Yet Nana was a lovely grandmother to us, in spite of us sullying her bloodline. She suppressed her bigotry in order for her better self to surface, but it was still there, lurking in the depths of her lesser self.
-- Bernardine Evaristo (chapter 1)

Importance: This quotation sums up Evaristo’s contradictory and complex view of her maternal grandmother, whom she admired as an independent and ambitious woman but whose racism and bigotry affected her relationship with her biracial grandchildren, despite her surface kindness. Evaristo notes later in her memoir that writing her novel Lara, a book based on her family history, helped her to better understand and empathize with Nana, despite her grandmother’s concerns about her daughter’s marriage to a Black Nigerian man.

In Britain we are all subliminally inculcated into the nuances of this country’s subtle class gradations from birth, and I was clearly making moves to progress from working...
-- Bernardine Evaristo (chapter 1)