August 6, 2017 - Danzy Senna New People interviewed by Kitty Pilgrim

you oh okay good um i have little sentences that sometimes i refer to okay that's great i just didn't know if i could prepare you good morning everybody thank you so much for coming to the book festival and for supporting this wonderful free activity as you know it is free but donations are essential for the success of this particular festival for 25 donation you will get a free canvas book bag the donations could be made at the information tent which is just behind us and food is available just around the corner there if you're looking for something to snack on our author this morning is dansy senna whose book is new people and introducing her is kitty pilgrim who is a novelist and a former cnn anchor and correspondent at the end of their conversation there will be some time for questions and answers and following the program she will then go over to the book signing table and you would be able to speak with her there if you needed to have a conversation of more than whatever this is and books are available we strongly urge you to purchase books of the authors because that's how we support the authors who are kind enough to come to the book festival thank you well i am just delighted to meet dansy senna and um i was just didn't know what to expect when i started to read this book because it's really about race and it's race is something that we've all been basically dealing with discussing and it's been very much in the headlines and i know i covered it many many times when i was in the news um and yet you there's a sometimes a subject that you think you know and someone writes about it and your perceptions just shift completely and this is what this book did to me and i was so surprised because i didn't think about race in the way that she deals with race it's um you know it's it's a book that also for such a subject that's so fraught with tension and and god knows we've seen tension in many american cities over race and we've seen such deeply charged news articles about race that to actually be howling out loud with laughter about this very sensitive subject was such a surprise i have to confess i read this book in one sitting i could not put it down and i know everyone says that and you know at book festivals that's what everyone says but i really mean it i read it cover to cover i could not take my eyes away from the narrative and also the perceptions that she was bringing to me that were so new um it was a masterful book it really is a masterful book and i i'm thrilled to actually talk to you today um i want to talk about um race in in um and i'll quote from your book because i think you summed it up so there's a character named the poet he doesn't even ever have a name were you ever tempted to give him a name no it felt like the right thing for it's told from the perspective of this woman maria who's obsessed with this guy who she first in the first scene she sees him reading poetry and he kind of remains um a kind of icon in her mind so given that it's so close to her i left him the entire book the poet i thought that was terrific i was reminded of like pilgrim's progress or you know where there was just it's a noun it's not like a name and it just it creates this image that's so um mystical it's really great i really love the way you did that and i i never would have occurred to me everybody has a ha has to have a tom dick and harry with in my books but like this was was really amazing the poet is um basically he's black he's effortlessly black right he is he is black he doesn't have to try to be black but maria is um half white have black or i don't actually know um because you leave it a little nose i don't i don't think she knows right it's nebulous but she was adopted as a an infant by a black woman who was um a single woman who was a harvard phd student and wanted to as and was a feminist and sort of very race savvy black woman um wanted to adopt a black girl and raise a black daughter and so she went through the process and adopted this infant and the infant just stayed looking white to her great disappointment and she um kept waiting for her hair to curl and her skin because babies often look sort of paler and straighter-haired and then change and the baby never changed and um the baby she she has the record that the baby is biracial but just um there's sort of a kind of a little bit of a dark comedy about the adoptive mother there and her disappointment i i thought it was a brilliant brilliant twist on everything but maria is constantly straining under the weight of other people's expectations is she black is she white and then she is engaged to be married and i love this line because um her um her fiance is also of two different races and and he says khalil which is his name says they make each other complete their skin is the same same shade of beige together they look like the end of a story and i love the way you put that that was just really interesting that they found togetherness in their con racial confusion yeah their racial ambiguity is part of the attraction and them both feeling somewhat like i think of that island of the misfit toys when they meet in college you know he's half black and half jewish and she's racially mixed and they have both um struggled in terms of dating i think is where the choice gets played out of what you're going to identify with especially in college and um so when they meet each other it's like they've found the solution to the struggle of their identity and they're going to make this sort of new race um out of these mixtures hence the title new people they're they're new people um but there is in your book there is a certain power with being black and i actually love i need to read this sentence also i'm sorry to keep reading your work but i i just i'm mesmerized by it and so you're talking about lisa who is who's very dark-skinned and she said and she