Bernardine Evaristo, MANIFESTO: On Never Giving Up
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[0:58]Bernadine Ivaristo is the author of Manifesto on Never Giving Up.
[1:02]She is the 2019 winner of the Booker Prize for Girl Woman Other, which was a number one national bestseller,
[1:08]and winner and finalist of many awards, including the Women's Prize for Fiction and the Dublin Literary Award.
[1:14]Ivaristo is the author of eight other books that explore aspects of the African diaspora.
[1:19]Her writing spans verse fiction, short fiction, poetry, essays, literary criticism, and drama.
[1:24]Ivaristo is Professor of Creative Writing at Bernal University, London, an honorary fellow of St. Anne's College, University of Oxford and Vice President of the Royal Society of Literature.
[1:34]She received an OB in 2020 and lives in London with her husband. Her most recent book is Manifesto.
[1:40]Welcome, Bernadine. Thank you so much for coming on momstone of time to read books to discuss Manifesto on Never Giving Up.
[1:47]Thank you.
[1:48]Okay.
[1:49]Hello. Hi.
[1:50]So now.
[1:51]Okay.
[1:52]Welcome. Thank you so much. Your first book, obviously, or your last book, I should say Girl Woman Other was such a huge hit,
[2:00]and you are kind enough to then take readers in and show them how you got to that point in your life.
[2:06]What your life was like, which was so fascinating, the whole journey, your parent, like everything. Tell us a little about why you decided to write this.
[2:14]I'm sure people were very curious, but you didn't have to do it.
[2:18]So explain the impetus and what it was like going back through time and reliving some of these experiences and all that.
[2:26]Yes. Well, I, you know, when I won the book or I was 60 years old, so I'd already had, you know, quite a long life.
[2:32]And I realized that even though I had, you know, I wasn't unknown as a writer in Britain, I wasn't really known very widely and I wasn't known around the world.
[2:43]And so a lot of people were introduced to me when I won the booker. And it was like they were then very interested in who I was and what my background was and so on.
[2:52]So I found myself talking a lot about myself in interviews that that well actually almost continue through to today.
[3:01]It hasn't really solved your problem. Look, we're right here.
[3:05]It hasn't really stopped but also the book is published go up and other is published in lots of languages and they all won interviews and so on.
[3:12]So I just got very used to talking about myself in great depth and detail and I then had to think about what the next book was going to be.
[3:19]And I thought I think I want to create a record of my life up to this point and rather than write another novel.
[3:27]So sort of dodging the bullet of the set the next novel because you know, go up and other was very successful and people might want more of the same or you know, anyway, I didn't really want to have to engage with fiction.
[3:39]So I thought writing a memoir would be a really good thing to do.
[3:44]I mean, I call it a memoir and a meditation not to put anybody off but I it's not strictly a memoir where I say this is where it began and this is the journey of my life.
[3:55]It's looking at my creativity and how my life has been shaped by it and my creativity has been shaped by my life going back to my childhood.
[4:05]So so that really was the thinking behind it.
[4:08]I love that, I so love it.
[4:10]There was a passage in the beginning where you talked about what you were like as a young reader and you said an avid reader since my early childhood, it was here in the solitude of my room that I started to write poems discovering a relationship between what I was feeling and the power of words to articulate it through poetry.
[4:27]I was thinking about starting starting your poetry career as a young child.
[4:32]Yeah, well, obviously I was a young woman because I didn't really write until I was about 19 when I went to drama school and I was in on a course where we were there to create our own theater.
[4:44]So we were trained as actors but we're also creating our own theater and I discovered that when I started writing for theater it came out as poetry and it felt like that was my natural means of expression.
[4:56]In poetry, I loved poetry, I've been reading poetry since my teenage years and it just felt like this was how I wanted to express myself.
[5:05]But when I when I started writing I was completely unable to change a single word of anything that I wrote.
[5:11]But I think about that now because we know that writing is rewriting and as a writer very quickly you have to learn that the first sort of you know the first words that you put on a page are going to be changed and rearranged and you know may not even appear in the final version.
[5:25]Of a poem, for example, but at that stage I was so attached to what I was writing and it was so personal that I could only write one draft of a poem.
[5:37]Now I might write, you know, 4050.
[5:40]Oh my gosh.
[5:42]A piece of writing and a book will typically go through anything from three to five, maybe even six drafts.
[5:51]So it really is a very big enterprise, you know, just shaping something so that it's just right before it reaches the reader.
[6:01]But in those early years, yeah, poetry was my thing and I was I still am I suppose a poet in some ways I don't really see myself as a poet that I was, because I started writing poetry and I started writing poetry.
