama, Roxane Gay, and countless other readers, and translated into thirty-five languages.

Evaristo’s nonfiction debut, Manifesto, is an intimate and inspirational account of Evaristo’s life and career as she rebelled against the mainstream to fight to bring her creative work into the world. She recalls her childhood and teenaged years as a young actor and playwright in London, details her early political awakenings and activism, and recounts her determination to tell stories that were absent in the literary world around her. In her over three decades of centering the stories and histories of Black Britons, Evaristo refused to let any barriers stand in her way. In Manifesto, she charts her theory of unstoppability, and explains how she broke with convention to achieve fulfillment both artistic and personal. Drawing deeply on her own varied experiences and the people who have inspired her, Evaristo offers a vital contribution to conversations around race, class, feminism, sexuality, and aging.

Manifesto is a unique inspiration to us all to persist in doing work that we believe in, even when we might feel overlooked or discounted, following in Evaristo’s footsteps, from first vision, to continued perseverance, to eventual triumph.

Bernardine Evaristo on a childhood shaped by racism: ‘I was never going to give up’

The Guardian
2021-09-25

Bernardine Evaristo

Bernardine Evaristo: ‘I liked the same music as my little white pals, ate the same food, had the same feelings – human ones.’ Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Observer

My creativity can be traced back to my heritage, to the skin colour that defined how I was perceived. But, like my ancestors, I wouldn’t accept defeat

When I won the Booker prize in 2019 for my novel Girl, Woman, Other, I became an “overnight success”, after 40 years working professionally in the arts. My career hadn’t been without its achievements and recognition, but I wasn’t widely known. The novel received the kind of attention I had long desired for my work. In countless interviews, I found myself discussing my route to reaching this high point after so long. I reflected that my creativity could be traced back to my early years, cultural background and the influences that have shaped my life. Not least, my heritage and childhood

Through my father, a Nigerian immigrant who had sailed into the Motherland on the “Good Ship Empire” in 1949, I inherited a skin colour that defined how I was perceived in the country into which I was born, that is, as a foreigner, outsider, alien. I was born in 1959 in Eltham and raised in Woolwich, both in south London. Back then, it was still legal to discriminate against people based on the colour of their skin, and it would be many years before the Race Relations Acts (1965 and 1968) enshrined the full scope of anti-racist doctrine into British law.

My English mother met my father at a Commonwealth dance in central London in 1954. She was studying to be a teacher at a Catholic teacher-training college run by nuns in Kensington; he was training to be a welder. They married and had eight children in 10 years. Growing up, I was labelled “half-caste”, the term for biracial people at that time…

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Bernardine Evaristo: ‘These are unprecedented times for black female writers’

The Guardian
2019-10-19

Bernardine Evaristo

‘These times really are extraordinary’ … Bernardine Evaristo. Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Observer

The first black woman to win the Booker prize argues that a revolution is sweeping through British publishing. But can it lead to lasting change?

Chidera Eggerue, AKA The Slumflower, is a social media star, south-east London homegirl and feminist. She first came to prominence in 2017 when she created the hashtag #SaggyBoobsMatter on Twitter in order to promote the body-positive message that women’s breasts and bodies are fine just as they are. It’s an important idea and antithetical to a beauty industry that berates us for our imperfections. A year later Eggerue published a self-help motivational book, What a Time to Be Alone: The Slumflower’s Guide to Why You Are Already Enough, which entered the Sunday Times bestseller list the week it was published in 2018, when she was 23. In her very pink, zanily illustrated book, Eggerue, a self-styled “guru, confidante and best friend” to her readers, offers advice on self-worth and self-acceptance. An earlier booklet called Little Black Book: A Toolkit for Working Women, by Otegha Uwagba, became a bestseller in 2016, paving the way for Eggerue. This, in turn, was probably influenced by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2014 essay We Should All Be Feminists.

