Gloria Oyarzabal’s Woman Go No’Gree takes its title from a phrase in West African pidgin, a refusal that also functions as a thesis. The book, published by Editorial RM in 2020, examines how European colonialism imposed gender as a biological organizing principle on societies that had ordered labor, profession, and even monarchy along other lines. Oyarzabal approaches this history through photographic sequence and book design, testing how inherited frameworks influence the representation of women and how an image can make those frameworks available for scrutiny.
The central question is whether social relations everywhere are organized around biological sexual difference. Oyarzabal treats that as an open problem rather than a given, drawing on religious and linguistic evidence suggesting that precolonial African practices were not gendered in the ways colonial administrations made them. She also turns the question on Western feminism itself, asking what happens when universalist gender categories meet cultures with entirely different traditions. The title’s refusal — woman go no ‘gree — is not a rejection of feminism but of its Eurocentric rationalist scaffolding.
Visually, the book is built around what the publisher describes as a brilliant, colorful, and rhythmic page layout. Oyarzabal moves between beauty canons, modernity, stereotypes, and the infantilization of women exported as part of the Western patriarchal system. The sequencing does not illustrate an argument so much as stage its contradictions, allowing imperial imagery to collide with contemporary bodies and settings. At 176 pages in a 19 × 27.5 cm hardcover, the book gives this examination a sustained physical form, inviting readers to relate its visual rhythms to the questions the text raises.
Woman Go No’Gree won the Images Vevey Book Award 2019/2020 and the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation Photobook of the Year Award in 2020. Those prizes matter less as endorsements than as evidence that the book’s method — decolonial critique conducted through photographic sequence and design — was recognized as a serious intervention in the photobook form. For collectors concerned with photography’s role in postcolonial thought, and with the ways a book’s structure can carry an argument that text alone cannot, it is a considered acquisition.
