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Chapter 1: Amma
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Girl, Woman, Other, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Diaspora, Culture, and Identity
Love, Sexuality, and Race
Home and Community
Contradiction, Complexity, and Intersectionality
Radical vs. Reformist Social Movements
Summary
Analysis
Yazz sits in the seat her mother, Amma, saved for her, the best in the house. She’s worried that the play will be another embarrassment. Yazz quickly gets lost in thought as she observes everyone around her. Waris and Courtney, two members of her “squad” dubbed “The Unfuckables,” sit next to her. The squad are determined to get good degrees because to them it’s the only way to save the world that their elders have destroyed. The climate is in crisis, the UK is exiting the EU, America has a “perma-tanned” president, and their generation is doomed to live in their parents’ homes forever thanks to the economy. Yazz wants to become a journalist to make her voice heard.
Amma wants the person she loves most to have a front row seat to her premiere and the major accomplishment it represents. Meanwhile Yazz, ever critical of her mother, is preoccupied with the worry her outdated, once-radical mother will embarrass her as usual. Yazz upholds the generational divide that Amma once upheld in her own youth. Yazz blames her mother’s generation for all the world’s ills, meanwhile ignoring all that her mother did to make social change within the arts. The name of Yazz’s crew asserts power and defiance against a society that threatens them at every turn with the rise in white-supremacy and nationalism in the wake of Donald Trump’s election and Brexit. Yazz doesn’t realize that her goal in life, to make her voice heard, is the same goal her mother set out to achieve in her own youth with her theater company, revealing that the generational divide is not so wide as she thinks.
Themes
As usual, the theater is full of old people—including Amma’s friends, like Sylvester, whom Yazz pities. Amma has been complaining that he refuses to change, and Yazz thinks Amma was guilty of that herself until landing the gig at the National and suddenly looking down on her old theater friends. She also criticizes her mom for getting angry about gentrification, when she’s been a gentrifier for years and was even spotted at the new café that sells expensive breakfast cereal.
Yazz easily sees through her mother’s hypocrisies. Yazz sees her mom struggling with her decision to give up her radical identity, that once aligned her with Sylvester, for her place at the National where she risks becoming a sellout like the old friends she also criticizes. Yazz can also see her mother’s role in gentrification, which Amma herself can’t or won’t acknowledge.
Themes
Yazz spots her dad, Roland, a couple rows ahead, who wears expensive clothes but claims he can’t help pay for her college. He's a professor and bestselling author. Yazz criticizes his white-male-dominated syllabi as being at odds with his own identity as a person of color. He’s speechless in the face of her critiques. He's become a TV personality and Amma says he’s sold out to the “establishment,” but still agrees with everything he says. Yazz knows she and her dad will have a healthy relationship one day, but that it’s her job to educate him.
Yazz likewise homes in on her father’s hypocrisies and criticizes him incessantly. Yazz sees Roland as someone who has unquestionably internalized the norms of white-supremacist society. His syllabi uphold a traditional canon that excludes people of color despite being one himself. There’s a clear generational divide between Roland and Yazz, just like there is between Yazz and Amma. In the same way that Sylvester calls Amma a sellout, Amma hurls the same insult at Roland. Yazz condescendingly thinks it’s her job to educate Roland on progressive social and political values without recognizing the social change Roland has effected by rising through the ranks in academia as a Black man. Like her mom before her, she’s ignorant of her own hypocrisies.
Themes
Yazz’s godfather Kenny, Roland’s partner, is seated next to him. He’s also old-fashioned but she likes him because he isn’t arrogant like her father. Recently Kenny asked her to be less harsh on her dad, but she’s reluctant to concede. After “being born into poverty,” as she describes it, Yazz implores her mom to sell their house, which is now worth a fortune thanks to the gentrification she herself jumpstarted. Yazz wants to buy an apartment with the money. Amma doesn’t respond to this proposal.
Kenny understands the impact that Yazz’s criticisms have on her father in a way that she can’t see. Yazz believes she was born into poverty, when in reality she was born to two academically successful parents, who could provide her with a comfortable life. Her mother’s status as a homeowner is itself a financial privilege. Yazz’s ignorance of her relative privilege is evident in her very selfish demand that Amma sell her home in order to buy her an apartment.
