Yahoo Finance Bernardine Evaristo: I’m not white, upper class or privileged — it’s been a very, very long journey
‘I want to be a role model,’ says Bernardine Evaristo emphatically. ‘And an inspiration. Because my background, it’s not, you know, a white background. It’s not upper-class; it’s not privileged; it’s not Oxbridge. I come from a large, working-class, mixed-race family growing up in suburbia. The things that have happened to my career this last year have been absolutely wonderful, but people shouldn’t forget that it’s been a very, very long journey.’
The 61-year-old winner of the 2019 Booker Prize sits at a 10-seat distance from me (it’s before the latest lockdown), in the front row of the theatre-in-the-round of Rose Bruford College. Evaristo has just begun a five-year term as president of the Kent drama school. There is a satisfying circularity to this alumna appointment. These days Evaristo thinks of herself, with occasional amusement, as part of the establishment: a professor of literature at Brunel University; an honorary fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford; a vice-president of the Royal Society of Literature; an OBE recipient on the Queen’s 2020 birthday honours list.
None of that, however, was her expectation 40 years ago when she was ‘a very happy’ student here at Rose Bruford. It took the young Woolwich-raised Evaristo, fourth of eight children of an immigrant West African father and British mother, three rounds of drama school applications to secure any offers. She chose the college, set around a manor house on the leafy fringes of Sidcup, because it offered a course in community theatre and she knew how challenging it would be to find work as a black actor. ‘Other drama courses would have trained me to act,’ she says. ‘But not given that sense of control over my career from also being able to create theatre.’ On graduating in 1982, she co-founded Britain’s first black women’s theatre company, Theatre of Black Women, with fellow students Paulette Randall and Patricia St Hilaire.
There is a significantly broadened culture of opportunity for black theatre-makers today but Evaristo hopes her appointment to this ceremonial role, following former National Theatre director Sir Richard Eyre, will bolster students’ ambitions. ‘I hope that for black students in particular, it will have a resonance,’ she says. ‘For the student body as a whole I feel that I have a lot of wisdom to share. I have been in the arts professionally since 1982, and that is a very long time to last, first in theatre and then in writing. I hope I can impart to the students here — in a hopeful way — that need to be resourceful, tenacious, resilient, imaginative, determined beyond belief and committed to your art in the face of all kinds of adversity.’ Even something as extreme as theatre’s annus horribilis in 2020.
We meet in what now seem the sunny uplands of Tier 3 on a bracingly bright, clear day before Christmas. After having her photograph taken in Rose Bruford’s landscaped Lamorbey Park grounds, Evaristo and I head into the theatre. Her eighth, Booker-nabbing novel, Girl, Woman, Other, begins outside a theatre: with Amma sauntering down the South Bank on the day the black, feminist epic she has written and directed, The Last Amazon of Dahomey, opens at the National. Of the 12, mostly female, mostly black, characters explored in that novel, Amma’s story seems the most infused with the young Evaristo. The author now smiles fondly about her ‘lesbian era’ (she and husband, writer David Shannon, have been together since 2006). Meanwhile Amma, a gay veteran of radical feminist theatre, has ‘spent decades on the fringe, a renegade lobbying hand grenades at the establishment that excluded her until the mainstream began to absorb what was once radical and she found herself hopeful of joining it’.
Of her own accession to establishment positions, Evaristo says: ‘I’m not interested in a status quo that is exclusionary. When I get into these positions of symbolic or actual power, I’m there to represent people who I feel should become part of the narrative of that organisation.’
Being the first black British woman to be awarded the Booker, a prize she shared with Margaret Atwood that year, has given Evaristo a powerful mainstream platform. ‘I’ve done nothing but talk,’ she chuckles, eyes glinting. ‘Everything changed for me through winning the prize. I have this background as an activist, which I’ve carried on with, but now more people pay attention.’
For years, Evaristo has been known in literary circles, for her advocacy of inclusion, and nurturing of younger authors. The Complete Works poetry scheme she founded, which mentored 30 poets of colour, can genuinely be said to have transformed British spoken and written word. Graduates include the multi-award-winning Jay Bernard, Raymond Antrobus and Sarah Howe. She also co-founded the influential writers’ development agency, Spread The Word.
Evaristo began Girl, Woman, Other in 2013. While writing, she sensed a shift in the world, that the political momentum of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter had ‘created more interest in that kind of story, and black women’s lives generally’. The book came out, relatively quietly, in May 2019. It was the Booker win that October that transformed its fortunes, with 28 translation deals secured within a month, and an end-of-year endorsement from Barack Obama. Historian David Olusoga has said its Booker triumph symbolises a progressive shift in British cultural attitudes. The toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol was another symbolic moment in a year of seismic change — what did she think its impact was on the British Black Lives Matter movement? ‘Events last summer really did change the focus here. Previously, it was very easy for British people to point to America, look at the levels of discrimination there and think, “Well, we don’t have that kind of problem here.”
‘But Britain is a country that is systemically racist in lots of different ways, that has refused for a long time to examine that. What happened last summer prompted many British institutions to look more seriously at their own practices and attitudes.’
Some artists have rejected honours, such as OBEs and MBEs, because of their association with the British Empire. ‘They are old-fashioned terms and they need to change them,’ says Evaristo. ‘But I’m happy to accept these recognitions as a national honour. Also, my argument is, what does it look like if we don’t accept them? If black and Asian authors don’t, then they become white honours for white British people and that goes right up to people becoming Dames and entering the House of Lords. We continue our exclusion from certain levels of participation in society, and I think that would be sad.’
Though energised by the success of a generation of black creatives such as directors Lynette Linton and Ola Ince, writer-performers Michaela Coel and Inua Ellams and Steve McQueen’s Small Axe BBC1 drama season, she hopes to see more emerging black talent behind the scenes and at the helm of cultural organisations, as well as less familial pressure on children from immigrant backgrounds to jettison creative vocations.
She also hopes to see Girl, Woman, Other adapted for the stage, ideally at the National in keeping with its protagonist Amma’s play. The novel was optioned for TV early last year but that was just before the pandemic struck and things have since gone quiet. So is there serious talk of a theatre version? ‘Not at the moment,’ says Evaristo. ‘But focus on that [in this piece], because I really want them to!’ You get the feeling she’ll make it happen.
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