AG: How do you feel about the label “political fiction”? Is there, for a novelist, a wariness about it?
BE: The interesting thing is that I’m not usually called a political writer. And I am a political writer! There is a political underpinning to Girl, Woman, Other, which is to explore as many black British women as possible in a single novel. The intention is for the reader to enjoy the book on the level of story, but at the same time, they’re engaging with all these issues. This is my eighth book, and all of them have been very political in terms of the ideas, the context of my characters and the subversive way in which I’m exploring the Afro-diasporic experience and black British history and society. But the context for my work has altered. After I won the Booker in October, everything changed. People are reading my book now, irrespective of the labels that are imposed on it. So, I’m not concerned that seeing it as “political fiction” will challenge people to such an extent that they won’t want to read it.
AG: Orwell’s aim was “to make political writing into an art”. Do you think this ambition hints at the slight delicateness around what is literature and what is political tract, and the need to disguise the political message in something that is valuable in its own right?
BE: If we think of politics with a small “p” in terms of power relationships and hierarchies, then I think we could categorise most literature as political. But what I’m doing is writing a book about black women and stating it as such – that’s not really the case when you’re talking about white writers. Is it not political, for example, for a white male writer to write books only from the perspective of white, middle-aged, heterosexual, middle-class men? To me that is a very political act, but we never look at it like that. When I’m writing about black British women, it’s seen as very consciously being about blackness. Which it is. But it becomes something that we’re beaten up with – the idea that we are somehow writing about social issues and politics, and therefore it is not real art.
Obviously it’s very different for you, because you’re a journalist, so your mission with your journalism and your book is to educate people. So how does politics play out in your work?
AG: As journalists, we’re meant to be objective. We’re not meant to reveal anything about our own politics, we’re meant to be asking questions and giving a voice to people who otherwise aren’t able to directly seize the attention of politicians and people in power. That’s what I think I’ve done in my book and why I really wanted to write it. A lot of issues in The Windrush Betrayal were highlighted in the Guardian and attracted a political response in 2018. But the importance of putting it in a book is to make sure that people really understand the long roots of the problems that caused the Windrush scandal, and have a bit more time to engage with the very complicated and very different stories of so many people affected.
BE: There are connections between what we both do, because I’m deeply interested in history. In your book you go back and explore imperialism and colonialism because you need people to understand the situation we’re in today, which I think is one of its strengths. We need to understand the foundations of Britain’s relationship to its former colonies.
AG: I was really interested to see the report into what caused the Windrush scandal, written by Wendy Williams. One of the key findings was that ministers and Home Office officials had very little understanding about Britain’s colonial history and our immigration laws going back throughout the 20th century. So she called on the Home Office to begin a whole programme of education for its workers and ministers. And that’s in part what I’m trying to do in this book, because you can’t understand why this whole mess happened without knowing that, in 1948, a system of free movement was created between people in Commonwealth countries and Britain; people were invited to come here, and it was only gradually, through increasingly restrictive immigration legislation, that their position invisibly moved from being legal to being illegalised. Ministers themselves just weren’t aware of this, which is why when all of the hostile environment policies began to be introduced, there was so little knowledge of the catastrophic consequences they could have.
BE: It is shocking though, isn’t it, to think that people working in government don’t understand recent history? We have the Black Lives Matter movement and still, today, people don’t understand Britain’s involvement in the slave trade. That’s why it’s so important that it should be taught.
AG: Well, one of the most amazing parts of the reporting for this book, for me, was going to Jamaica and meeting a lot of politicians and historians there who were still feeling quite wounded by the relatively recent visit of David Cameron in 2015. He went over there and was surprised to be asked by a lot of people about whether or not Britain was considering paying reparations for slavery. And I think he just hadn’t realised that was still a topic for discussion.
