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Yvonne Durant: Hi, listeners. I'm Audible Editor Yvonne Durant. Today I'm speaking to a very important woman who possesses a talent of capturing our minds and attentions, and our hearts, with her exquisite words and stellar storytelling in . Kukajawani, Danzy Senna.
Danzy Senna: [Laughs].
YD: By the way, listeners, Kukajawani is the word for "Hello" from the planet where Finn, son of the main character, sometimes resides on this planet. Did I get that right, Danzy?
DS: You got it right, you did. He comes from that planet.
YD: Yeah, I liked him. I finished listening to Colored Television just the other day, and I just had to sit still for a moment. Thank you for the experience. When you finished writing it, do you remember what you were thinking?
DS: I was thinking that I was sad to leave these characters, because I had lived with them for quite a long time and gotten really attached to this family, and sort of half of my mind was always with them, for years. I always feel that when I finish a novel, just like a sense of grief and like I'm letting these sort of children leave the nest and enter the world without me, and it's a little bit bittersweet.
YD: Yeah. You really had me at the mention of bunions. I giggled. I was a member of the bunion secret society once. I had one removed and it's funny, strangers, usually women, would come up to me noticing the boot on my foot and ask, "You had the operation?" I mean, who writes about bunions? You do. Did you have the operation?
DS: I did have the operation. And so I put it into a character whose not anything like me, but I thought it was sort of just such a comedy of being immobilized for a period and thinking you're going to write when you're immobilized, and of course not writing a single word because writing requires distractions and walking and moving. So, it was kind of one of the many make-it-worse situations in this novel, where things don't quite go as planned.
YD: They usually don't like to do two at a time. I had one done. My sister had two, but separately, because you have to stay off your feet.
DS: Yeah, no, I didn't have two done at the same time. I had one done years ago, and I remember them mentioning I should get the other one done, and I didn't listen. So now I'm left with one bad foot and one good foot.
YD: I wrote a blurb about your book for our post, we have something called Editors Select, and in it I talked about my brown skin. I think I'm almond color, and from morning to night I will be brown, I will be seen as a Black woman. Okay, that has its issues, but I don't have to announce myself. You have to announce yourself, and other mulattoes, as a rule, usually have to announce themselves, you agree?
DS: Some do, some do. In my family, we all came out looking different. My sister doesn't have to announce that she's a Black woman, and I do, just based on sort of where the DNA scattered. It's actually been formative, I would say, to me becoming a writer, is that sense of the gap between my face and my race, and that experience from a very young age of having this kind of other within other identity, where I was not only a Black person in America, but I was a invisible Black person in the Black community in the white world, and always had to navigate that sense of disappearing and not being seen. I think it sort of made the writing become all the more urgent for me, to speak on the page.
"They never say to a white writer who writes about white people over 20 books, 'Can you just stop writing about whiteness,' because it's assumed you're writing about human beings who have multiple experiences in different scenarios."
There's this term now that people use, "white passing," which is a new term, which wasn't a term when I was growing up, but that's what they call people of mixed-race who appear to be white to the world. It's a term I have problems with, because it turns the term passing, it takes that term, which to me is an action, it's something you choose to do, and sort of makes it just a sort of passive description of a person, so that I become white passing when I've never passed as white in my entire life. I'm perceived as white, but I don't pass as white. So, I find that an important distinction.
YD: Oh, that's a new one, "white passing."
DS: Yeah, it is new. I mean, for my generation, your generation, it was never something we ever heard.
YD: You mention Carol Channing in the book. Do you think she was white passing, she white passed all these years? She didn't go out of her way, but at a certain point, I think, she's very clear on her background, that she fessed up.
DS: Oh, yeah, at 16 she learned that her father was a Black man who had been passing himself as white, and she kept that in her back pocket her whole life and didn't reveal it till the very end when she wrote her biography. I think that just goes to show you the kind of limitations that she was aware of that would be placed on her should she come out as a woman of mixed-race or a Black woman. And it's changed so quickly. You know, that woman Rachel Dolezal, and all those white women who were Black passing. They were passing as Black, but what was interesting for me about that was that so much has changed in my lifetime that nobody could've imagined someone doing that when I was growing up. That wasn't something someone would do. There would be no reason to do that. It's just fascinating to me as a kind of cultural observer to watch the world and these definitions and these identities changing over my lifetime, and I feel like I've lived through so many sort of different episodes, to go to the TV metaphor, of the mulatto experience in America and what it means.
YD: Right, in the book, Jane, the protagonist, gives her daughter an American Doll named Addy, who’s Black. By the way, I know the writer of Addy's story, and I called, I said, "You're in the book! You're in the book! Addy's in the book." She was real excited about that. And Ruby, Jane's daughter, is not exactly thrilled. Can you tell us why Jane chose that doll for her daughter? Can you tell listeners why Jane made that choice?