These are unprecedented times for black female writers, in no small part due to the internet. It has reconfigured how we present ourselves to the world at large, as well as bringing previously marginalised social groups and writing to the fore in ways hitherto unimaginable. As a society we are beginning to recognise and take seriously the ills and pitfalls of social media, but it is still the most exciting channel of mass communication since history began…

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Girl, Woman, Other

Hamish Hamilton (an imprint of Penguin UK)
2019-05-02
464 pages
Hardback ISBN: 9780241364901
Ebook ISBN: 9780241985007

Bernardine Evaristo

Teeming with life and crackling with energy – a love song to modern Britain, to black womanhood, to the ever-changing heart of London

Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives and struggles of twelve very different characters. Mostly women, black and British, they tell the stories of their families, friends and lovers, across the country and through the years.

Joyfully polyphonic and vibrantly contemporary, this is a gloriously new kind of history, a novel of our times: celebratory, ever-dynamic and utterly irresistible.

Tangled Roots: Real Life Stories from Mixed Race Britain

Tangled Roots
2015-12-11
205 pages
ISBN: 978-0993482403

Edited by:

Katy Massey

12% of UK households are mixed race. These are our stories.

The Tangled Roots book brings together over 30 writers to answer the question: What is life like for mixed families in Britain today?

Five leading authors—Bernardine Evaristo MBE, Sarfraz Manzoor, Charlotte Williams OBE, Diana Evans and Hannah Lowe—together with 27 members of the public tell the story of their mixed lives with heart-breaking honesty, humour and compassion.

Broken identity

The Times Literary Supplement
2018-01-31

Bernardine Evaristo

Afua Hirsch ©Ken McKay/ITV/REX/Shutterstock

Afua Hirsch, Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging (London: Jonathan Cape, 2018)

People of colour raised in the openly racist Britain of the 1960s and 70s often put an identity quest at the heart of their fiction, poetry, drama and non-fiction. Joan Riley’s novel about an alienated girl, The Unbelonging (1985), and Caryl Phillips’s pan-European travelogue, The European Tribe (1988), provide powerful early examples. Hanif Kureishi’s first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), opens with the mixed-race protagonist declaring, “My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost”. In her play Talking in Tongues (1991), Winsome Pinnock wrote about an Afro-Caribbean woman who sought to reassemble her fragmented identity back in her parents’ Jamaica. In my own verse novel, Lara (1997), the mixed-race protagonist journeys to her father’s Nigeria to see if she can belong there. Back then, writing in this genre spoke of the dilemma of not feeling accepted in Britain; to the children of immigrants, the seemingly harmless question, “Where do you really come from?”, was seen as a challenge to their British birthright. Jackie Kay’s memorable poem “In My Country” encapsulates one response: “Where do you come from? / Here, I said, Here, these parts” (Other Lovers, 1993).

It is a question I haven’t been asked in decades; I hoped it had died out along with the idea that Black and British was an oxymoron. Afua Hirsch’s Brit(ish), however, finds it still tripping out of people’s mouths, as the most “persistent reminder of that sense of not belonging”. The book digs deep into the reasons for this enduring question, skilfully blending memoir, history and social commentary around race, culture and identity. Hirsch writes with an incisive honesty that disproves the idea that privilege can be easily reduced to racial binaries. She fully acknowledges the exclusive pedigree of her own background as a lighter-skinned woman of mixed parentage in a colourist society, who enjoyed a comfortable middle-class suburban childhood with her Ghanaian-born mother and English Jewish father. Her education was private all the way to Oxford University, and led to a first career as a barrister. Ten years ago she became a journalist. Hirsch is ostensibly the successful embodiment of Britain’s multicultural project, but her privileged status has not immunized her from the perniciousness of racism…

Read the entire book review here.