[6:12]Well, I called it verse drama for theater and then I wrote verse novels my first two books with us novels until eventually I ended up writing more straightforward fiction, but, but even go with another is a, is a, I call it a fusion fiction.
[6:25]So, you know, I'm someone who much about with form quite a lot, but the poetry is still there inside me. They won't let me go even though I tried to get rid of it.
[6:35]Can't take the poet out of the girl.
[6:37]Yeah, something like that. And then I just wanted to jump to a passage at the end where you said, I am first and foremost a writer.
[6:45]The written word is how I process everything, myself, life, society, history, politics.
[6:50]It's not just a job or a passion, but it is at the very heart of how I exist in the world.
[6:55]And I am addicted to the adventure of storytelling as my most powerful means of communication to quote from Zuleka and the Emperor's babe.
[7:02]This is my legacy to leave a whisper of myself in the world, my ghost of magnet opera of words.
[7:09]That's it, you know, it's I've been writing so long now, starting writing seriously at drama school when I was young woman.
[7:18]And for over 40 years since that is hard to imagine a life where I'm not writing.
[7:26]a lot of people people have people have to go to work. We have to earn a living. And some of us, you know, choose a vocation rather than a simple job, you know, it's something that we feel really, really passionately about as I mean, most writers I would suggest probably do.
[7:42]And for me, it's something that I will be doing hopefully if I, you know, mental facilities enable me to until the day I die.
[7:50]It is how I process life and I'm a storyteller and I think in terms of, you know, as opposed to when I'm daydreaming I'm thinking in terms of the kinds of stories I want to tell.
[8:02]And I also like the fact that as a writer you get to have this massive hopefully platform where people are are are experiencing your ideas your characters your narratives and that they are coming into your world, you know, and seeing the world through your perspective.
[8:18]And so that's quite an exhilarating thing to think about, you know, so it's to me is absolutely integral to me as a human being and I can't imagine it not being there.
[8:30]And when you when you write are you did you always write do you like to type do you like to write freehand do you like if you have a funny thought or an interesting thought during the day are you going to do you write it in notes like are you a scribbler what's your step.
[8:45]you take notes very often I know people who do, you know, who always getting out their notebook to to job things down.
[8:52]I wish I could do that because I think there are a lot of things that I forget but I type directly on to a computer and that's how I've been working now for about 20 plus years.
[9:03]Before then I would write by hand and then put it on to the computer so I and that was when I was writing first novels and this but she I think it's it's better to write as their poetry by hand.
[9:15]So I would write my hand put it on to the computer and then way before then when I first started writing it would just be by hand.
[9:23]Now, when you when I'm writing a novel and go up and other was 120,000 words I just don't know how anybody could write that by hand, you know, I mean people do people do though some people do it's crazy but they yeah.
[9:35]And some people still do which I find incredible because I'm just so used to delete cut paste copy you know I that facility that could that computers have given us.
[9:47]I don't know how I could write long form fiction without it or even you know even any kind of long form nonfiction because you can just get things out and then make it right better later.
[10:00]Whereas when you're writing by hand, I saw Charles Dickens,
[10:02]it was Nicholas Nickleby, the original manuscript of Nicholas Nickleby,
[10:07]which is in the Victorian Albert Museum.
[10:09]And I had a look at it about two months ago.
[10:12]And it was so interesting because of course it's all handwritten.
[10:15]And you see all his notes, you know, but not a lot of notes.
[10:20]And I think, you know, for people of his generation and, you know,
[10:25]for the whole of the period that people were writing by hand,
[10:29]I think you probably process your thoughts in a much more ordered fashion
[10:35]and probably give a look more thought to them, because you know that you don't have much.
[10:39]It's going to be a hassle coming to rewrite things.
[10:42]Whereas now it doesn't matter really, does it?
[10:44]And we can be a bit scrappy because we know we can tie it to get up.
[10:47]I wonder if literature would have been better or worse or the same net result
[10:52]if they, you know, if we'd given Dickens a computer and said,
[10:56]here, use the cut and paste feature.
[10:58]Oh my God.
[10:59]I think he would have probably been even more prolific.
[11:02]Yeah.
[11:02]You know what I mean?
[11:02]But better.
[11:04]Someone should do that.
[11:05]Someone should take, like, great expectations and say,
[11:09]but this is the version if he had been able to write it on a computer and cut and paste it.
[11:13]It's interesting because when you're writing on a computer as well,
[11:15]you have access to very easy access to different words,
[11:19]you know, to synonyms and disorders and so on.
[11:23]So I don't think the source existed during Dickens' time.
[11:27]So you would just have had a dictionary, I guess.
[11:30]Yeah, there would definitely have been limitations.
[11:33]But perhaps, yeah, I don't know, really.
[11:35]It's not the tip of the net, but it's just the one.