DS: Yeah, so, Jane and her husband, Lenny, are broke. She's a novelist, he's a painter, and they've been living for years without much money. Neither of them have a lot of job stability and their work doesn't sell, and their daughter really wants an American Girl doll. Jane finishes her novel and before she knows what's going to happen with it, she gets into this sort of heady space thinking that she's about to get some money, and so she in this kind of excitement goes to buy her daughter an American Girl doll. And she wants a Black doll for her daughter, who she's concerned has sort of begun to wear a blonde wig, and seems to be kind of at odds with not loving her brown skin and her hair. So, she really wants to get her daughter a Black doll, and she goes in to get the one—there's one other doll that's sort of middle-class, Louisiana, belle of the ball. And they don't have it anymore. They've stopped selling that one. The only one they have is Addy, who’s escaped from slavery, so it's like the second choice, and she gets it for her daughter and it has this little book that comes with it, and this matching dress.
Her daughter really is disappointed in this doll, and it throws her into despair. The mother thinks it's because the doll's Black, but the daughter corrects her and says, "It's because it's the only American Girl doll I'll ever get, and that's the only one I'm ever gonna get.” Because she knows they don't have money, and then the doll won't have any friends, any other American Girl dolls, and it'll be the only story that she has, the only figure she has in her room. And it's kind of an echo or parallel to Ruby's struggle, because they move so many times in her life—she's only a little girl—that she never has time to make friends. So, there's something about this doll that conjures up all that feeling she has.
YD: On some level I related to Ruby because my sister and friends, they had white Barbie dolls, and my mother found a Black Barbie-like doll for me. Her feet were big because her shoes had to clip onto them. It was harsh. She had two knots on it. So, we were in the schoolyard doing a Barbie doll fashion show, and it was my turn and someone yelled, "Miss Africa," and I cried, oh my goodness, I cried, because that was before Black was beautiful. We'd talk about the motherland, and all of that. It was quite painful.
DS: Oh, I could imagine. We had the Christie doll, and my mother found us all these dolls from Europe that were some international dolls with different colored skin, and many of them looked like us. So she went out of her way to try to find dolls that looked kind of like us. But we got into Barbie, too, later, all the different colors of Barbie.
YD: Right, right, now she's very colorful. I have to tell you, I'll never look at a bowl of mixed nuts the same way. I know I'll always remember the phrase "drowned in buttermilk." We used to accuse people of having white fever. I remember someone talking about this guy, and he said, "Oh, honey, he has white fever. It ran him out of Philadelphia" [laughs]. Hampton Ford, he was talking about that.
DS: Yeah, Hampton Ford goes to a party of the Kardashians' that they're giving for one of their toddlers, and he's this Black producer who is trying to create diverse content for this network and hires Jane to work for him. He goes to this party and he's filled with panic because there's not a single child there with two Black parents. It's all mixed kids, and he's sort of filled with this fear in many different parts of his life that Black people are being erased and replaced by these beige kids, and that eventually even his own child will end up marrying a white person, and their child will end up marrying a white person, and he says that by the time he's an old man, he's just going to have family gatherings that's going to look like Abercrombie & Fitch catalogs [laughs].
"For me the specificity of mulatto, it's a term that holds in it all of the history that comes from being very specifically Black-and-white-mixed in this country, and it's kind of got baked into it the problems of race."
So, yeah, a common perception of the fear of race mixing always comes from the white perspective in the sense of polluting whiteness, and this idea of whiteness as purity. But in this book, I think, it's flipped, and the Black fear of being erased, which is actually more of a real possibility, given that we're the minority in this country and the history of the lightening and lightening of the Black people in America is a real one. So, Hampton kind of holds that anxiety in the book.
YD: Sometimes, while listening to the book, I thought you were doing the narration, and in fact, now that I hear you, you could've been Kristen Ariza, and I felt it made me closer to Jane. I was there with you, rooting for you, feeling horrible. It was like, "Okay, Jane, we're gonna get through this." Why did you choose Kristen Ariza? And what were the must-haves for the narrator of your work?
DS: She has narrated the last several books of mine, and I had to choose out of several options the first time I picked her. My work has, I think, both comedy and melancholy in it, and irony, and her voice has a real range to it, and it was subtle. She didn't go too far with the sort of comic elements, but she kept it in a kind of register that felt really, really nuanced as an actor. So, I loved her voice, and when they gave me the option again of picking someone new, I listened to her again. I said, "She's really good. I think she does such a great job with my work."
YD: Yeah, she could've gone over-the-top. I found she was quite restrained. She had this restraint about her.
DS: That's what I like, yeah, her restraint.
YD: So, there're a couple of people I want to slap. Jane's agent, Honor. What a name. She does not deserve that name. It always makes me nervous when people say, "Well, maybe you should consider not writing about this or writing about that."
