Girl, Woman, Other. Bernardine Evaristo
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Название: Girl, Woman, Other

Автор: Bernardine Evaristo

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература

Серия: Booker Prize Winner

isbn: 9780802156990

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      as for me, I get my fighting spirit from my dad, Kwabena, who was a journalist campaigning for Independence in Ghana

      until he heard he was going to be arrested for sedition, legged it over here, ended up working on the railways where he met Mum at London Bridge station

      he was a ticket collector, she worked in the offices above the concourse

      he made sure to be the one to take her ticket, she made sure to be the last person to leave the train so she could exchange a few words with him

      Mum, Helen, is half-caste, born in 1935 in Scotland

      her father was a Nigerian student who vanished as soon as he finished his studies at the University of Aberdeen

      he never said goodbye

      years later her mother discovered he’d gone back to his wife and children in Nigeria

      she didn’t even know he had a wife and children

      Mum wasn’t the only half-caste in Aberdeen in the thirties and forties but she was rare enough to be made to feel it

      she left school early, went to secretarial college, headed down to London, just as it was being populated by African men who’d come to study or work

      Mum went to their dances and Soho clubs, they liked her lighter skin and looser hair

      she says she felt ugly until African men told her she wasn’t

      you should see what she looked like back then

      a cross between Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge

      so yeh, really ugly

      Mum hoped to spend their first date going to see a film and then on to her favourite spot, Club Afrique, right here in Soho, she’d dropped enough hints and loved to dance to highlife and West African jazz

      instead he took her to one of his socialist meetings in the backroom of a pub at the Elephant and Castle

      where a group of men sat guzzling beers and talking independence politics

      she sat there trying to act interested, impressed by his intellect

      he was impressed with her silent acquiescence, if you ask me

      they married and moved to Peckham

      I was their last child and first girl, Amma explained, blowing smoke into the already thickening fug of the room

      my three older brothers became lawyers and a doctor, their obedience to the expectations of our father meant I wasn’t pressurized to follow suit

      his only concern for me is marriage and children

      he thinks my acting career is a hobby until I have both

      Dad’s a socialist who wants a revolution to improve the lot of all of mankind

      literally

      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

      and your point is?

      you really can’t expect him to ‘get you’, as you put it

      I let her know she’s an apologist for the patriarchy and complicit in a system that oppresses all women

      she says human beings are complex

      I tell her not to patronize me

      Mum worked eight hours a day in paid employment, raised four children, maintained the home, made sure the patriarch’s dinner was on the table every night and his shirts were ironed every morning

      meanwhile, he was off saving the world

      his one domestic duty was to bring home the meat for Sunday lunch from the butcher’s – a suburban kind of hunter-gatherer thing

      I can tell Mum’s unfulfilled now we’ve all left home because she spends her time either cleaning it or redecorating it

      she’s never complained about her lot, or argued with him, a sure sign she’s oppressed

      she told me she tried to hold his hand in the early days, but he shook her off, said affection was an English affectation, she never tried again

      yet every year he gets her the soppiest Valentine card you can buy and he loves sentimental country music, sits in the kitchen on Sunday evenings listening to albums of Jim Reeves and Charley Pride

      tumbler of whisky in one hand, wiping tears away with the other

      Dad lives for campaigning meetings, demos, picketing Parliament and standing in Lewisham Market selling the Socialist Worker

      I grew up listening to his sermons during our evening meal on the evils of capitalism and colonialism and the merits of socialism

      it was his pulpit and we were his captive congregation

      it was like we were literally being force-fed his politics

      he’d probably be an important person in Ghana if he’d returned after Independence

      instead he’s President for Life of our family

      he doesn’t know I’m a dyke, are you kidding? Mum told me not to tell him, it was hard enough telling her, she said she suspected when pencil skirts and curly perms were all the rage and I started wearing men’s Levis

      she’s sure it’s a phase, which I’ll throw back at her when I’m forty

      Dad has no time for ‘the fairies’ and laughs at all the homophobic jokes comedians make on telly every Saturday night when they’re not insulting their mother-in-law or black people

      Amma spoke about going to her first black women’s group in Brixton in her last year at school, she’d seen a flyer at her local library

      the woman who opened the door, Elaine, sported a perfect halo of an afro and her smooth limbs were clad tightly in light blue denim jeans and tight denim shirt

      Amma wanted her on sight, followed her into the main room where women sat on sofas, chairs, cushions, cross-legged on the floor, drinking cups of coffee and cider

      she nervously accepted cigarettes as they were passed around, sat on the floor leaning against a cat-mauled tweedy armchair, feeling Elaine’s warm leg against her arm

      she listened as they debated what it meant to be a black woman

      what it meant to be a feminist when white feminist organizations made them feel unwelcome

      how it felt when people called them nigger, or racist thugs beat them up

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