Bernardine Evaristo’s first novel in verse Lara was originally published in 1997. Since then she has written two further verse novels: The Emperor’s Babe, a linguistically exuberant tale of a precocious Nubian teen growing up in Roman London which heralded her move from a small independent, Angela Royal Publishing (now defunct) to Penguin/Hamish Hamilton, and Soul Tourists, an ambitious and subversive take on black European history via the modern day road trip. Her first prose novel Blonde Roots met with considerable critical acclaim when it was published in 2008 and that year she also decided to update Lara – a semi-autobiographical verse novel based on her own childhood and family history over 150 years across Britain, Germany, Ireland, Nigeria and Brazil, which was published by Bloodaxe last October (2009). Here on Open Notebooks, I talk to her about what might make a writer return to a book more than a decade later and get a glimpse into her editing and creative process…

KMW: What prompted you to return to Lara after so long?

BE: I was giving a reading from Lara soon after it came out and an Irish Academic approached me and asked why I hadn’t written about the Irish side of my family. I had mentioned it but not explored it, and she said this was surprising because of Ireland’s history of immigration and colonialism, two of the most important themes in the book. I realised I really hadn’t thought of it and was shocked because it seemed such and obvious thing to explore.

When I embarked on Lara first time round I was much more interested in exploring my Nigerian and Brazilian ancestry – the black side of my family because this was the absence I felt in my life when I was growing up. When Bloodaxe agreed to republish Lara I decided it was a great opportunity to explore the Irish and German side of my family history too. The end result is that the book is more balanced in terms of both sides of my ancestry.

'With the German ancestry I had been looking at family photographs, and my mother knew there was a German on her father’s side, but she didn’t know who it was. I was looking at this photograph of my mother’s father’s mother – she was called Ada Wilkening - and I thought why don’t I go on ancestry.com and see if I can find anything out about her? I quickly discovered her father, Louis Wilkening - he came to Britain in the 1860s and settled in Woolwich where in fact I grew up. So that became a wonderful adventure for me and I tracked as much as I could about him down as I could.'

KMW: So how did you integrate these new characters into the existing text?

BE: It wasn’t too difficult because at the beginning of the book I have a character called Taiwo based on my father – a Nigerian man coming to Britain in the late 1940s who meets my white English mother called Ellen in the book. I explore her history of growing up in England in the 1930s and 40s and the book also explores her mother’s story of growing up in London as a woman of Irish parentage at the turn of the 20th Century. The new characters, who are Irish and German, are on my mother’s side of the family, so I was able to slot in the new sections at the beginning of the book without altering the existing text too much.

'A lot of Irish people came to the UK in the 19th Century because of the famine in Ireland – and a lot of Germans came to live in Britain at that time too – they were the largest immigrant group. The population Germany had grown too quickly and the land couldn't accommodate the people, so a lot of Germans, such as my great-great grandfather emigrated to England. The newly revised Lara became a book, which in its historical aspect is not just concerned with people from the former colonies coming to Britain or descendants of slaves, but about a much wider experience of migration.'

KMW: As a writer, more than a decade down the line, do you feel your approach to the text has altered? Did your relationship to the material feel different when you went back into it? Was there a temptation to rewrite the whole thing?

BE: I loved revisiting it knowing that I could tweak it here and there, especially the bits I’d known since publication didn’t quite work – nothing major just a word here or there. This book is very close to my heart and I didn’t feel the need to revamp it completely although I did break up the text into couplets so that the dense, textured poetry has more space to breathe. I had given numerous public readings from the book for over ten years so I didn’t need to re-acquaint myself with the story. The task for me was to get back into the spirit of the poetry I had written all those years ago. At first my language was too prosaic because I’ve been writing prose fiction recently and I had to make the shift back into my more intensely poetic self, which took a while to achieve.

KMW: So do you think the editorial work changing it into couplets perhaps loosened you into the text?

BE: It didn’t really serve in that way.  It’s just that I have a fondness for couplets. The Emperor’s Babe was in couplets and I feel very comfortable with that form.

KMW: The way that the stories mesh together is via the dramatic poetic monologues of the characters – did you find your handling of voice was different in any way?

BE: Again, not really. I love writing in the first person, capturing voice, conveying character. In fact all my subsequent books have utilized the first person narrator, whether poetry or prose, so it was very familiar. That said, with each character there’s always the challenge to bring them to life. How to put flesh on an ancestor? How to make them living, breathing sentient beings? For example, how would Louis the German speak in the mid 1800s? How could I convey the cadences and syntax of his speech convincingly without going overboard? How far could I go in writing broken English phonetically? I experimented with it and then emailed a German friend who made helpful suggestions.

KMW: Does the first person narrative voice attract you because of your earlier work in theatre?

BE: I realise now that my writing has been very informed by my theatre training as an actress and a playwright. For many years I didn’t see the connection. The use of dramatic monologue is an obvious example. I like my characters to leap off the page, to be seen and heard, to exist as if they really are alive and not as wooden characters embedded in text, not quite real, never fully realized. I want my characters to live in the imagination long after the pages of my books have been closed.

KMW: in Lara the arc of the story is not told in the traditional narrative sense. I imagine that’s one of the things that facilitated the updates as well. It’s almost as if the structure of the novel is as family tree. That’s how it is visually. You can hang different branches from that tree and watch them grow.

BE: That’s a nice way of putting it. In Lara there are stories within stories, chapters or units, that loop backwards and forwards and inter-connect thematically and sequentially if not always chronologically. Each character goes on a journey within their own chapter, and some of them leak into other characters’ sections and stories. I might take a character from birth to death or just capture significant moments in their life – moments of high drama or conflict, their relationships and the journeys they undertake within themselves and/or abroad – traveling from one place to another, one country to another, one continent to another. And of course the book traverses two centuries. It’s not a traditional  novel structure at all, and the verse novel genre gave me freedom to explore ways of telling the story outside of the parameters of the conventional novel format.

KMW: Having written Blonde Roots as a prose novel, was there a temptation to do the same with Lara?

BE: Now that would be a huge step to take and one I’d never do because I think Lara works as it is – as a verse novel. People used to say that if only I’d written it as a prose novel it would reach a wider audience but it is what it is – although it was originally a prose novel that I worked on for three years before spending another two years re-writing it as verse. Lara has quite some history – starting off as a conventional novel, ending up as a verse novel and then being given a third life, if you like, with a new form and additional material. I’d like to hear it on the radio and various producers have submitted it to BBC Radio  over the years but it never gets accepted. They think it will be too complicated for the reader to follow. I beg to differ.

KMW: With the updates was there a temptation to bring the Lara character forward in time – obviously Lara is also you…

BE: Let’s say that she is based on me rather than actually being myself. The book is a mixture of fact and fiction, it’s semi-autobiographical, a fictionalized family history, so I can’t claim that everything Lara is and experiences tallies with my own life, although a lot of it does. It ends in 1995 and it’s now fifteen years later. But even so, I’ve missed out heaps of interesting stuff about my own life. Maybe that will feed into another book some day. For the purposes of the story I wanted to tell in Lara, the eponymous Lara’s job is done. It begins with her fragile sense of belonging and identity as a mixed race girl/woman, and ends up with her embracing all her selves, no longer divided but multiple. She’s travelled and searched into her family history and returns to England with the realisation that ‘this is home’. She’s come to a deep understanding of the two sides of her family: the black, white, English, Nigerian, Brazilian, European and she’s integrated that and found a sense of peace and completeness.

Bernardine Evaristo’s website: http://www.bevaristo.wordpress.com.