Girl, Woman, Other

“Amma then spent decades on the fringe, a renegade lobbing 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 in.” 

Evaristo comments on the politics of the arts industry and the simultaneous desire for and rejection of monetary validation for one’s art form. Through Amma, Evaristo points out the hypocrisy of this system and ties it back to the unrealistic demands of capitalism.

“[A]ged sixteen, aspiring to become an actress, she headed for London where people proudly proclaimed their outside identities on badges.” 

Amma’s journey to find acceptance illustrates Evaristo’s interest in the intersections of identity and her portrait of myriad underrepresented communities in Great Britain and beyond.

“I tell Mum, she married a patriarch. Look at it this way, Amma, she says, your father was born male in Ghana in the 1920s whereas you were born female in London in the 1960s.” 

Touching on the book’s theme of the effects of diaspora in Great Britain, Amma’s mother attempts to explain to Amma the cultural dissonance between the way her father was socialized in Ghana in the 1920s and what Amma has been brought up to expect as a Londoner in the 1960s.