Evie Robinson
Manifesto on Never Giving Up, Bernadine Evaristo’s highly-anticipated memoir, is a heartfelt masterpiece. Tracing the story of her life from her early childhood through to adulthood, Evaristo details her experiences of love, friendship and her creative craft, as well as her frequent encounters with vicious racism along the way. Having been a huge fan of Evaristo’s work for a few years now, I was thrilled see her speak at the Southbank Centre ahead of the book’s launch, alongside writer and journalist Afua Hirsch, author of the Sunday Times Bestseller, Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging. The conversation was moving, enlightening and inspiring, giving me much food for thought on many of the issues Evaristo raises in her book.
The book is organised by theme, featuring stories from many aspects of Evaristo’s life: her turbulent history of relationships, a catalogue of houses and homes in which she has lived, the way she broke through barriers to have her voice heard in the creative industry as a Woman of Colour.
Carefully woven into all of these stories is Evaristo’s consideration of her racial identity, and her own consciousness of and relationship to this. In the first chapter of the book, entitled One: heritage, childhood, family, origins, she describes the difficulty of coming to terms with her identity as bi-racial, feeling as though she existed in a kind of liminal space, not quite at home with either Black or White communities nearby. Growing up in Woolwich, an area that was mostly white, this sense of feeling like the other pervaded her early life:
“Growing up bi-racial and brown skinned in an overwhelmingly white area, I was inevitably noticed because I looked different from the majority. Being noticed is one thing, but being treated badly is another”
The third chapter of the memoir, entitled the women and men who came and went, provided a simultaneously amusing and heartbreaking insight into Evaristo’s life of relationships and romantic connections. She details many relationships, one in particular with a woman whom she names as TMD, or ‘The Mental Dominatrix’ (listening to Evaristo reflect on this time of her life during her event at the Southbank Centre was particularly amusing). And though she now looks back on this time retrospectively and laughs, she recalls the toxic impact of this woman’s controlling behaviour on her creative integrity.
She spent her life exploring her sexuality and identity, living out her twenties as a lesbian, before meeting her current partner David, whom she happily describes as the love of her life. In this incredibly personal and vulnerable chapter, Evaristo explains the story behind the discovery of her sexuality, and makes a powerful assertion on the beauty and bravery of the Queer community:
“Mutual attraction between human beings of the same gender should not be regarded as unnatural, as a pathology that requires dissection, any more than heterosexual attraction needs deconstructing or explication. The problem is not with same-sex attraction but with a homophobic society that requires queer peple to justify their existence and fight for their rights.”
“To pursue same-sex relationships is testament to the human spriti to connection to each other at the level of our essentialist humanity, regardless of gender identity. It is an expression of love and desire between consenting adults expressed beyond imposed social constructs that determine who is allowed to love whom. Queerness is a manifestation and statement of freedom and enlightenment”
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Most people know Evaristo for her ground-breaking novel Girl, Woman, Other, winner of the Booker Prize in 2019. The novel had a profound impact on the literary scene for its formal innovation, sitting somewhere between verse and prose, but reading like lyric poetry. It features a polyphony of voices, celebrating the perspectives of twelve central female characters, most of whom are Queer and Women of Colour. With the discovery of Evaristo’s book came the assumption for many that she had simply become an overnight sensation with the success of this work. But her memoir tells the real story of a turbulent career spanning over forty years, in which Evaristo produced a total of eight novels. Each of her works plays with the conventions of the novel form in some way, often written in verse, which is something that makes her an incredibly distinct and interesting writer.
Though Evaristo won the Booker Prize a year ago, she has been working in the creative arts for her entire career. Graduating from Rose Bruford College in 1982 after studying Community Theatre Arts, she embarked on an initial career in theatre, during which she founded Theatre of Black Women, the first company of its kind in Britain. A thread that runs throughout this chapter is the importance of female friendships and alliances, particularly her connections with other Black women. Evaristo emphasises the integral part that her friendships with Paulette Randall and Patricia St Hilaire played in creating the company:
“Without our friendship as the starting point for the company, it would never have come into being”
Though the company eventually came to the end of its life, Evaristo’s time in theatre had a pivotal impact on her creative practice, and would work to shape her future identity as a novelist and writer.
“I wasn’t an overnight success, but everything changed overnight”
Now, aged 62, the author of eight novels and a memoir, Evaristo sat in her armchair at the Southbank Centre, dressed in a vibrant patterned suit and patent trainers, and confidently asserted that, at this point in her life, she feels unstoppable. Her energy was enough to fill the auditorium from wall to wall: made resilient by experience, she is such a force to be reckoned with. Her new book is a source of inspiration for any reader, and a call to action for anyone hoping to make a difference.
Featured image courtesy of Mari Potter on Unsplash . Image license found here. No changes were made to this image.
Evie Robinson
Final year BA English student at University College London. President of Pi Media, UCL's student publication. Arts, culture and current affairs writer and aspiring journalist.