A Q&A with Danzy Senna
From the psychological depth of Nella Larsen’s novels to the still-relevant questions about what an artist or an individual owes her community in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s fiction, the Harlem Renaissance produced elegant work that shook literature. It still has resonance for present-day novelists. Perhaps there’s no more sophisticated contemporary American novelist when it comes to observed social intricacies, the tragicomedy of identity, and the liminal spaces around race and class than author Danzy Senna, who is also a professor of English at USC Dornsife. Each of Senna’s six daring, original books is a restrained marvel of artistry, razor-sharp perceptions, and unsettling plots that grow out of distinct, memorable characters.
Senna’s extraordinary fourth novel, Colored Television, the September California Book Club selection, will be published on September 3. Protagonist Jane Gibson and her Black painter husband, along with their two children, get by house-sitting for wealthier people around Los Angeles. As the book begins, Jane’s working on a second novel, an epic “mulatto” history.
This interview with Senna, conducted over Zoom, has been edited for brevity and clarity.
When you first encountered the “tragic mulatta” figure in literature, what were your reactions?
Where I first deeply explored that was as an undergraduate at Stanford, where I did my thesis on Nella Larsen’s Passing, Faulkner’s Light in August, and James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. It was exciting to me, especially, reading Larsen at that point in my life. To have the feeling that I had always been here, in a way. There’s such an amnesia and erasure of biracial people of Black-white origins at every stage of our existence in this country. The whole mythos of this culture is built around that erasure and the lie that we don’t exist, from the first time we exist in the antebellum South to saying, “That’s not my child,” when that’s clearly your child, to the present day, when Donald Trump is telling Kamala Harris that she doesn’t exist as she is. When I saw Nella Larsen writing about these themes that were so much still a part of my life, I had that chill of recognition. The beauty of her giving that gift to the present was so amazing and helped me understand what I wanted to do in my own work.
I don’t reject the tragic mulatto in the flippant way of simplifying the idea of the tragic mulatto, where we cast any figure who is of mixed race, who has issues, with being a tragic mulatto. The problem with that figure is not that they’re struggling and that they’re of mixed race, like in the works of Douglas Sirk, who directed Imitation of Life, or William Faulkner, but that we don’t do the necessary next step where we see that the problem is not in the body of the tragic mulatto but in the culture and the racism of the culture outside of them. Nella Larsen is doing something very different because she’s writing from within that complexity, versus being the white gaze telling what they think that story is.
I’m more interested in the problem of being mixed and less scared of it as a struggle—I don’t believe in the mythos of biraciality as the solution to all our problems, any more than I believe in it as a pathology. Metaphorically, it’s a way of thinking about a lot of different experiences—not just Blackness. It limits how powerful Passing is to say it’s only about that specific experience. There’s an existential theme and issue that she’s talking about that exists in a lot of different experiences. Also, Larsen’s novel Quicksand is the one I’m even more obsessed with—I love both of them so much.
How strongly her agent urges Jane to get past writing her second novel, which has taken her years, was fascinating. Reading your second, Symptomatic, only cemented my interest in your writing.
Something I needed to reference in Colored Television was the tragedy of the second novel. This was definitely a reference to that, for anyone who knew the inside story of Symptomatic. It was one of the more traumatic experiences publishing that book, where I saw how illegible I was to the world when I was to bring my full self to the table, my full twisted self. It was also the real birth of me as a writer.
Writing my first novel, I didn’t fully know what I was doing in a conscious way. Your first novel is so much the book that you’re inevitably going to write. To know what my publisher, my agent, wanted from me after that and not to give that to them was me reminding myself that, as an artist, I wasn’t here to please. I was here to do what I was most excited by or most driven to do. In a strange way, Symptomatic feels like a really important work for me with my own creative process; to write a first book, Caucasia, that was so universally loved and to have it be so praised felt like it, potentially, could have silenced me forever. To write something a little bit more rebellious and a little bit weirder was important for my writing process and writer development.
What were the origins of this novel?
The family itself was what I was interested in. Jane was part of this picture I had in my head of this woman who’s very susceptible to certain images in the culture, of a perfect Black family and the Hanna Andersson catalog. In the image, too, was this family with a disgruntled artist husband and this woman who’s dragging them to open houses and making them stare at this vision. I found that inherently funny.