Themes
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Yazz wants the play to be a success because she doesn’t want to deal with the emotional fallout that’s sure to follow if it’s a failure. She anticipates being trapped on the phone, subject to Amma’s angry lectures about how the critics don’t understand Black women’s lives, leaving them unable to appreciate the play. She’d complain that they only understand stories about aid workers in Africa, troubled teenagers, African American blues singers, or white people rescuing slaves. Yazz thinks emotional caretaking is the price she has to pay as an only daughter.
Yazz’s fear of the fallout that would follow a failure reveals that despite some of her material privileges, Yazz’s childhood was emotionally difficult at times. Amma looks to Yazz for emotional support, forcing Yazz into the reversed role of caretaker. Amma is understandably frustrated by the mainstream theater world that overlooks stories that center Black women, instead favoring stories that center and celebrate white saviorism or depict Black people in roles that white people are comfortable with.
Themes
Yazz hoped to fall in love at college, but instead finds only loud, drunk, and obnoxious boys. She’s given up on her love life for now, lamenting that she’s living in the era of dating apps among men who expect sex to be like the porn she assumes they watch all day. She admits that Amma has more game, and despite her “multicultural whoredom,” is happy she’s settled down with her two white partners, Dolores and Jackie. Yazz has watched women come in and out of her mother’s life, even fight over her, and she expects a new woman will enter the picture soon. The women always try to impress Yazz, and she takes full advantage. Although she’s constantly criticizing her parents, Yazz defends them against the people who assume she’s been emotionally damaged by her unconventional childhood.
Yazz’s struggles to find love highlight how online dating has allowed misogyny to flourish in new ways. Yazz plays off her mother’s tendency to bring new women in and out of her life by highlighting how she worked this situation to her advantage. Amma’s constant parade of partners is another aspect of Yazz’s unconventional upbringing that others assume may have negatively affected Yazz, and that Yazz defends her parents against. However, it’s clear that Yazz does find comfort in the stability that Dolores and Jackie bring into her mother’s life. Yazz is often torn between celebrating the unconventional aspects of her childhood and acknowledging the parts that made it difficult at times.
Themes
The one boy Yazz did go on a date with at college swiped through his dating app right in front of her before leaving to go out with someone else. She knows she’s attractive, but no one can compete with the artificially attractive women online. Yazz wants a monogamous, long-term relationship, but until then maintains a casual relationship with an American boy who has a girlfriend back home. She worries that she’s doomed to be single forever, like all Amma’s straight friends who can never find someone good enough, who her mom describes as having “Looking for Obama Syndrome.”
Yazz’s experience with this boy points to how the digital era has reduced love and relationships to an algorithm that presents people with seemingly endless potential partners. This ultimately leaves young people reluctant to commit to any one person because the prospect of someone better is always just a swipe away. Amma describes this same concept when she talks about “Looking for Obama Syndrome.” The world of celebrity and social media presents impossible ideals that leave people unsatisfied with reality. Yazz wants a monogamous relationship, which contradicts with her willingness to be involved in the American boy’s infidelity. Like Amma, she too is full of contradictions and hypocrisies.
Themes
The fourth member of the squad, Nenet, is already engaged through an arranged marriage. She resisted at first, but quickly gave in to avoid getting a job after college. She eventually warmed up to her fiancé Kadim. She still gets straight A’s and she passionately defends herself and her classmates against misogynistic men on campus. Waris also has a boyfriend, Einar, and the two geek out over anime. Waris draws a comic about a Somali superwoman who castrates men who hurt women.
Nenet’s situation eliminates the problem of seemingly endless choices. While Western society and feminism in particular view arranged marriage as an outdated and misogynistic practice, Nenet challenges that assumption by being both satisfied with her impending arranged marriage and maintaining an identity as a fierce feminist on campus. Her desire to marry and have a man provide for her is likewise frowned upon by white, Western feminists, which ultimately undermines Nenet’s right to make this choice for herself. Waris’s comic is a story, like those Amma tells, that centers and celebrates the strength of Black women.
Themes
Yazz was instantly drawn to Waris, bonding over their criticisms of their immature classmates who run around getting drunk—on their way to rehab, Yazz thinks—unlike the squad, who all prefer sobriety. Waris wears her hijab as a political statement, not a religious one. She thinks she’s ugly and fat, refusing to leave the house without a mask of makeup, and Yazz tries to convince her that she’s beautiful. She often wears sunglasses on overcast days, to appear fearless she says, but Yazz suggests she may be hiding her fear behind them. Waris concedes both theories might be true, and Yazz loves that they see the world similarly.
