Poured Over: Bernardine Evaristo on Manifesto

“Well, this is the thing about being an overnight success after forty years.” Bernardine Evaristo made history when Girl, Woman, Other won the 2019 Booker Prize, for she is the first Black woman and the first Black British person to have won the coveted prize in its more than fifty-year history. Bernardine joins us on the show to talk about her fabulous memoir, Manifesto: On Never Giving Up, “overnight fame” (after decades of work in literature and the theater), her creative process, the writers who’ve inspired her work in the theater and on the page—and she even offers some advice for those who are stuck in their work and see no way through. Featured books: Manifesto: On Never Giving Up and Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo and For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf by Ntozake Shange. Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus episodes on Saturdays) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and wherever you listen to podcasts.

From this episode:

Bernardine Evaristo: When I started writing books and fiction, I really struggled to write dialogue, because I’d never written it because the theater that I was creating was actually very inspired by Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf, which came to London in about 1979 in the West End. And we went there as drama students, and I absolutely bowled over by it. And I got the poetry book that came with the play and read the poems and loved it. So it was the first time I saw more than one black woman on stage. And I’d hardly seen black women on stage anyway, yet, I’ve been going to the theater from the age of twelve, thirteen. Black women just weren’t there. They just weren’t, you know, getting the parts. They weren’t part of the sort of performance culture and theatre in the UK. And so here are the seven African American women actors, poets were reading Ntozake’s poetry and dancing on stage. And it was just overwhelmingly exquisite for us. And what Americans might not know is that for us, in the UK, as young people looking for role models, we weren’t really finding them in the UK, because most of us, our parents were what we call the first generation. So they would have come over in the probably 40s 50s, maybe even 60s and come from somewhere in the Caribbean, somewhere in Africa, generally speaking, or somewhere in Asia, and so on. And they were too busy surviving in this society. But for us, people of the second generation, we had the privilege and advantage of being able to perhaps choose to go into theater or you know, some of us did, at least to have much more freedom in terms of the careers we chose for ourselves. And so when we were looking for role models, they weren’t in the UK, but they were in America, and there was a lot there was so much what’s the word? I suppose all Americans were like gods. African Americans in particular, were like gods to us. We love the way African Americans spoke; the quality of the singing and performing and everything was incredible, and actually a bit overwhelming as well. For us because we were Londoners, we were British girls, right? We couldn’t recite poetry like Maya Angelou.

B&N: But also we’re coming from very different cultures when you’re turning to writers like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor and Ntozake Shange, how are you translating what you’re experiencing of their work into a Black British woman’s experience?

Bernardine Evaristo: Interesting question, it was challenging because everything about the Americans was seemed so much more seductive. So the validation that we needed for ourselves was not to be found in our society. And even among ourselves, African American history is very different. So for example, to Black British history, or the history of people of color in Britain, very, very, very different. There is a shared history going back in America for most people of African descent 400 years, whereas in the UK, we were coming from 50, something African countries, 30 Something Caribbean countries, lots of countries in Asia and so on, there wasn’t quite the same shared history, where we met was in how we were experiencing and being treated by the majority population in the UK. And so that’s what we were exploring through art … And later me through my early books, it was about telling those stories that hadn’t been told. And I guess the biggest inspiration for us was that the African Americans were doing it. bell hooks just passed… And I think about Ain’t I a Woman. And so you’re about a woman and you’re kind of coming into your feminism, but you don’t really have the language or the context for it, you just know what you believe. And then you read something like Ain’t I a Woman. And suddenly there is an intellectual context for what you have to say, somebody has done the deep thinking for you. And that was so important. Audre Lorde was really important to us. And you know, she came to London, we met her. And, you know, she was like a guru to us, they inspired us in different ways.