Oftentimes, I’m trying to write something that I see, that I’ve never seen represented before. I’m trying to write that thing into existence, because I’ve never seen a certain world that I populate, either on the screen or on the page, and I want that to be in the world.
In your introduction to the reissue of Fran Ross’s 1974 satiric novel, Oreo, which features a biracial heroine, you mentioned that, in real life, Ross had gone to Los Angeles to write for Richard Pryor’s show and that hadn’t worked out. Did that knowledge influence Colored Television?
The fact that I was interested in that was more me relating to Ross. What she struggled with in terms of her illegibility and her desire to write to tonalities that are not welcome from a woman of color was something I deeply related to. I also saw how L.A. and the television-entertainment world have sometimes felt ahead of the publishing world and the literary world, in terms of this freedom to explore different tones and modalities around Blackness and Black women and women of color—more, men of color. There’s a weird way in which television is more the avant-garde of these things than the literary world.
How do you think about the collective cultural production of TV versus other solitary artistic work?
You don’t write novels by committee, and they are sort of formed in the darkness, and then you send them into the world, and you don’t know if you’re insane or not. You wait for this judgment of something formed in such a dream state. That’s a high-risk thing to do, even though we have editors and we have friends who read it. One of the major differences in film and television is that there is more of a committee you’re constantly presenting your work to—and it requires this level of feedback that is different and can lead to magical stuff. I’m interested in that tension and what it’s like to be a writer for the page, a kind of archaic form in this moment, when people don’t have the attention span to read novels. What do we do with that identity? I’m still writing about identity, but it’s a different kind of identity crisis.
Being alone when you write as a novelist seems likely to lead to greater risks taken than in a committee. How do the risks you take as a novelist feel when you’re taking them?
I think this is why a lot of the film and television industry does draw on novels—because they’re looking for something original and something risky, and the new is often coming out of this very old form. It’s from that deep thinking that you allow yourself to do when you’re not thinking about how much something’s going to cost to make, when you take the capital out of it that is required to make these other forms.
But I’m trying to amuse myself. I am my audience, and I’m trying to make something interesting enough that I start to daydream about it, that I start to live in two worlds. That’s where I know I’m doing something I want to make—if I’m driving and my kids are talking and I’m thinking about Jane and Lenny and Brett and that’s competing for my attention.
The other great relief is—I can’t imagine not being a writer, because then all of the shitty things that happen to you have no use. I was writing about that with “Why I Write.”
Speaking of what you wrote in that essay, when did you first discover the power of making art from pain?
Probably where I was most conscious of it was Caucasia and realizing that I had tapped into this experience that all of my life had made me feel alienated and outsider. To write it into a character is to tap into everyone having that feeling in themselves. The fact that so many people related to that was an experience of, Oh, right. Everyone feels completely alone. Everybody feels outside, and everybody feels shame, or a disconnect from their physical self and what they’re presenting. I want my students to tap into that part of themselves. Everyone has that power in them to feel connected to what makes them different from everyone else in the room. It’s about helping them find that as a superpower rather than a weakness.•
Join us on September 19 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Senna will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss Colored Television. Register for the Zoom conversation here, and preorder the book, which will be published on September 3.
NARRATIVES OF SUBVERSION
Read critic Walton Muyumba’s cogent essay about Colored Television and Senna’s array of works. —Alta
EARLY-HOLLYWOOD NOVEL
Alta Journal books editor David L. Ulin reviews Scott Phillips’s The Devil Raises His Own, which Ulin calls “a book about the loss of innocence, about the move from the pre-industrial society of the rural 19th century to the emerging mass culture that was to come.” —Alta
ASIAN BOYHOOD IN SILICON VALLEY
Listen to a terrific interview with Jon M. Chu, director of Crazy Rich Asians and the forthcoming Wicked, about his new memoir, Viewfinder, which starts in his hometown, Los Altos, California, where his parents own a long-standing, popular Chinese restaurant. —NPR
ARTISTIC DEVELOPMENT
Listen to Miwa Messer’s lovely interview with actor Jay Ellis (Insecure) about his debut essay collection, Did Everyone Have an Imaginary Friend (or Just Me)? —Poured Over
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