we should celebrate that many more women are re-configuring feminism and that grassroots activism is spreading like wildfire and millions of women are waking up to the possibility of taking ownership of our world as fully-entitled human beings
how can we argue with that?

Girl, Woman, Other was probably one of the most powerful and thought-provoking pieces I've read this year. It touched me in a way I just did not expect. I was sceptical of whether I would like the book because of the poetry-style prose and the fact it had won a Man Booker Prize. For some reason, I have always grown up considering the Man Booker Prize to be awarded to books filled with big jargon words that I'll never understand. However, I absolutely adored this book by Bernardine Evaristo. I loved the style, the content, the message and just pretty much everything about this book. I feel like some people will say that they loved this book because they felt they should but I just found myself scribbling quotes, after quotes, sitting and just thinking whilst I read this book. I actually finished it last month, but have needed some time to compose my thoughts on it.

Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives of 12 mostly black womxn and one man. At first I thought these stories would show the lives of these womxn separately, as I didn't understand how they would connect. However, by the end everyone of these womxn was interlinked through another in some way which I think offered a powerful message on how our lives touch so many other peoples. The book was split into segments and each segment focused on three womxn who were closely connected because they were related, they worked together, they were friends etc and I really liked this as a style because it meant we still saw these womxn we'd just got attached to through the lens of one of their relatives/friends.

One of the really fantastic qualities about Girl, Woman, Other was the fluidity in which it looked at gender and identity.

Feminism is so herd-like, Yazz told her, to be honest, even being a woman is passe these days, we had a non-binary activist at uni called Morgan Malenga who opened by eyes, I reckon we're all going to be non-binary in the future, neither male nor female, which are gendered performances anyway, which means your women's politics, Mumsy, will become redundant, and by the way, I'm humanitarian which is on a much higher plane than feminism

I think Evaristo approached the concepts of gender identity and specifically non-binary and transgender identities in a very good way. It wasn't a big deal, the characters just interwove and both taught the reader and themselves what it meant to be non-binary/transgender which I think is even more powerful. She also looked a lot at LQBTQ+ relationships and touched on domestic abuse within those, but also polyamory and various other ideas. I think Evaristo was so incredibly forward-thinking in this book and it was so refreshing and enjoyable to read.

In addition to looking at identity and gender, the other major aspect of the book for me was the focus on culture and history. Most of these womxn were black and their family were first generation immigrants from Ghana/Jamaica etc. I think Evaristo managed to highlight some really interesting points about how a) their cultures intersected with their British identity b) how they were accepted/not-accepted by British society c) what their cultural background meant when they came to Britain.

My father was devastated at having to flee Ghana so abruptly, she eulogised at his memorial, attended by his elderly socialist comrades it must have been so traumatic, to lose his home, his family, his friends, his culture, his first language, and to come to a country that didn't want him

In addition to talking about immigration from Ghana/Jamaica, Evaristo managed to briefly touch on slavery (and slave owners/those who earned their wealth through slavery in Britain), she touched on the lynchings in America during the fight for Black Civil Rights. There were so many powerful points in history that Evaristo touched on. However, for me, this became so much more of an impact when she showed how they connected not just to black people in Britain, but to white people and to show how we are not different. How we have a mixed cultural heritage. It actually made me cry at the end of the book because it just felt so poignant that many black British people are harassed for the colour of their skin, for their hair, for looking "other", yet beneath it all we are not 100% white and we are all interconnected.

I was honestly so amazed and touched by this novel. The poetry style prose with no punctuation actually just made this book flow so beautifully and I loved escaping from the strict structure of normal books. I would recommend this book to everyone as I absolutely adored it.