My name is Bernardine Evaristo. I'd like to introduce you to my eighth book which
is a novel called Girl, Woman, Other. it's a novel that I wrote because I wanted to
write about lots of different black women's stories. So in a sense it's a
celebration of black womanhood, black British womanhood to be specific. There
are 12 protagonists and they each have their own sections and their lives in
some way overlap. And I wanted to explore a variety of women so they're aged 19 to
93, they have different cultural backgrounds. So for example some have
African cultural backgrounds, some have Caribbean cultural backgrounds, they have
different occupations, they are also different sexualities, I have a
non-binary character as well. And I wanted to look at their lives from
childhood through to the present time and to look at their ambitions,
their dreams, their relationships, their families. Well I suppose that's another
important thing to say is that there are four mother and daughter partnerships in
the book as well. And to give voice to the kinds of characters I'd like to see
in fiction that I really don't see and that's the thinking behind the book. And
it has a slightly innovative form in that I call it a fusion fiction, but
don't let that put you off, it's actually a novel, it's very easy to read; but the
stories kind of fuse together and there's also sort of a fusion in terms
of form as well which you'd have to read to find out what I mean. So I'm here in
Waterstones in Piccadilly and I'd like to introduce you to three books that I
read when I was in my 20s, which were really important and really helped shape
my thinking as a writer and gave me the confidence to become a writer.
The first book I'd like to introduce you to is Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde,
who is enjoying a renaissance at the moment, which is incredible because I was
introduced to her work when I was in my 20s, in the 80s. And I met her a few times
as well when she came to London which was incredible. The reason I love this
book and actually love her entire oeuvre , is because she was a very powerful black
feminist at a time when we really didn't have a voice out there in the world. She
was also a lesbian and she kind of stood by her lesbianism and was very out and
you know took all the punches because of that. She was what we might call one
of the first intersectional feminists in that she drew together issues around
class and gender and race and sexuality and looked at all those things in terms
of her being a feminist voice. This book is full of essays including a trip to
Russia she took in the 70s. She was also for many years a cancer
survivor, she also talks about the power of speaking out and breaking through the
silence and she really is speaking to black women first but what I find really
interesting now is that she's got a global audience that is beyond the
barriers of colour. And a lot of women, white women, are really enjoying her work.
So the most important thing about Audre Lorde for me was that she was a woman
writing essays about being a black woman, which spoke to me at a time when I
needed to hear those words and her wisdom because there was such little
work being published anywhere in the world from that perspective, a black
feminist perspective. So that's why I'd like to champion Sister Outsider by
Audre Lorde. So the second book that was a really
important formative influence on me as a young writer was Ntozake Shange's
For Coloured Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When The Rainbow Is Enuf, which
is called a choreo poem but it's also called a kind of prose poem. Ntozake Shange
was again an African-American writer and this was originally a
performance, it was a production, that was shown off Broadway and then it
came to London in around 1981 when I was a drama student, which was my initial
career, was as an actor. And I went to see it and it was absolutely mind-blowing
for me because it was about seven African-American women telling their
stories. And it was... I cannot tell you how unusual that was. It was rare, it was the
first time, I would say, that had happened in a British production house, you know,
a British theatre. So this book is about seven black women and she tells their
stories through this kind of fusion prose poetry form and she captures the
essence of their lives. As you can see it's not a thick book. This is actually
the original that I bought I think in 1981. As you can see it's old and
it's a beautiful little copy and I'll never get rid of it. So these women,
she captures the snapshots of their lives and talks about their
difficulties and their celebrations and really brings them to life. And when it
was performed it was done through dance and the women are only identified
according to a colour. So there's lady in yellow and the lady in red and so on and
so forth. This is a text that has been performed all around the world ever
since and it was made into a Hollywood film about six years ago I think. A lot
of people connect to it because it's so beautifully written. It's quite
experimental in form but also that she's capturing these voices at a time when we
didn't hear these voices. So the next book I'd like to share with you is
Selected Poems by Derek Walcott and here it is. Derek Walcott
has been my favorite poet since my sort of late 20s. I was first introduced to
his collection Midsummer which was a collection of sonnets and I absolutely
fell in love with his writing. He died a few years ago, some of you might know
that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in the 90s which was an
amazing honor. He's from the Caribbean, from St. Lucia, and he lived most of his
life in St. Lucia. You know, most Caribbean writers, they
leave and go live somewhere else but he stayed there and he wrote from that
perspective. What I love about his work is that, first of all, the absolute beauty
of his language. He makes the ordinary extraordinary through the most
incredible images I think, unrivaled in my opinion. So I love that about his work
but also he writes about memory and history, Empire, slavery, loss, family,
ageing; all kinds of issues. And he just kind of meshes them together sometimes
in a single poem so that he takes you on this journey, this emotional journey,
intellectual journey, historical journey, existential journey through his work. In
particular through Midsummer which, as I said, was my introduction to him and
there's an emotional depth, there's an intellectual gravitas, there's
also a playfulness and there's an originality to his work that for me is
unrivaled. It's always very personal but his work speaks to me as a poet in ways
that other poets don't so if you haven't been introduced to Derek Walcott check
them out and see what you're going to be in for. It will be a delight, hopefully!