BE: Winsome, one of the characters that are more familiar to people, is somebody who comes to Britain in the 1950s, and she is the only Windrush-generation character in the book. Until the Windrush scandal blew up through your journalism, I had no idea this was going on . If I had known, I would have created Winsome as a character who is forced to go back to Barbados. She’s perhaps one of the more familiar characters to people. So to have everything taken away from her at the end, and to have her feeling confused, betrayed and powerless, would have been very impactful.
AG: Tell me a bit about the 12 characters. Because you were quite explicit in saying that you wanted to bring 12 very different characters into the light who haven’t frequently been part of British fiction.
BE: I wanted to expand the representation of who we are in this country, rather than define it or reduce it. They are aged 19 to 93 and every generation in between, and that was really important. Some of them are migrants who have come from another place. A lot of them are born in Britain, because I wanted to make the point about people who were born here and raised here and this being the only country they know. I also decided that the women could not all be straight, because that’s not true to life. A quarter of the protagonists are on the queer spectrum. Class came into the book without me even thinking about it, because I was exploring a number of women who start their lives at the bottom of the ladder and then work their way up. I was also keen to explore a wide range of black women who live in a society where there are certain perceptions of who they are based on stereotypes. So, one character, Bummi, is a cleaner but she has a degree in maths. Her daughter Carole goes to Oxford and becomes a banker.
AG: Do you think Carole would be out marching [in the BLM protests] this week?
BE: No! No, Carole wouldn’t. Carole is somebody who has sold herself to the corporate world. She’s left her working-class origins behind in order to succeed. Amma, who is the theatre director, is a lesbian and a radical activist – she would have been out marching.
AG: Carole might have been watching the news and thinking about it.
BE: You’re being too kind to Carole! Carole’s on a very narrow path to success. Amma and her daughter Yazz would be marching, and probably Megan/Morgan, the non-binary figure too, but I think that’s probably it.
When you were writing your book and your articles, you were encountering people who were just being seen as numbers. They had been dehumanised. That ties in directly with my project as a writer, because there are so few portrayals of people of colour, particularly black people and black women, in our fictional world. So, how did you bring people to life?
AG: The need to have people’s human experiences was obvious to me right from the beginning, because a lot of the policy problems that lie behind everything having gone wrong are incredibly complicated, very head-spinning, quite boring if you’re not engaged with Home Office policy issues, and, to be frank, quite hard to get anyone excited about. And in that way, I think I was fortunate that the first person I interviewed about all of this had had such an extreme experience. That was a woman called Paulette Wilson who had been here for 50 years, who’d come from Jamaica as a child, who was twice arrested and sent to Yarl’s Wood detention centre and who was about to be deported to Jamaica. It was really important to explain to readers the details of her life so that they could understand that this wasn’t just a minor error by the Home Office, but a really staggering mistake that they had made.
BE: As a writer, I know what my intention is and there’s a lot of freedom in terms of how I express it. But I don’t really know how my work is going to be received or its impact. It’s very different, for you: there is a goal, especially with this, wasn’t there?
AG: There was a goal: to make the Home Office and ministers realise that there was a huge problem. Even though we’ve had two years now of apologies from ministers, there’s still a refusal to engage with the legislation that underpins all of these issues.
How do you feel about the impact of your work, having won the Booker and being No 1 on the bestseller lists?
BE: I love the fact that my work is out there and being read by so many people. That gives me such joy. I have been publishing since 1994, and I really wasn’t reaching many people. And now I am. And I’m reaching them with a radical, experimental book, about 12 primarily black British women. And the fact that I got to No 1 in the paperback hit parade, and won the Booker, might mean that the doors finally do open to a bigger number and variety of writers and genres. Next year I’ll start writing a new book. I’m excited at the prospect.
• Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo is published by Penguin (£8.99) and The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment by Amelia Gentleman is published by Guardian Faber (£18.99). To order copies go to guardianbookshop.com.
• The 2020 winners of the Orwell prizes for political writing will be announced on 9 July.