[11:38]It is interesting.
[11:39]Do you ever get tired of talking about girl women,
[11:42]other? Do you ever want to be like,
[11:43]I don't want to talk about this book ever again?
[11:45]I'm tired of it.
[11:48]I think I literally have given about,
[11:51]and I kid you not because I was counting at one point,
[11:55]about 400 interviews.
[11:57]Sometimes many in a single day, because especially during lockdown,
[12:02]you know, during lockdown, I would do, like, maybe four countries in the day,
[12:06]at four different festivals.
[12:07]Oh, my gosh.
[12:08]I would be like in Brazil, then in Italy, then in, I don't know, Australia,
[12:14]and then in France, you know,
[12:17]and because it was so doable, wasn't it?
[12:18]All via Zoom.
[12:19]So I really, really have talked about girl women, other.
[12:26]A lot.
[12:27]I don't want to be ungrateful.
[12:30]No, I know.
[12:31]No, because I'm in a luxurious position now as a writer,
[12:34]and that people do want to talk to me about my work.
[12:37]And I know when it was like, for a very long time,
[12:39]where, you know, I would have loved to have this attention.
[12:42]So, but the honest answer is yes.
[12:49]I said so well, at least now you have a new book.
[12:56]Yes, you can just deflect the conversation.
[13:01]While you're busy at work on different books like this one,
[13:05]are you reading all the time yourself?
[13:08]And if so, like, what do you love to read while you're working?
[13:10]And are you one of those people who can't read of the genre that you're writing in,
[13:14]or do you just read whatever all the time?
[13:16]Yeah, I've gone through different stages where I have felt
[13:19]that I can't read fiction when I'm writing fiction.
[13:22]But then I realize at some point that I'm writing fiction all the time.
[13:25]So that means I don't read everything.
[13:27]I had to get over that one.
[13:30]Actually, the problem for me, I mean, I love reading, obviously.
[13:33]I mean, you know, I've been reading since I was a little child.
[13:36]From the moment I was able to go to the library on my own,
[13:39]I would go and get books, and it was, you know,
[13:41]it was, the world reading was the world to me.
[13:43]Literally, you know, I engage with the wider world through reading as a child.
[13:48]But as an adult, somebody who is, you know, I'm a professor at university,
[13:53]I have been a book critic.
[13:55]I judge prizes.
[13:57]I chaired the Women's Prize last year, and I know a lot of writers.
[14:01]So that means that my reading is not as free as it used to be.
[14:06]And that, for me, is more the issue that years ago, in my 20s and 30s in particular,
[14:13]I would be able to just pick up a book, any old book that I wanted to read.
[14:17]And if I'd read it, and if I didn't like it, I wouldn't finish it.
[14:21]And I wouldn't even probably have a discussion with anyone about it.
[14:25]Whereas now, I have to read for all these different activities,
[14:28]especially judging prizes, you know, when maybe at one prize I judged 200 books turned up.
[14:34]Wow. I wanted to kill myself too.
[14:37]Why did I say yes to this when all these books filled up my house, right?
[14:41]It was terrible.
[14:43]Yeah, and you kind of have to read them in order to talk about them.
[14:46]You can't pretend to have read them kind of thing.
[14:49]So that was a nightmare.
[14:50]So yeah, it's more about finding books that really really inspire me,
[14:54]because that then nurtures my imagination and nurtures my own reading,
[14:58]rather than the kind of duty books that I have to read.
[15:02]Two books that I've read recently that I really loved, and I know I'm really
[15:06]really late to reading this writer, but unpackaged in the dark house.
[15:10]We wish on some lists together, so I started to pay attention to her.
[15:14]And then I thought, let me get this book, and I absolutely loved it.
[15:17]I was like, oh, this is a discovery.
[15:20]And I know that I'm probably 40 years too late,
[15:22]but I'm going to be really more of her work, but I just relished it.
[15:26]And when I read a book that I love, it is the most pleasurable experience.
[15:32]You know, I look forward to returning to it, to curling up on my own,
[15:37]reading at leisure, getting so much pleasure from it, and just feeling kind of fulfilled
[15:44]by someone else's skin and imagination.
[15:47]The other book I read recently that I, and it's my first book of here is that I also thought
[15:51]was really powerful, was The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead.
[15:54]I know there are huge writers in America, aren't they?
[15:57]And I just thought that packed such a powerful function.
[15:59]It's a short book, but they left such a strong aftertaste, you know?
[16:04]And it was so shocking and horrifying, but just so brilliantly explored.
[16:10]So those are two writers who, yeah, are definitely very fresh in my mind.
[16:15]I love the idea of a book leaving a strong aftertaste.
[16:18]I love that. That's a great way to describe it.