My Name Is Leon by Kit de Waal review – a touching, thought-provoking debut

The Guardian
2016-06-03

Bernardine Evaristo

Insight and authenticity … Kit de Waal. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

A young vulnerable boy is taken into care after his mother is no longer able to cope

Kit de Waal has already garnered praise and attention for her short fiction. She worked in family and criminal law for many years, and wrote training manuals on fostering and adoption; she also grew up with a mother who fostered children. This helps explain the level of insight and authenticity evident in My Name Is Leon, her moving and thought-provoking debut novel.

It is set in the early 1980s and, like What Maisie Knew and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, is told through the perspective of a child who is keenly observant, although we understand more of what is happening around him than he does. In this case, the narrator is eight-year-old Leon, who becomes a foster child. The novel begins with the birth of his baby brother, Jake. Immediately we realise that there is something wrong with their mother, Carol. Rather than cradle the child she has just given birth to, she leaves the hospital room to have a cigarette. The nurse leaves too and tells Leon, “If he starts crying, you come and fetch me. OK?” Leon is left on his own with Jake. The novel is full of quietly shocking moments like this, which reveal how much child protection has moved on from 30 years ago.

The brothers have different, and absent, fathers. While Carol and Jake are white, Leon is mixed race. His father, Byron, is in prison, while Jake’s father, Tony, has rejected Carol and their child. Home is on an estate near a dual carriageway. Carol often leaves her boys alone in the flat when she goes out…

Read the entire review here.

Putting History in Its Place: An Interview with Bernardine Evaristo

Contemporary Women’s Writing
Volume 9 Issue 3 November 2015
pages 433-448
DOI: 10.1093/cww/vpv003

Jennifer Gustar, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies
University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus, Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada

Bernardine Evaristo was born in Woolwich, London, to an English mother of Irish descent and a Nigerian father, who had immigrated to the UK. She has been actively publishing since the release of her first book of poetry, Island of Abraham (1994). She has published six other works since: the semiautobiographical Lara (1997); The Emperor’s Babe (2001), a novel in verse, based in Roman Londinium; Soul Tourists (2005), a hybrid of poetry and prose that explores the spectral black history of Europe; Blonde Roots (2008), a satirical novel that inverts the historical realities of the transatlantic slave trade; Hello Mum (2010), an epistolary novella that explores a fourteen-year-old boy’s sense of disenfranchisement and the consequent lure of gang culture; and, most recently, Mr. Loverman (2013), the story of a closeted homosexual Trinidadian-British Londoner, who must confront the damage perpetuated by his own silences. Evaristo has served as coeditor of two literary anthologies: NW15 (Granta/British Council, 2007) and Ten New Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010). As editor, she has been instrumental in both mentoring and promoting the visibility of black British writers. In 2010, she guest-edited an issue of Wasafiri, entitled Black Britain: Beyond Definition, that celebrates contemporary black writing in the UK. Her 2012 guest-edited volume of the UK’s leading poetry journal Poetry Review, entitled Offending Frequencies, features more poets of color than any previous single issue. In September of 2014, she investigated the publishing industry’s attitude toward women of color as guest editor of Mslexia. She currently works as a Reader in Creative Writing at Brunel University, where, in 2011, she instituted the Brunel University African Poetry Prize. Two of her works have been adapted for radio: The Emperor’s Babe for BBC 1 (2012) and Hello Mum for BBC 4 (2012). She was elected Fellow of the…

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Miscegenation Blues: Voices of Mixed Race Women

Sister Vision Press
May 1994
389 pages
8.8 x 5.8 x 1 inches
Paperback ISBN: 092081395X; ISBN 13: 9780920813959
This book is out of print.

