Summary
Amma's story kickstarts Girl, Woman, Other. When we meet her, Amma is middle-aged, has newly been appointed as the director of London's National Theatre, is set to debut her play in the theatre, and has a university-age daughter and two female lovers. However, things were not always so established, or stable, in Amma's life. Amma's vignette delves into the past to tell how she overcame squatting in an abandoned building, established her own theater company with her best friend, Dominique, and had a string of lesbian love affairs in her twenties and thirties.
Amma was born in the sixties to a mixed-race mother and Ghanaian father in London. Growing up, she always felt that her father was, paradoxically, both a socialist and a patriarch, who was a staunch progressive outside the house but controlled his wife unrelentingly at home. Observing the traditional male and female roles play out in the interactions between her parents may have established a radical bent in Amma, who, in her young adulthood, become an outspoken feminist. She aspired, along with Dominique, to be an actress. To their dismay, the only theaters hiring black women were seeking to fill roles that involved "semi-naked women running around on stage behaving like idiots." Disappointed and disillusioned, Dominique and Amma started their own theater, the Bush Women Theatre, for others who were similarly underrepresented in theater. Over time, Amma builds a reputation in the underground theater scene, makes a great group of friends, and buys a house in Brixton.
There, she decides to have a daughter with Roland, a gay friend, who agrees to be a sperm donor. Amma gives birth to Yazz, and parents her to be as outspoken and progressive as her mother is.
Yazz
Yazz, the university-age daughter of Amma and Roland, is skeptical and strong-minded but ultimately big-hearted. She frequently finds herself disagreeing with the ideas and behaviors of her mother and her mother's friends, leading to certain disagreements at home. However, having just started at university and living in the dorms, she begins to navigate a life on her own for the first time. She plans to become a journalist "because she has a lot to say and it's about time the whole world heard her." At university, she also forms a "squad"—her friend group consisting of Waris, Courtney, and Nenet. Waris is "black, Muslim, poor, hijabbed," but even so, a fighter at heart. Waris is determined to become a politician and fight for social change. Courtney is a white, blonde woman who, though in Yazz's eyes is "ignorant of other cultures" because she was raised on a farm, has a "strength of character and chutzpah" that the squad admires. Finally, Nenet is the wealthy daughter of Egyptian diplomats, who uses her family's money to cheat on exams and buy designer handbags. Yazz feels uncertain about maintaining a friendship with Nenet because of her slacker morals and "privilege."
Dominique
Dominique and Amma met when they were young adults auditioning to be actors. Both were black, lesbian, and politically minded women, and the two formed an instant bond. They began work on the Bush Women Theatre together and remain good friends over decades. In her mid-twenties, Dominique meets Nzinga, an older African American woman. The two feel instantly drawn to each other. For Dominique, Nzinga serves as a sort of mentor figure, and appears to be more enlightened, more wise about the condition of the black woman than anyone Dominique has ever met. This relationship envelops Dominique until Nzinga is her whole world. When Nzinga announces that she will soon return to America, she gives Dominique an ultimatum: it's Nzinga or London. Of course, Dominique follows the older woman to Long Island, New York, where the two will live on a lesbian-only commune called Spirit Moon.
As the two settle into routine, it becomes clear that something is off: Nzinga controls who Dominique can speak to, what she can eat, hides letters that come in from family back home, and even renames Dominique "Sojourner." What Dominique once felt was magical quickly becomes stifling, then emotionally, and finally, physically abusive.
The other women of Spirit Moon step in to help Dominique escape, purchasing a plane ticket for her. She heads for the west coast, where she is nursed back to health by a lesbian couple. To remain in the United States, Dominique marries a gay man, then begins to establish herself in the creative scene in California. Eventually, she starts her own women-only film festival and meets Laverne, her long-term partner, whom she marries when gay marriage is legalized in California.
Analysis
The narrator maintains the same reflective yet humorous tone in each character's vignette, and even direct thoughts attributed to different characters share this same tone. Even with a shared narrative tone, however, each character's personality shines through independently—and indeed, the characters differ greatly from each other. Clearly, then, tone is not the literary device that conveys each character's personality and voice. What, then, shapes the reader's understanding of Amma as free-spirited and strong-willed, Yazz as cynical, rebellious but ultimately goodhearted, and Dominique as fun-loving but tethered or grounded? How do we come to understand the characters as distinct when they all seem to share the same "voice" or tone?
The first thing that comes to mind is the respective plot or action in which the characters are involved. Amma's life trajectory differs greatly from Yazz's and Dominique's. For example, while Amma spends her twenties squatting in an abandoned building, Yazz will spend them at university (though in the novel she has not even quite yet reached her twenties), and Dominique on a lesbian commune in Long Island. Clearly, these contextual circumstances differ, and then, within these different contexts, each character also responds and thinks differently. Amma may technically be bordering on homeless, but she makes life exhilarating by creating in the theater scene and in having multitudinous lovers. Yazz is at university and determined to succeed in order to "wrest intellectual control from [the] elders." Dominique finds herself loving, then losing herself in the pull of a strong magnetic force—her lover Nzinga. Both the characters' contexts and their reactions to the contexts inform how the reader perceives and labels each's personality.
Other than simple plot, the structure of the novel also helps to characterize Amma, Yazz, and Dominique. Amma's vignette comes before both Yazz's and Dominique's, and since the latter two characters' lives deeply touch Amma's, their tales are told through Amma. That is, we first read about Yazz not in her own vignette, but in Amma's. Amma tells us how she perceives Yazz's metamorphoses from infant to child to adolescent before we enter into Yazz's life from her own perspective. Because of the order of the narrative, we first gain an understanding of another character from the perspective of a first character. The first character's depictions of the second character tend to lend insight into both characters' personalities.
To better understand this phenomenon, let's delve into the concrete examples found in Amma and Yazz. Amma describes the adolescent Yazz as having a "spiteful snake" in her mouth that exists to lash out at her mother, and "stomp[] about" the house. Even so, Amma "misses her." From the way Amma understands and reflects on Yazz's action, we understand that though she may feel hurt at her daughter's harsh words or tantrums, she ultimately loves and misses her. The corresponding section in Yazz's vignette deals with her belief that the "older generation has RUINED EVERYTHING." We know Yazz believes this because she says so, but we are not told how this belief manifests in action by Yazz herself. However, because we have already read Amma's vignette (which comes chronologically first), we know concretely that Yazz's conviction that her mother's generation has led the world astray causes her to lash out with her "spiteful snake" at Amma.
This vignette-style structure fundamentally juxtaposes different characters' reflections and reactions to corresponding actions, a juxtaposition that ultimately helps to characterize each character: Amma feels frustrated with her teenage daughter's antics, but has the wisdom and patience to endure it with love nonetheless. Meanwhile, Yazz's seemingly arbitrary tantrums are also contextualized as stemming from a genuine conviction in the rightness of her action and the wrongness of her mother's (and Amma's generation's). The structuring of character narratives operates throughout the novel to highlight differences between all 12 characters.
