{"id":45404,"date":"2016-01-27T16:35:14","date_gmt":"2016-01-27T16:35:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=45404"},"modified":"2017-05-04T03:03:47","modified_gmt":"2017-05-04T03:03:47","slug":"saving-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=45404","title":{"rendered":"Saving race"},"content":{"rendered":"

Saving race<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The Boston Phoenix<\/a>
\nMay 14-20, 2004<\/p>\n

Tamara Wieder<\/strong><\/p>\n

With <\/em>Symptomatic<\/a>, the follow-up to her acclaimed debut novel <\/em>Caucasia<\/a>, Danzy Senna<\/a> again delves into race in America \u2014 and defies second-book syndrome<\/em><\/p>\n

IT\u2019S EVERY YOUNG writer\u2019s dream: to have a first novel achieve critical acclaim and monetary success. But a dream is usually all it is, and for Danzy Senna<\/a>, it was no different. She certainly didn\u2019t expect the attention and praise her debut novel, Caucasia<\/a><\/em> (Riverhead Books, 1998), received; after all, the book was originally written as her graduate-school thesis.<\/p>\n

Senna, the biracial daughter of poet Fanny Howe<\/a> and activist and writer Carl Senna, was raised in Boston<\/a> in the 1970s \u2014 not exactly a hotbed of tolerance for mixed-race families. Her experiences in Boston and beyond have helped mold her as a writer; Caucasia<\/em> told the story of biracial sisters dealing with some of the same ugliness doled out to her own family. Senna has also written extensively on the frequent experience of being mistaken for white, and how it\u2019s led to an uncomfortable exposure of prejudices and intolerance in those around her.<\/p>\n

In her latest novel, Symptomatic<\/a><\/em> (Riverhead Books), Senna again surveys a familiar racial landscape. Her narrator is a biracial young woman often mistaken for white; she develops a friendship with an older, similarly mixed-race woman that begins as an antidote to loneliness and alienation, but gradually grows into something both complicated and frightening.<\/p>\n

Q:<\/strong> Tell me where the idea for <\/em>Symptomatic came from, and how you ended up writing it.<\/em><\/p>\n

A:<\/strong> I love thrillers, and I love the old Roman Polanski<\/a>, Hitchcock<\/a> thrillers, and I wanted to think about race and identity and use the kind of thriller plot. And I was interested in the sort of claustrophobia<\/a> of race, and the claustrophobia of identity, and how you can sort of become trapped by it. But in this case it\u2019s more literal. I was also interested in doubles, and that comfort that you initially feel when you have an identification with someone, and how that can kind of turn smothering. So racial identity, and then identity in general, sort of as something that can be comforting and terrifying and smothering, all at once…<\/p>\n

…Q:<\/strong> You wrote in an essay that “in Boston circa 1975, mixed wasn\u2019t really an option.” How did you deal with that?<\/em><\/p>\n

A:<\/strong> I always identified as black. That was, I think, the only choice for me. The other choice wasn\u2019t psychologically healthy for me, because my whole family didn\u2019t<\/em> have that option. So I think black was my identity, and in many ways still is, though I think of black and mixed as related in a complicated way. I think of myself as mixed, and<\/em> I think of myself as part of a long history of African-American writers, so I don\u2019t see them as so distinct as people do these days.<\/p>\n

Q:<\/strong> Did you ever feel resentful that mixed wasn\u2019t an option?<\/em><\/p>\n

A:<\/strong> I didn\u2019t desire that as an option. The black community was where I placed myself, and I felt actually sort of disparaging of people who identified as mixed; that seemed kind of tragic to me, because it seemed like they were avoiding the politics and the power relations that were really at the heart of race, to me. So a lot of my politics grew around this identity growing up, of identifying myself as black and seeing race as much more than a biological category. I think now I don\u2019t worry so much about what I identify as; that just seems sort of simplistic, to suggest that there\u2019s one answer to that. But I don\u2019t feel badly that I didn\u2019t…<\/p>\n

Read the entire interview here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With “Symptomatic,” the follow-up to her acclaimed debut novel “Caucasia,” Danzy Senna again delves into race in America \u2014 and defies second-book syndrome<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,13743,8,6462,20],"tags":[22822,1340,22821,22820],"class_list":["post-45404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-interviews","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-boston-phoenix","tag-danzy-senna","tag-tamara-wieder","tag-the-boston-phoenix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45404"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45404\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53790,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45404\/revisions\/53790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}