"Being / together": Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other and the Black British Women's Movement

This essay locates Bernardine Evaristo's Booker Prize-winning novel Girl, Woman, Other (2019) within the sociopolitical history and written lineage of the Black women's movement in Britain. It identifies contextual resonances with the 1970s and 1980s praxis of collaboration and collectivity and traces intertextual connections with Evaristo's own early writing (including theater, verse fiction, and the radio story from which the novel evolved) and the periodicals, anthologies, and organization newsletters of the time. These references illuminate the novel's structure, lineation, and narrative mode. I argue that Girl, Woman, Other reanimates the rallying call "we are here," affirming the presence and diversity of Black lives in Britain, while its distinctive "fusion fiction" form actively engages readers, realizing the Black feminist political principle of "speaking out."