Edited by

Carol Camper

Miscegenation Blues: Voices of Mixed Race Women is a stunning and long awaited collection of some of the most poignant writing by more than forty women of mixed racial heritage.  Together they explore the concept of a mixed race identity, the fervour of belonging, the harsh reality of not belonging—of grappling in two or more worlds and the final journey home.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Carol Camper Into the Mix
• Edge to the Middle … location, identity, paradox
  • Camille Hernandez-Ramdwar Ms. Edge Innate
  • A. Nicole Bandy Sorry, Our Translator’s Out Sick Today
  • Culture Is Not Static
  • Lisa Jensen “journal entry 25/10/92″
  • Elehna de Sousa Untitled
  • Nadra Qadeer Spider Woman
  • Deanne Achong Untitled
  • Michele Chai Don’t
  • Naomi Zack My Racial Self Over Time
  • Mercedes Baines Mulatto Woman a honey beige wrapper
  • Mixed Race Women’s Group—Dialogue One
  • Michele Paulse Commingled
  • Lara Doan Untitled
  • Lisa Suhair Majaj Boundaries, Borders, Horizons
• But You Don’t Look Like a… faces, body, hair
  • Lisa Jensen (one more time now.)
  • Ijosé Two Halves—One Whole (Part I)
  • Two Halves—One Whole (Part two)
  • Ngaire Blankenberg Untitled
  • Blue
  • Joanne Arnott Mutt’s Memoir
  • Lois Robertson-Douglass No Nation Gal
  • Marilyn Elain Carmen The Issue of Skin Colour
  • Claire Huang Kinsley Questions People Have Asked Me
  • Questions I Have Asked Myself
  • Gitanjali Saxena Second Generation; Once Removed
• My Name is Peaches… obiectification.exoticizaiton
  • Mercedes Baines Bus Fucking
  • Where Are You From? A broken record
  • Michele Chai Resistance 153
  • S.R.W. What is a “Sister”?
  • Barbara Malanka Noblewomen In Exile
  • Stephanie Martin Is true what dem seh bout colrd pussy?
  • Michelle La Flamme Yo White Boy
  • Carol Camper Genetic Appropriation
  • Family Album
• Some More Stories
  • Annharte Emilia I Should a Said Something Political
  • Victoria Gonzalez Nicaragua, Desde Siempre: War fragments from a woman’s pen
  • Marilyn Dumont The Halfbreed Parade
  • The Red & White
  • S.R.W. For My Sister Rosemary: Just Like Mine
  • Claiming Identity: Mixed Race Black Women Speak
  • Joanne Arnott Song About
  • kim mosa mcneilly don’t mix me up
• The Unmasking… betrayals, hard truths
  • Lorraine Mention Journal Entry: Thoughts on My “Mother”
  • Letter to a Friend
  • Nadra Qadeer To a Traveller
  • Nila Gupta Falling from the Sky
  • Rage is my sister
  • Jaimi Carter Are You Writing a Book?
  • Nona Saunders Mother Milk
  • Children’s Games
  • Pussy Willows and Pink
  • S.R.W. Untitled
  • That Just Isn’t Right
  • Michi Chase One
  • Karen Stanley Warnings (Suspense Version)
  • Joanne Arnott Little On The Brown Side
  • Speak Out, For Example
  • Anonymous White Mother, Black Daughter
  • Mixed Race Women’s Group—Dialogue Two
  • Heather Green This Piece Done, I Shall Be Renamed
  • Myriam Chancy Je suis un Nègre
  • Yolanda Retter Quincentennial Blues
• Are We Home Yet?… return to self and cultures
  • Diana Abu-Jaber Tbe Honeymooners
  • Nona Saunders Tapestry I
  • Tapestry II Carole Gray Heritage
  • Bernardine Evaristo Letters from London
  • Ngaire Blankenberg Halifax
  • Kukumo Rocks Route to My Roots
  • Pam Bailey Naming and Claiming Multicultural Identity
  • Maxine Hayman Shortbread and Oolichan Grease
  • Seni Seneviratne Cinnamon Roots
  • Shanti Thakur Domino: Filming the Stories of Interracial People
  • Nila Gupta The Garden of My (Be)Longing 350
  • Gitanjali Saxena Gitanjali’s Bio
  • Kathy Ann March Like Koya
  • Faith Adiele Learning to Eat
  • The Multicultural Self
  • Remembering Anticipating Africa
• Contributors’ Notes