DS: Oh, I've heard that. I have heard that. Jane finishes her 10-year opus, what her husband calls, "The mulatto War and Peace," this book she's been laboring over for years. It's her second novel, and her agent just kind of flippantly says, "I don't think you should keep on this mixed-race experience. Can you get away from the whole mixed thing?”
It's something that's interesting and specific to being a writer of mixed-race, and particularly a Black/white mix. If you write about people of that background multiple times, it doesn't matter what else you're writing about, people will impose the idea that you're only writing about that.
YD: Exactly.
DS: But they never say to a white writer who writes about white people over 20 books, "Can you just stop writing about whiteness," because it's assumed you're writing about human beings who have multiple experiences in different scenarios. And I don't think, actually, Black writers don't even get that comment. If you write about Black characters over and over again, you're just assumed that's what you write about. But when you're mixed-race, you're assumed that that's a one-off, and you're not supposed to treat it as an actual world from which you come, that you will always be writing from. It's not seen as a perspective. It's seen as a kind of predicament. So, I was interested in that projection onto mixed-race artists and writers, and that strange kind of preconception about you.
YD: Yeah, very true. The conversation around mulattoes has been written about, talked about, argued about, even the word has been a source of controversy. You have no issues with it, from what I heard, and what would the alternative be? I think you pointed out, "mixed-race," what would the mix be? Why would you walk about saying, "Well, I'm actually mixed-race," if someone is bold enough to ask you what you are?
DS: Which they usually are. Well, mixed-race to me is a completely meaningless term, because it doesn't tell you anything about someone's background. I have friends who are white and Chinese and who are Peruvian and Mexican, and what are we talking about when we say mixed-race? We're just saying that somebody's parents were of different backgrounds, but for me the specificity of mulatto, it's a term that holds in it all of the history that comes from being very specifically Black-and-white-mixed in this country, and it's kind of got baked into it the problems of race. But I'm, as you can see, interested in those problems, and interested in that history. So, the term feels loaded in a way that feels appropriate for what we're talking about in my work.
YD: I know you have children, I think two sons? Have you ever been asked at a park, "How long have you been working for this family"? Or when they see you with them, do you throw people in a state of confusion?
DS: I don't know. It's funny, that hasn't happened a lot. It may be because they look enough like me. But I did have a funny experience where I went to the park with my kid when he was four years old, and I was just really tired and he looked kind of a mess. And there was a group of Black teenagers at a bench nearby watching us, and I was pushing him on the swing, and I could see them looking on with great disapproval, and I thought, “They're looking at his hair right now and they think I'm a white mother who let my child's hair look like this.” One of them came over to me, and I said, "Stop, I know what you're gonna say" [laughs].
"I have a sort of fighting spirit, so I will just keep at something, and I think that's one of the best qualities to have as a writer."
YD: Is that right?
DS: And I'm having the most hilarious conversation with them, and they were like offering me product advice, and I was like, "I have those products." I was like, "We just left the house in a rush."
YD: That is hilarious.
DS: Yeah, but other than that, it's been pretty smooth sailing with them in that regard.
YD: So, I'm thinking of Jane's experience, and I'm thinking of you also. Would you like to see Colored Television on colored televisions everywhere, or on the big screen?
DS: If it was done right, and with the spirit of the work. It's always a risk when you have work being adapted that they'll completely mangle it, but I also find that has exciting possibilities too, to like imagine it being acted. I don't have a really precious feeling about my work that it can't be ever made into another form. Like, I'm open to that, and have worked with people on that, so yeah, I think it's definitely a possibility.
YD: Okay. And one of my favorite questions, and it's not a favorite state to be in as a writer, the state of being rejected. How do you take rejection? Or have you had to?
DS: I have had to take rejection, for sure. My first novel I sent out eight times to try to get published and got rejection upon rejection. I joke a lot in this novel about the identity of being Gen X and the sort of resilience you have, the scrappiness you have if you've been raised in that generation where your parents were sort of absent in many ways and you were let loose on the city. I'm also middle child and second born and I think I have a sort of fighting spirit, so I will just keep at something, and I think that's one of the best qualities to have as a writer, is beyond talent, beyond inspiration, is resilience, because you're not writing always to please. You're writing to challenge, to entrust, to change the culture that you're in and show people something that you think you're seeing. That's not always going to be met with praise or acceptance. And especially if you're a writer of color. I mean, immediately you have walls up in front of you.
YD: Right.
DS: So, yeah, I think, I just had many ups and downs in my career, and I was tapping into all of that with Jane and her kind of calamity with her second novel.
YD: Well, I think you're on an upbeat this time, and you've had ups before, of course. This has been great. Thank you for taking the time. Listeners, you can find Colored Television on Audible. Have fun, enjoy it. If you have to go back, it'll be worth your while. Just keep with the story, it's wonderful. Thank you.
DS: Thank you so much. This was such a pleasure. It's great to meet you.
YD: Same here. All the best.