Bernadine Evaristo: Horizons of Identity

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the one of the most famous Afro-British writers — Bernardine Evaristo. In 2021, her book “Girl, Woman, Other” was translated and published in the Russian language. Earlier (in 2019), it had become a winner of the Booker Prize. The authors of the article focus on the problems that primarily concern the writer herself. These include feminism and gender equality, professional motivation and the texture of success, crisis and the search for identity, otherness and dissent, cross-cultural dialogue and existence on the verge of tradition, as well as the theme of the House (with a capital letter), within which, ideally, it is quite possible for representatives of different races, ethnicities and cultures to coexist.Bernardine Evaristo tried herself as an actress, screenwriter, director, radio and TV presenter and uses the experience gained in her literary works. Their genre is difficult to define. The novel “Girl, Woman, Other” is a kind of anthology of women’s experience. Foreign criticism defines it as fusion prose (a combination of the incompatible). It contains the authenticity of non-fiction and the miracles of magic, unobtrusive notes of maternal instructions and mesmerizing rhythms of blues poetry. The author avoids capital letters in her text; there are no main or secondary characters in the book. The author gives her protagonists (there are twelve of them as the number of Christian apostles) the opportunity to recognize their selfness, expand the horizons of their own identity. Together with them — her messengers — she tries to comprehend the meaning of her own existence as a woman, as a person, as another.