Evaristo, Bernardine
EVARISTO, Bernardine
Nationality: British. Born: London, 1959. Career: Poet-in-residence, Museum of London, 1999. Awards: Emma Best book award, for Lara; Arts Council Writers award, 2000.
Publications
Play
Moving Through (produced London, 1982).
Novel
Lara. Turnbridge Wells, Kent, Angela Royal, 1997.
* * *Bernardine Evaristo combines a highly textual sense of form with oral performance poetry. She can mix autobiography with fiction and appear objective and noncommitted while observing through black feminist eyes. Her volume Island of Abraham often recalls what otherwise might be ignored as not belonging to the way in which history is recorded by whites and Europeans. Even when this non-European past is brought to attention by, say, an archaeologist, it becomes a tourist's view of strange ruins without recapturing the actual nature of what it was like. "Epitaph," with its awareness of loss, is like Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn":
Ethiopian, Aztec, Ashanti,
Mongol, Ottoman, Shang,
Inca, Moor, Mayan.
Your years did not stand still
like upright Corinthian pillars
but were flowing rivers
carrying the memories of your deeds.
A poem of black third world protest becomes an elegy on the decay and death of civilizations, which end in ruins: "Nothing lasts forever. / Europe's empires dissolved to dust, / … for all great civilisations live and die." The tone, voice, and movement of the poem, the feeling of balance, and even the piling up of rich sounding nouns and the use of time as a river seem influenced by Derek Walcott, especially the Walcott of "A Far Cry from Africa" and "Ruins of a Great House."
Other poems have Walcott's measured, elegiac way of treating topics through distance and respect. One of Evaristo's recurring themes is her mixed ancestry and how little she knows of her Nigerian father. In "Father, My Father" she says, "Daddy, I cannot read your eyes. / Those brown orbs of Yoruba history." In many of the poems the poet is an outsider in other lands, a traveler familiar with fear and with overcoming it. It is this knowledge that allows the speaker to feel superior to her "male, white and young" Spanish-speaking acquaintance in "Spanish Blues," which concludes with her entering a café in Grenada full of paintings of symbols of masculinity, where "I order a whisky, marvel at the measure, / swallow the fire easily, this time." In the poem "Island of Abraham" she flies to Sainte Marie Island, off mainland Madagascar. This is one of several poems in which the speaker desires to be one with the natives, only to be regarded as another rich foreign tourist, a colored white. She imagines herself as a small girl in 1666 watching the arrival of pirates, the first white men: "the island would never be the same again, / its virginal membrane broken." The results of history are "recalled now in the green-eyed, / dark skinned boy."
This is in part Evaristo's situation. She is a product of Europe's encounter with other people, and although she attempts to identify with the others, she is herself a tourist from England enjoying herself on this island off the coast of Madagascar. There is a desire for rootedness, community, belonging, and continuity. This is associated with family, females, and being black and is contrasted with strangers, male culture, and whites. "Antique Gold and Burning Rose" speaks once more of "memory" and speaks of visions of African women in the Sudan and Egypt: "I recall Cleopatra, Seacole, / Tubman, Bricktop and Baker." In the next poem, "Simple Scribe," Evaristo imagines herself and her poetry as being like a scribal writer in the past, "trying to learn so that I can pass on / trying to listen so that I can hear / trying to move so that I can enter."
Lara, a novel in verse, is part of an attempt to rediscover and invent a usable past. On her mother's side Omilara is the product of a poor Irish Catholic family that moved to England in the nineteenth century and that tried to raise itself out of illegitimacy to the security of the middle class. This was what was intended for Ellen, Lara's mother, until she met and married an African, one of the black immigrants who arrived in England after World War II in search of a higher education and with a desire to be at the center of the British Empire. Taiwo, a Nigerian, is from a Lagos Yoruba family earlier taken as slaves to Brazil, from whence some had returned to Africa after emancipation to form a small, elite enclave during the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As these two stories might suggest, although the history of slavery and white domination are the main focus of black-white race relations, the actual history is more complex. The story of the Irish and the working class often has its parallels in black history, while the continuing movement of people of African descent back and forth across the Atlantic and to England has taken place over several centuries and has resulted in a complex black history of class and cultural differences.
The first half of Lara is concerned with the history of the girl's white family and with her life in England. It is a story about Irish Catholics in what to them is a harsh world with few comforts except family and church. This must be one of the last portraits of a way of life that is now passing. It feels solidly present in the poems, as do the attraction of Ellen toward Taiwo, the mixture in Ellen's mother of racial prejudice and the fear of losing class status if her daughter marries a black man, life in England immediately after World War II, Lara's youth in a large household in a working-class suburb, and her experience of the cultural and political fashions that followed the swinging 1960s.
Ellen experiences discrimination for marrying a black man and is rejected by her mother until the children are born, when there is a semireconciliation. Lara's own childhood is both typical and troubled by racial hurts, but more often she is bothered by being different, so that naive questions of where she is from can wound her. She wants to be like everyone else until, sexually awakened, she also becomes conscious of color and has an affair with a black Etonian. She then plunges into black England, trying to find a supportive identity, and toward the end of the book travels to Nigeria and Brazil and then back to Nigeria before returning to England. This symbolically recapitulates the journey of her black ancestors and is emotionally cleansing, allowing her to face London reborn, knowing who she is, a product of several cultures, each with its own complex history.
—Bruce King