[16:21]I love it. Yeah.
[16:22]Some books I read and I'm like, this was so powerful.
[16:24]Like, whatever I read next is not going to be even close.
[16:27]I mean, like, I so moved that I can't possibly, you know, it's like being in a very
[16:33]heated relationship and then like going on your next date and you're like, no, I can't.
[16:38]So anyway, but yes, the book is amazing.
[16:41]So what are you working on now? Can you even say?
[16:43]I'm working on a theatre piece actually, which I can't talk too much about, but I began in theatre
[16:49]and I've kind of returned to writing a little bit for theatre.
[16:53]Theatre was my first love. I was an actor to begin with.
[16:56]And I love theatre. I go a lot and I love theatre people actually.
[17:01]And I miss the sort of, the creative process of being in a theatre company and the collaboration
[17:06]and just the energy of actors in particular.
[17:09]Because, you know, when actors get drunk, they often become really extrovert and wild and crazy.
[17:17]And I love all that. Whereas writers, when they get drunk, get very quiet and morose,
[17:22]and even more melancholy.
[17:24]And it's not such fun.
[17:26]And I miss the performance of theatre people.
[17:32]Anyway, that's not why I'm writing, but I do like the whole culture around theatre.
[17:38]And so I have a piece that has been commissioned.
[17:42]I can't say any more than that, but I have to deliver it very soon.
[17:45]So I better get on with it.
[17:47]I love it. You're basically writing so you have more fun parties.
[17:52]Right? That's really what it comes down to.
[17:54]So, you know, that's hilarious.
[17:56]Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?
[17:59]I'm sure you've been asked this a trillion times, but I don't know if something happens.
[18:02]Or something that you haven't said before.
[18:04]Yeah. Well, you know, there's so much to say to aspiring authors.
[18:08]The first thing to do is do it.
[18:10]You know, a lot of people want to write and they don't actually do it.
[18:15]Join the class, you know, so many classes around these days for people to join,
[18:19]to have a taste of it and see if they want to do it.
[18:21]I think reading is as much about writing as writing.
[18:25]So if you're writing books, then you need to read.
[18:28]You know, if you're writing nonfiction, read nonfiction.
[18:30]If you're writing fiction, read fiction.
[18:31]If you're writing poetry, read poetry, but then read everything as well.
[18:34]Because it's the equivalent of musicians not listening to music.
[18:38]So if you want to be a writer and you don't read,
[18:41]you are like your musician who doesn't listen to music.
[18:43]And that is a very stark analogy, isn't it?
[18:46]Because if you don't listen to music, how can you create it,
[18:50]other than very rudimentary, current work?
[18:53]So I became a writer through reading.
[18:56]So I always say to my students, you've got to read.
[18:59]Unfortunately, they have a lot of competition with reading these days, right?
[19:02]Because they have this thing called the internet and smartphones.
[19:07]And so they are, it's like, oh, I despair, really.
[19:12]You have students studying creative writing who don't want to read.
[19:16]And you know that when they come in bedraggled at half an hour late for the class.
[19:21]But they've been up doing this TikTok thing.
[19:23]Or whatever it is they're doing.
[19:25]I don't know.
[19:26]I'd read to think on the internet.
[19:28]So especially for any young people listening, you need to read.
[19:31]And if you find you can't concentrate, it will get better.
[19:34]You just have to persist with it until you can devote an hour, two hours, three hours,
[19:39]to reading something.
[19:42]And I guess the third thing is you will find your own voice and your own style eventually.
[19:48]But don't expect to win the Nobel Prize with the first thing you have ever read, right?
[19:53]Because it is going to be rough.
[19:54]But you will develop your skills and your craft over years and then eventually
[20:00]hopefully you'll be published. Some people get there sooner than others, but it doesn't matter.
[20:06]Don't compare yourself to anyone else. Just follow your own kind of path. And you will find your own
[20:11]style, you know, and that is often something that people feel they haven't got, but it develops
[20:17]over time. It may not be a particularly literary style, but you will find the kinds of stories you
[20:22]want to tell and the way you want to tell them. That first of all has to kind of satisfy you
[20:27]and then the reader. Because if you hate your own work, it's very likely the reader will too,
[20:32]so that's not a very good start. So you know, find your own way in so that you find it rewarding
[20:40]and then get the feedback that you need and so on to grow and develop.
[20:44]If you hate your own writing, don't have high expectations. Back to Dickens. Lower your expectations.
[20:51]Anyway, thank you so much for today. Thank you for coming on. I'm sorry again for coming on late,
[20:56]and I'm looking forward to hearing what your theater reveal will be. So that's exciting.
[21:00]Thank you very much. Okay. Have a great day. Bye. Bye.
[21:05]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't
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