The Last Amazon of Dohamey (Allegory)
The Last Amazon of Dohamey is Amma's play about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women warriors in Benin. These warriors serve the King of Benin, who cannot trust male guards not to harm him, and any man who looks on an Amazon is killed. The plot revolves around the last of these warriors, Nawi, who, originally a wife of the king, is pushed to become an Amazon when she is unable to bear him a child. Nawi wins glory as a great warrior and has a string of women lovers. As she lays dying, Nawi reflects on all her achievements and experiences, and she feels proud of herself. Does Nawi's trajectory sound familiar? If it does, that may be because it seems to be an allegory for Amma's own life: she fights a system that does not accept her, ultimately triumphs as the director of the National Theatre, and in the process has a string of lesbian lovers. The message here seems to be that Amma, and other women like her, are warrior-like. They can tap into the Amazon within them and triumph against all odds.
Incomplete Sentences (Symbol)
Evaristo employs an interesting literary device over the course of her 450-page-long novel: she does not capitalize the first letter of the first word of a sentence, and rarely caps off her sentences with periods, leaving them "incomplete" or "unfinished." These incomplete sentences become symbolic of unfinished business—while the stories of each character may have been narrated in the vignettes of the novel, they are not complete. They cannot ever be told completely, and are fundamentally continuous. One character's story will tend to segue into the next generation's, and then the one after that. These incomplete sentences represent this unfinishedness.
Death of a Parent (Motif)
Over the course of the novel, many characters experience the death of a parent. One of the primary themes of the novel is generational change—with new births, it is no surprise that some of the older characters also deal with deaths. Some characters experience their parents' deaths early on—like Bummi and Grace—while others experience this loss when they are more established in their lives—like Amma, Roland, Hattie, and Grace. Regardless, losing a parent (in life and in this novel) is a jarring event that pains the people to whom it happens. Frequently, the death of a parent helps a person reconcile the intergenerational conflicts or misunderstandings that existed between them and their parent, as is the case with Amma—who, only after her father's death, begins to understand that he may not have been the tyrannical patriarch that she labeled him as.
Single Parents (Motif)
Another recurrent motif in the novel is the single parent. Single parenting comes about as the result of various events in Girl, Woman, Other—for example, Bummi is a single parent because she is widowed, LaTisha because her partners leave before her children are born, Penelope because she and her husband divorce and she wins custody, and Daisy (Grace's mother) because her lover sails away before she even knows she's pregnant. Regardless of the cause of a woman's single-parent status, being the sole caretaker of a child carries hardship with it: with only one income stream, these women often have to work harder to support their children, and then as a result, have less time to spend with them. The children often also suffer as a result. Grace, for example, is left orphaned when her mother suddenly dies of tuberculosis. She is sent to a girls' home. Bummi is left to fend for herself as an adolescent when, similarly, her single mother passes away in a freak work accident. The motif of single parenting ties into themes of socioeconomic disparity, race, and even intergenerational conflict.
London/The Metropolis (Motif)
Diverse in its people, subcultures, neighborhoods, and for our purposes, symbolic meanings, the city of London impacts almost all of the characters in Evaristo's novel. In fact, Hattie may be the only character who never makes it out of rural Yorkshire to London. Her offspring, however, gravitate toward London for the opportunity it represents in their adolescent minds. The reality that Ada Mae and Sonny encounter is, in fact, quite different—the city is dirty, expensive, and unkind to these young strangers. In fact, this paradoxical reality is exactly what London symbolizes in the novel. The city is a place of opportunity and more accepting and tolerant of diversity, while at the same time, a place that can cause pain and suffering. It's where characters like Amma experience both incredible lows—like squatting in abandoned buildings—and incredible highs—like being director of the London National Theatre.
