Bernardine Evaristo won the Booker prize with a novel full of proud black female characters, but reveals today that she struggled with her racial identity as a child.
Evaristo, 61, the daughter of a white English teacher and a Nigerian welder, said she once crossed the road to avoid being seen with her father because he was “a very dark-skinned black man”.
“I remember when I was about 11, seeing him walking down the street towards me and I crossed the road because I didn’t want to say hello to him because I didn’t want to be associated with him,” she says on today’s Desert Island Discs on Radio 4. “I mean, that feels terrible now, but that’s what it was like, because growing up in the 1960s and 70s, in a very white area, there was nothing around us to tell us that being a person of colour was a good thing.”
The author, who grew up in Woolwich, southeast London, said she and her seven siblings were taught nothing about their Nigerian heritage by their father, who adopted the English name Danny. She was the fourth of eight children.
“He had four boys, four girls at a time when there was a lot of racism on the streets before the Race Relations Act. So he had children in a society where it was kind of OK to be racist, and he had to protect us.”
As a child, she would travel by bus to grammar school in nearby Eltham where the black teenager Stephen Lawrence would later be murdered in a racially motivated attack.
Evaristo suspects her father’s actions were because he was scared for his children. “He didn’t tell us anything. He said later on that he wanted us to grow up as English children and so it wouldn’t be wise for him to tell us about his past or to pass on his language, which was Yoruba.”
Her Booker-winning novel Girl, Woman, Other spent five weeks at the top of the charts this summer in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests. That achievement made her the first black or minority ethnic woman and the first black British writer to assume the top spot in the UK paperback fiction charts.
The book — her eighth in a 25-year career — has sold tens of thousands of copies and been translated into 26 languages. A television adaptation is expected in 2022 after Potboiler Television bought the rights earlier this year.
She was a joint winner with Margaret Atwood for The Testaments, her follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale, after the judges broke the rules to declare a tie. The pair split the £50,000 prize money.
Evaristo, who once dreamt of becoming a Catholic nun, said: “I wanted to write a book that had as many black British women in it as possible, because there were so few of us getting published. We just weren’t really present in British fiction or fiction anywhere in the world, to be honest.”
As well as facing racism from white people growing up, Evaristo said she was also not always welcomed by black people. She said: “Growing up we were called ... half caste and that didn’t feel like an insult. That was what mixed-race people were called.”
She added: “There were identity issues about, do I really fit into any kind of black culture when I have a white mother, and I wasn’t always welcome either in black spaces because I was mixed race.” In 1997, while researching her family history for a semi-autobiographical novel titled Lara, Evaristo finally reconciled her identity. She said: “I’ve never looked back from that. I identify as a black woman. And I’m happy to claim that as my identity, and within that I’m also a mixed-race woman, or you might say biracial or whatever term is around that comes in the future. And I’m very solid in it.”
Evaristo, who guest edited The Sunday Times’s Style section in July, also discussed being a lesbian for about 10 years and having “lots of relationships”. She is married to David, whom she met in 2006. The couple do not have children.
Her father was a “disciplinarian” and supporter of corporal punishment for his children. Evaristo said: “He was a mystery. My father didn’t talk to us. He disciplined us and he told us off but he didn’t really chat to us.”
The 5ft 5in amateur boxer arrived in Britain aboard the Apapa, a ship from Nigeria, in 1949. First, he settled with his older half-brother John in Liverpool, and then headed to Brixton, south London. He met his future wife at the Catholic Overseas Club near Victoria station, but the interracial marriage faced hostility from her white family.
To the outside world Danny was a charismatic, gregarious man who loved to dance with his friends. He became actively involved in the local Labour Party and became the first black man to serve as a councillor in Greenwich, south London. He died 20 years ago, aged 72.
As professor of creative writing at Brunel University, Evaristo is one of only 26 black women among the UK’s 20,000 university professors and wants other people to speak out. “I’m not doing any more diversity panels,” she promised. “But I can drop tweets.”