Yazz and her friends value being outsiders. Like Amma and Dominique before them, their Blackness sets them apart from their predominantly white classmates, and rather than assimilate they choose a more radical path, embracing and proudly asserting their difference. While white, western feminists see the hijab as a symbol of oppression, Waris challenges this stereotype, wearing it as a bold, feminist, and political statement that defends her culture and identity against white feminist assumptions. Despite her fierce feminist and political beliefs, Waris still struggles with internalized beauty standards that leave her feeling insecure about her body. The dual meanings of her symbolic sunglasses represent the difficulty of remaining fearless in a society endlessly critical of women, and especially women of color.
Themes
Waris says the world was different before 9/11 even though she can’t remember what that world was like. Her mom, Xaanan, explains that in the “before,” Americans looked at women in hijab with pity, but in the “after” with hostility. Every time there’s a terrorist attack, Waris steels herself for more racist abuse. She hates that when Muslims carry out an attack it’s called terrorism, but when a white man does the same he’s called mad. The racism has forced her grandmother into hiding in her apartment, where she disappears into prescription pills.
Waris, a Black woman and Muslim, contends not only with racism and misogyny, but Islamophobia. 9/11 didn’t create Islamophobia, it always existed, but the event transformed and intensified it. Waris highlights the double standards in society that portray all Muslims as villains when an individual Muslim participates in violence, while white violence is individualized, sparing white people as a whole from this gross generalization. Waris’s grandmother highlights the devastating impact that racism can have on mental health.
Themes
Xaanan taught her kids that they could let themselves be crushed by these harsh realities or become fighters. She works at a community center for Muslim women and teaches martial arts to women, including Waris. Waris lists all the terrible, racist remarks made to her over the years, and Yazz says she feels sorry for all the ways she’s suffered. Waris says her suffering pales in comparison to what the generations of Somali women before her have endured. She pushes herself to be successful in the UK because of the sacrifices that made her life possible. She tells Yazz not to treat her like a victim.
Xaanan is a powerful Muslim feminist who obliterates the stereotypes that white, western feminists impose on Muslim women. Her work is dedicated to strengthening and empowering her community in the face of a hostile white society. Yazz’s tendency to victimize Waris reveals how women of color are capable of internalizing and reproducing the same harms as white women. Despite her progressive political beliefs, Yazz fails to see how her well-intentioned sympathy for Waris is in fact harmful. While Waris has suffered from Yazz’s perspective, Waris herself understands the privileges she has as a second-generation child of immigrants. Yazz isn’t the child of immigrants, so she doesn’t understand the realities of this experience.
Themes
One night Waris, Yazz, and Nenet dance to their favorite Egyptian singer. Courtney, a white girl, knocks on the door in her pajamas and asks them to turn it down, and Yazz says no. Nenet breaks the tension. She says she learned how to handle conflict from her dad who was a diplomat during Mubarak’s presidency, which Waris calls a dictatorship, but Nenet calls political stability. Nenet’s grandfather was family friends with Mubarak. Nenet tells Waris her parents are so diplomatic they’d be nice to her, a Somali, who Egyptians typically look down on. Nenet’s family flew to the UK when Mubarak was ousted, made possible by the dual citizenship her father paid a hefty sum for. Nenet doesn’t know where her family’s money that bought privileges like boarding school comes from.
Courtney replicates white people’s tendency to police Black people for having fun. Nenet’s role as peacekeeper represents, on a small scale, her and her family’s alignment with the West, in contrast with Yazz and Waris’s standing defiantly outside and against it. Nenet’s family’s privilege is rooted in their political connections. Her father and grandfather were close to Mubarak and his regime, which was installed and supported by the West. They were part of the country’s elite that had to flee in the wake of the Arab Spring, and their wealth makes this escape possible. Egyptian discrimination against Somalis, as well as their differences in political opinion, highlight how political realities complicate friendships like Nenet and Waris’s.
Themes
Nenet invites Courtney in and teaches her how to dance. Courtney is having fun “belly dancing,” as she describes it, and Yazz calls her out for being Orientalist. Nenet steps in to explain the dance to Courtney who just shrugs while she dances better than the rest of them. At breakfast the next morning, Courtney tells them she grew up on a farm, which the other three joke explains her farmgirl looks. Waris and Yazz have never been on a farm, but Nenet’s parents own one. Yazz and Waris conjure romantic images of farm life that Courtney says are nothing like where she’s from.
