Bernardine Evaristo made history when she was declared the joint winner of the Booker Prize in 2019. It's shocking that a black woman hadn't won the award before that point and “Girl, Woman, Other” has gone on to receive deserved success as a bestseller. It's great to see that Evaristo is using her fame to highlight black British writers from the past whose books went out of print by curating a series for Penguin Books called 'Black Britain, Writing Back.' These include newly reprinted editions of books by a variety of black writers focusing on different subjects in different genres. Evaristo states that these aren't meant to form a new canon, but begin to correct how “Black British writers rarely appear on these reading lists, are rarely taught to new generations of readers and unless they become commercial successes, their legacy very quickly disappears.”
I'm looking forward to exploring all the books in this series and the first book I read from it is Judith Bryan's “Bernard and the Cloth Monkey” which was first published in 1998 and won The Saga Prize. Anita or “An” returns to her family home in London after the death of her father. There she reconnects with her sister Beth who cared for their father during his illness. Their mother has gone on an extended holiday leaving the sisters alone together for the first time in years and this gives them time to sift through their troubled family past. As they care for and inhabit this home it takes on such a strong presence as the rooms seem laced with memories. The author evokes these through the eyes of the sisters whose narrative sometimes slips into the second person or takes on the characteristics of a fairy tale when describing the past. At first I found these shifts jarring but they came to make sense and feel very moving when I better understood the mentality of the sisters and the different traumatic events they experienced. It's a psychologically suspenseful story as well as a powerful portrait of the deleterious effects of complicit silence within the family home.
It's striking how strongly this novel conveys how when we live in close quarters with others we are also living with those people's egos. A person can form an enhanced sense of self which takes up space outside the physical body and when you live in close proximity to them you can be very aware of its presence. The author poignantly describes this in scenes where Anita witnesses her father's fantasy about reigning imperially over crowds of people or how her sister “bestrode the hall like a colossus” as she moves through the house in the early morning. For Anita herself, the imagined sense of self has more complex and serious consequences. I love how this story captures the ways in which we become so attentive to the people we live with that we can almost see their projections of themselves and the way they subjectively view the world. This novel also shows how significant and tragic it is that we learn not to speak about certain things or remark upon injustices which are occurring under one's own roof. It's such an honest representation of the intimacies of family life.
Although they are very different from each other and often have an antagonistic relationship, the sisters come to discuss a number of subjects which need to see the light of day. The story describes realms of female experience that have been pent up because of the domineering presence of their parents and men in their lives. In doing so it records a shift in perspective between generations and there's an especially poignant scene where a number of black female characters are together discussing the particular burdens placed upon them even while they are aware their parents sometimes made sacrifices for their (intended) benefit. The evolving and sometimes conflicting views expressed feel like they can only be vented now that the parents are absent from the house. By doing so the sisters take ownership of both the home and their heritage as well as expelling the mythologies their parents created.
I also appreciated how this novel showed different sides of London. Outside of the suburban home, Anita meets an old flame of hers in a number of different locations around the city. It gives a distinct and refreshing view of a city as it is actually inhabited by people who live there as opposed to how it's glamorized in post cards. In one funny scene Anita and Steve take a boat ride with tourists and view London from the perspective of outsiders. But there's also a sense of how the city has taken residence within their home to depersonalize it: “The spoils of John Lewis stores and Selfridges obscuring the real house An knew to be just under the surface.” It's interesting that the story shows how these physical locations and the people within them are in a state of flux and continuously influence each other. “Bernard and the Cloth Monkey” is filled with striking imagery and expresses a memorable point of view.
