40 pages • 1-hour read
Girl, Woman, Other
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Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1, Section 1 Summary: “Amma”
Content Warning: The source material and guide contain references to racism, anti-LGBTQ+ bias, domestic abuse, rape, addiction, and the history of slavery in the United States.
The book begins from the perspective of Amma Bonsu, a middle-aged theater director who is on her way to London’s National Theatre for a rehearsal of her most recent play, The Last Amazon of Dahomey, a work of historical fiction about warrior lesbian Amazons. The entire run of the show sold out before one review was filed. As she walks, Amma reflects on her life and career trajectory. After she “spent decades on the fringe” (2), Amma is now receiving recognition for her work. As a young person, she was a budding queer feminist living in a King’s Cross squat with other young people interested in alternative lifestyles. While living in the squat, she slept with a myriad of women and was reticent to settle down.
She reflects on meeting her best friend, Dominique, a fellow Black woman looking for work as an actor but unable to land parts that did not stereotype Black womanhood. Dominique and Amma bonded over this marginality and agreed to start their own all-female theater company. The company fractured when Dominique moved to the United States. Amma agreed to coparent a child together with her friend Roland, a now famed intellectual. Their daughter, Yazz, is now 19 years old.
Amma thinks about many of the guests who will be attending the opening of her play tonight. Among them is Shirley, her oldest friend. Amma met Shirley when the two were 11 years old and the only brown girls in their grammar school. Shirley eventually went into teaching while Amma went into theater, but they remained friends. Amma defended Shirley to her art friends, who found her dull, while Shirley babysat for Yazz and lent Amma money without complaint. While the relationship feels “one-way” for a time, Amma believes that she is making Shirley’s “predictable” life more interesting.
In the present day, Amma meets for drinks with her aging activist friend Sylvester, who chides her for becoming “establishment with a capital E” (33). While walking to the theater, Amma remembers the death of her mother, whom Amma accused of complying with Amma’s socialist father’s every whim. When her father died, Amma regretted rejecting her father’s love and agreed with her mother’s assessment that her father was a product “of his time and culture” (34). After her parents died, Amma bought a house in Brixton, where she lives today.
Chapter 1, Section 2 Summary: “Yazz”
The next section focuses on Amma’s 19-year-old daughter, Yazz, who dismisses Amma’s feminism by claiming that gender is irrelevant and passé. Yazz challenges her famed intellectual father on his all-white scholarly references and instead cites progressive thinkers of color like Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, and Edward Said. Yazz moves away to college with aspirations of becoming a journalist. She befriends a group of other students: Waris, a British Somalian from Wolverhampton; Nenet, who comes from a wealthy Egyptian family based in London; and Courtney, who grew up on a farm in Suffolk.
At first, Yazz dislikes Courtney, perceiving her as racist after Courtney asks the other young women to turn their music down when parties are raging in the rest of the college dorm. Nenet, ever the diplomat, invites Courtney in to dance. Courtney quickly becomes part of the clique. Yazz subsequently invites Courtney back to her house in Brixton for the holidays. She notices that Courtney gets more attention from men because she is white. While Yazz attempts to teach Courtney about the nature of privilege, Courtney cites her working-class background and quotes author Roxane Gay in maintaining that “privilege is about context and circumstance” (72).
Chapter 1, Section 3 Summary: “Dominique”
Dominique, Amma’s former business partner and best friend, first meets Nzinga, an African American woman, at Victoria train station in London. Dominique quickly falls in love with Nzinga, who introduces Dominique to a decolonized, feminist, and vegan lifestyle. Dominique introduces Nzinga to Amma, who is skeptical of Nzinga’s liberal yet restrictive life philosophies. Amma and Nzinga increasingly clash, and Nzinga responds with aggression. Amma realizes that Nzinga “could be a formidable opponent, the energy that had hitherto radiated warmth had quickly turned radioactive” (82). Nzinga gives Dominique an ultimatum: Either Dominique comes back to the United States with her or they break up. Much to Amma’s disappointment, Dominique moves with Nzinga to a feminist commune in the United States called Spirit Moon.
Once the couple arrives at Spirit Moon, Nzinga forbids Dominique from speaking to the other women at the commune, claiming that the members of the commune have bad intentions and that she and Dominique are simply there to work as housebuilders. Nzinga insists on renaming Dominique “Sojourner.” Dominique becomes increasingly isolated and depressed as Nzinga’s behavior becomes more and more controlling and abusive. After a failed attempt by Amma to rescue Dominique from Nzinga, Dominique finally escapes Nzinga when Gaia, the head of Spirit Moon, offers to help her leave while Nzinga is away. Dominique flees to Los Angeles, where she stays with some friends of Gaia’s until she gets on her feet. Dominique eventually founds a women’s arts festival. During a domestic abuse counseling group, Dominique meets her wife, Laverne, with whom she eventually adopts twins. Dominique hears from a former lover of Nzinga’s that Nzinga died of heart failure and that she took credit for Dominique’s success until she died.
Chapter 1 Analysis
The first chapter establishes the work’s setting and atmosphere, painting the portrait of a diverse, far-reaching community. It also introduces Evaristo’s means of building this portrait: character by character, each one tied to another by friendship, profession, or blood. Girl, Woman, Other shifts fluidly from the interiority of one character to that of the next—a stylistic choice that hints at the theme of Human Connectivity and Interdependence by refusing to sharply demarcate different characters’ perspectives. Key narrative details likewise support this theme. For example, Amma’s coparenting technique implies that the health of a collective depends on the individual efforts of every person. Furthermore, it lays the groundwork for an intergenerational saga in which at least two characters in each chapter are blood relations, establishing the theme of The Impact of Family Legacy.
Amma’s section introduces Evaristo’s deep inquiry into the myriad intersections of identity—most notably gender and race. Amma and Dominque’s struggles to find meaningful work as young, Black, female artists not only critiques racism and sexism but embodies the concept of intersectionality, or the idea that experiences of oppression overlap and combine in ways that are more than the sum of their parts. Amma and Dominique, for instance, often find their ideals of racial equity and gender equality at odds with each other. Amma’s play attempts to redress this problem by celebrating both African heritage and lesbian identity.
Through Dominique, Evaristo examines queer abuse and its connection to racial trauma. Evaristo illustrates how colonial violence is inherited and can be repeated, generation to generation, relationship to relationship. Nzinga espouses ideals of feminism and racial equality yet isolates Dominique from a supportive community. Nzinga’s behavior thus exemplifies how liberal ideals can be weaponized or distorted. Her insistence on renaming Dominique “Sojourner” is emblematic of this broader pattern. In its allusion to 19th-century abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth, it is an ostensibly progressive move. However, it erases Dominique’s personal and cultural identity and thus replicates the impact of slavery and imperialism on many people of African descent.
More specifically, Dominique identity as a Black woman is shaped by Diaspora in Great Britain. Yazz’s section illustrates just how multicultural contemporary Britain is, as Yazz’s college friends are of all different ethnicities. However, that same section highlights the racist and imperialist dynamics that continue to underpin contemporary British life. It is telling that both Nenet and Waris’s families emigrated from countries that were once part of the British Empire, as colonialism often stripped such regions of their wealth and severely curtailed opportunities to advance there.
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