Courtney is immediately confronted with her unexamined bias and racism when she enters this predominantly Black space, which is a rare experience for white people who are used to being the majority in white, Western society. It’s an inversion of the broader reality on campus, where Yazz, Waris, and Nenet are surrounded by whiteness. At the same time, Courtney introduces complexity and intersectionality. Her dance skills undermine stereotypes that white people can’t dance, and Yazz and Waris make stereotypical assumptions about her life growing up on a farm that Courtney tells them are untrue. Nenet’s family owns a farm because of their wealth, whereas Courtney grew up in an impoverished rural community on her parents’ struggling farm. Courtney reveals how class intersects and complicates simple narratives of privilege, while at the same time she’s held accountable for her racism.
Themes
Courtney asks Waris why she wears a headscarf, and though this would usually make her angry, she simply says her mother, Xaanan, told her she never needs to explain herself to anyone. Courtney offers an apology that’s more an excuse, pleading ignorance. Yazz thinks that, even though she’s ignorant, Courtney is tough like the rest of “The Unfuckables.” She likes her, so she’s in the squad. A few months later, she formally tells Courtney that she’s an honorary “sistah.” She explains that being a sistah is about responding to how they’re perceived as Black women and claiming who they are.
Courtney’s insincere apology reveals how white people often avoid or refuse to own up to their racism. Despite her imperfections, Yazz lets her into the squad, revealing that socio-political realities complicate but don’t completely preclude friendships. Courtney’s honorary “sistahhood” invites her to be an ally to the rest of the squad.
Themes
Yazz warns Courtney that being a white woman with brown friends she’ll be perceived as different and lose some of her privilege. Courtney pushes back, telling Yazz that her intellectual parents grant her a lot of privilege, while she’s from a poor, rural community. Yazz says that being Black makes her more oppressed than anyone, except for Waris who is black, Muslim, female, poor, and wears hijab. In return, Courtney quotes Roxane Gay, who argues that playing the “privilege Olympics” ignores the context and relativity of privilege. Gay calls for a “new discourse for discussing inequality.” Totally shocked that Courtney has read Roxane Gay, Yazz is left speechless by this “#whitegirltrumpsblackgirl” moment.
Yazz tells Courtney that being a white ally to people of color comes with its own set of consequences. Throughout history, white activists have sacrificed, to some extent, their standing among other white people by fighting for justice. At the same time, Courtney will always maintain white privilege that spares her from the harsher consequences that people of color face for standing up for justice. Courtney confronts Yazz with her own hypocrisies and lack of intersectional awareness. While Yazz claims that she grew up in poverty, she was economically privileged compared to Courtney. Yazz is constantly playing what Roxane Gay calls the “privilege Olympics,” ranking her friends in order from most to least oppressed, which Gay asserts is a reductive and ineffective way of talking about privilege. Courtney’s ability to call Yazz out undermines Yazz’s condescending belief that she is the ultimate progressive authority who educates the helplessly ignorant like Roland and Courtney. When Yazz gets caught up in the “privilege Olympics” and elevates Waris as the “most” oppressed in their friend group, she continues to victimize Waris in the exact way that Waris has asked her not to.
Themes
Courtney says she only dates Black men, so will have mixed-raced children who will compromise her white privilege by “at least 50%.” Before college she’d never met a Black person. Her town was all white except for three Asians. Yazz invites Courtney to stay at her house the summer after their freshman year. Courtney explains that she’d only been to London once because her parents think the city is full of “coloureds,” “gays,” “left-wingers,” and “immigrants” who are ruining the country’s economy. Courtney calls her father a hypocrite because he’s friends with a South Asian man in town, but her father insists he’s “different” from the people he reads about in his papers. Yazz says the British economy would collapse without the people he hates. Courtney can’t wait to see his reaction when she has a mixed-race baby one day.
Courtney’s unexamined racism shows up in her beliefs about dating and relationships. Her insistence that she only dates Black men borders dangerously on fetishization. She believes that being with a Black man and having mixed-race children means she’ll be less privileged by association. In reality, this belief ignores the enduring power of white privilege and the stories of mixed-race children who, as adults, express how they were deeply harmed by their white parent’s internalized and unconscious racism that showed up in the way they treated their own children. Even though Courtney criticizes her father’s blatant racism, she’s inevitably internalized some of this ideology and hasn’t done the work to fully unpack her own racism. Her desire to use a mixed-race baby as a prop to upset her father is just as problematic as his outward racism, although she doesn’t realize the extent of her hypocrisy.
