"I hear babies cry
they'll learn much more
than I'll ever know
and I think to myself
what a wonderful world" ( Louis Armstrong),
modern England,
Amma, a socialist play write, living her life as she deemed fit since the age of 16, when she came out,
Yazz, her daughter, challenging the feminism of her mum,
Dominique, Amma's life long friend and once, business partner, who has since moved to LA.
Shirley, another life long friend of Amma's, who's discontent with what she always wanted in life,
Carol, her student, a go getter, who hasn't looked back, in her single minded ambition, which makes her not realise, the contribution of others, and stays grounded, only because of her husband
...
and the list goes on,
twelve characters in all,
connected across time, their social interactions, relations, tragedies, successes,
a collage of sorts, which makes London , ( And United Kingom to a lesser extent),
a multi-ethnic vibrancy of life today, where thinking change, acceptance is newly defined, wokeness itself is given new meaning, we meet Morgan, who was formerly Megan, and when life was explained to her, by her friend,
"being trans wasn’t about playacting an identity on a whim, it’s about becoming your true self in spite of society’s pressures to be otherwise, most people on the trans spectrum felt different from childhood,”
not all whom we meet are positively woke, we come across Dominique's lover, Nzinga,
who's version of possessiveness, and the physical and emotional torture can put to shame any "not so awoke" wife abusing man of the former times,
while feminism itself sounds dated, as Amma is told by her daughter, Yazz, elaborating on the impending irrelevance of a binary gender, thus,
nor is the child she raised to be a feminist calling herself one lately
feminism is ho herd-like, Yazz told her, to be honest, even being a woman is passé these days, we had a non-binary activist at uni called Morgan Malenga who opened my eyes, I reckon we’re all going to be non-binary in the future, neither male or female, which are gendered performances anyway, which means your women’s politics, Mumsy, will become redundant, and by the way, I’m humanitarian, which is on a much higher plane than feminism
do you even know what it is?
in form, Bernardine, uses, one, a prose like structure, (which yours truly had tried to copy within his modest skill), and two,
narrates her tale of a hundred years or more, between the opening night of Amma's latest play,
and it's after party, coming a full circle, to show the connections, adding an epilogue,
to illustrate the irrationality of racism,via the only white character ( or so she believed ),
of the twelve characters....
the beauty of Man Booker award winners is, the reader is continually challenged,
in structure, style and content, where I now took the ride that Bernardine Evaristo,
wanted the reader, myself, to take part,
similar to how George Saunders achieved a similar feat, with "Lincoln in the Bardo"...
Genre : Fiction
Published in: 2019
Man Booker Award Winner: 2020 ( tied with "The Testaments")
My Rating: ****1/2
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