When I was a young feminist working in theatre, I used to heckle
shows I considered offensive. One time, a friend and I poured beer
over a director’s head because we objected to the way black women
had been portrayed in his play. Unsurprisingly, we developed a repu-
tation for being troublemakers and were scorned. It was the
Eighties, and today I think we’d be hailed as principled activist
queens, beautifully belligerent with our radical chic: shaved heads
or funky dreadlocks, goth eyes, map-of-Africa earrings, oversize
men’s coats and Doc Martens. We might even be fronting adver-
tising campaigns.
My latest novel, Girl, Woman, Other, follows the lives of 12 pri-
marily black British female characters – each beautiful in her own
way – with interlinking stories. I wanted the book to be a celebration
of black women, to challenge assumptions about beauty, and to
encompass a variety of cultural backgrounds, ages, sexualities,
classes and occupations. My experience of Eighties counterculture
is captured through two of the women, Amma and Dominique, who
set up a theatre company, as I did, and decades later reflect on how
feminism has come full circle, thanks to the vocal power of millen-
nials. Amma, now in her fifties, is a curvy, eccentric dresser who
sports a head full of tiny blonde dreadlocks and wears gold trainers
and Birkies. Dominique is tall, thin, biker-leather cool, and draped
in chunky silver jewellery. Both are political and individualistic,
energetic and successful.
All of the women featured in the novel have evolving relation-
ships with the idea of beauty and the
female body. The reader will see one
teenager pinching her thighs so hard
they hurt in order to prove to a friend
that she has cellulite, while another
admiringly describes stretch marks as
looking like art and feeling like Braille.
A working-class woman of Nigerian
parentage goes to Oxford, changes her
accent, becomes a banker, dresses in tailored skirt suits and pearls,
and tightens her straightened hair into a topknot in order to be more
acceptable in society and at work. A retired teacher, who feels over-
weight and overlooked, dreads appearing naked in front of her new
boyfriend. When she does, he admiringly likens her to Botticelli’s
Venus. She thinks he’s being kind, but secretly hopes he means it.
Beauty has been too narrowly defined for too long and my novel
shows the consequences of this, while also challenging it and
offering different possibilities. We must accept the variety of skin
shades of the human family, without some kind of hierarchy that
positions whiteness as best. We should celebrate hair that coils and
springs outwards and upwards in a thickly energetic mass of lust-
rous vitality – free, explosive, unapologetic. We can choose to love
our size, our mounds and curves, our cellulite, wrinkles, the marks
on our body, the patterning of our pigment, the alignment of our
bones, and the interesting ways in which flesh wraps itself around
and shapes us. We can find beauty in the way gravity transforms
our bodies as we age, whether we are 30, 50 or 80. Ageing is a beau-
tiful thing, all those years of living, all the accrued insights and
mature perspectives.
We are raised to believe that beauty is an ideal that comes in
a form other than who we are. We compare ourselves to unattain-
able versions of a perfection that usually exists through the lens of a
camera and with the help of digital technology. We break down our
bodies into parts we like and parts we hate, as if we are a mismatched
jigsaw puzzle. Yet we are all works of art, we are all life models, we
have so much character and possibility in our physicality, a physi-
cality that bears our genetic code and is testament to our lifestyle
and choices. Beauty is about being who we are and not pandering to
pressures to be otherwise. Ultimately, we are all the fascinating
embodiment of the sinew of muscle, organs, blood, water and bones- and we are alive, we are alive.
‘ G i r l , W o m a n , O t h e r ’ b y B e r n a r d i n e E v a r i s t o ( £ 16. 9 9 , H a m i s h H a m i l t o n )
is out now.
‘Beauty is a profound sense of inner confidence.
To be beautiful is to know your own prowess
and fearlessly exhibit it’ Mickalene Thomas
FREEDOM
by Bernardine Evaristo
Beauty is...