Themes
Yazz takes Courtney all over the city. Courtney is excited by all the attractive Black men on the streets, and they notice her, too. Yazz usually gets checked out a lot when she’s out in the city, but now Courtney is the center of attention. Yazz thinks to herself that Courtney isn’t even that stunning. Instead, she knows that a white girl walking with a Black girl signals that the white girl is “black-man-friendly.” Yazz is used to becoming invisible when she walks around with a white friend, and this makes her feel jaded.
This scene reveals how white beauty standards often make Black women invisible, even in the eyes of Black men. Yazz is a prop that helps Courtney project her supposed racial tolerance and acceptance, similar to the way in which Courtney anticipates using a mixed-race baby as a prop. Yazz’s desirability is erased when she walks alongside her white friends, highlighting how racist beauty standards mean Black women are overlooked not just by white men, who often won’t even consider dating a Black woman, but by members of their own community, too.
Themes
They meet up with Nenet at her house, where a maid lets them in through the imposing security gate. While Courtney is seemingly enamored by Nenet’s wealth, Yazz realizes that seeing her wealth is a lot different than just knowing about it. Seeing just how wealthy she is permanently changes her opinion of Nenet. They go for a walk in Hyde Park. Nenet is in heels, toting a Chanel bag, and noticeably changing her body language as they pass groups of men who check her out. Nenet identifies as Mediterranean and tries to convince her friends that she isn’t Black. Waris implores her to admit that she’s African. The men in the park ignore Yazz who is “too dark” in their eyes but eat up Courtney, who loves the attention and is oblivious to their objectifying gazes.
Although Courtney calls Yazz out on her financial privilege, forcing her to confront her lack of intersectional awareness, she is awed by and uncritical of Nenet’s extreme wealth. For Yazz, this realization immediately shifts her perspective of Nenet. Yazz’s desirability is once again erased not just by Courtney’s whiteness this time, but by Nenet’s lighter skin tone, which highlights how internalized racism shows up in communities of color, in this case the problem of colorism. Nenet’s lighter skin affords her a degree of privilege, and she uses that privilege to try and distance herself from her Blackness. Waris calls her out on this, but at the same time she’s assigning an identity to Nenet, compromising her right to asserting and defining her own identity. Ultimately, each character contains a multitude of contradictions that complicate any attempt to impose simple narratives of race and identity.
Themes
They talk about college and their ambitious summer plans. Nenet reveals that she pays someone to write her essays. Yazz is shocked and angry that she’s cheating, and Nenet tries to downplay it by saying everyone else is doing it, too, including her fiancé. Yazz doesn’t know if their friendship will survive now that she sees Nenet in light of her wealth and her dishonesty. Yazz questions if there’s really any substance binding “The Unfuckables” together besides being brown girls on a mostly white campus. She thinks about how she’s going to fight, not cheat, her way into the name she wants for herself in journalism, the way Waris has to fight, too.
Nenet’s extreme wealth, and her admission that she’s paying for good grades, is a lesson in intersectionality for Yazz. She realizes that their shared Blackness may not be enough to hold them together. Intersectionality complicates simple definitions and assumptions of community. It’s possible Yazz has more in common with Courtney than she does Nenet, despite Yazz’s initial assumptions. Without such extreme financial privilege, Yazz and Waris have no choice but to work hard if they want to succeed in a white society that marginalizes Black women.
Themes
Yazz reflects that Courtney has become so much more worldly thanks to the rest of the squad, who aren’t your typical English university students. Of them all, Yazz thinks Waris’s family’s painful history lends her a depth the rest lack, but is careful to remember that Waris doesn’t want people to feel sorry for her. She thinks Waris’s circumstances have forced her to grow up too fast, as have her own. Yazz’s thoughts are interrupted as The Last Amazon of Dahomey begins.
Despite all these lessons and realizations, Yazz still hasn’t unpacked all her own biases and hypocrisies. She still sees herself as Courtney’s teacher, forgetting or ignoring that Courtney has taught her things, too. Although she remembers that Waris doesn’t want to be victimized, she can’t help but do it anyway.
Themes