says her darkness is something she can lord over people lisa is beginning to understand that the very things she hated growing up her kink and her color have begun to have currency if you know where to go who to be around who to avoid and how to frame the conversation and then a little bit lower you write lisa bought a t-shirt on the street in harlem a few weeks ago that reads it's a black thing you wouldn't understand so everyone's struggling with their identity here which is really quite amus it's amusing it's poignant but it's just amusing am i black and my white and and how how does that make me powerful does that make me not powerful right i mean i um grew up understanding there was this tradition in american literature of writing about mixed race people as tragic and it's like the tragic mulatto stereotype of the very sort of despairing mixed race character and i always think i'm like the comic mulatto i'm like i'm not the tragic mulatto i'm the but just writing about race i grew up in a household where comedy was so much of a part of our strategy of survival my dad is black and my mom's white and the the conversation around race there was always so much humor amongst us and kind of making fun of the outside world and those stereotypes and con conceptions of people based on color so it felt very organic for me to write a book that was so you know highly satirical and about identity politics and the sort of um the ways that people um can kind of commodify their own identity really i i it it is a hilariously funny book i was laughing out loud and the plot twists are so unique that you do not see anything coming and i a couple of times i just was saying what to the to the empty room it was so amazing you know and you also take on other races so at one point um she pretends to be a um [Music] a spanish nanny and there's a whole thing about chinese i mean there is no limit on where you will go on this topic and the freedom with which you deal with it is so refreshing it's not so utterly constipated the way it is right i was very i felt more liberated in this book in in a way and i think it was partly because i had a um a book contract for about five years for another book that i was supposed to be writing for my publisher and i just couldn't finish it and so i just kind of put it aside to write this just sort of to release myself and to have fun and and i thought my publisher's probably given up on me but i'm just going to do something to kind of get my head straight and just enjoy writing again and i wrote it sort of in secret thinking this is just for me and my few friends i'm gonna show this to and then i finished it and i thought maybe this is the novel so i called my publisher and said um i have some good news and some bad news the book you i'm sure they hate that they hate them it's never gonna happen the one you're waiting for is not happening but i have another novel and it's finished and i'm sending it to you today so it's like but something about writing it in private and i felt completely liberated and i was just really amusing myself in a room alone which is i think how all writing should happen especially for me yeah because then when you read it you're amusing yourself in a room alone and i must say i was amusing myself enormously so you didn't set out to write a big societal statement about norms and and and so how do you feel about people trying to actually push you into this important work category i mean you always it's like great do that as long as you buy the book you know i mean you're like it take call me what you want um you know i i think that the the sort of societal critique should not be so conscious when you're writing it or it's going to feel really heavy-handed and so you know what's interesting when you're writing fiction is what subconsciously happens on the page and um that should sort of happen and sneak its way into the story but the story has to come first and the characters so for me um you know it's really organic for me to write characters who are talking and thinking about race and gender and political issues because that's the demographic in which i live so that's the most organic dialogue that my characters would be happening but having but um but for me then you know i can't tell you what the book is supposed to say it's it's really the reader's job to do that work of analyzing it afterwards and i sort of hope that i'm not too articulate about it as a fiction writer that people can bring to their own experience to the to the novel yeah that's what's so exciting about fiction i think is that it's only in a way half half written the the reader is the other writer of what is on the page and that um that's their leaving things unsaid and leaving things un inarticulate is is actually part of the beauty of fiction for me as a reader the courage it took to send off this book to a publisher who wasn't expecting it it must have come like a pie in the face to your publisher but then were you nervous in that interval and what was their reaction when they called you i'm just i shared the novel with a small group of really great writer friends and they were really excited about it so i didn't feel completely insane when i sent it to her i thought there was something here that you know and but she was like okay i'll take a look at it but she had been you know waiting and waiting on this other big novel that i have hundreds of pages of um and so i just gave her this novel and it's just within a few weeks she was like we love it you know this is ex we we wanted another we wanted a great book and we got a book we love so we're we're happy and and it went really well from that point on but it was definitely it felt a little risky and you know the book definitely as you were pointing out um nothing is sacred in it and and it takes the risk of offending like almost every group i would say so and yet you recognize the kernel of truth in some of the the ridic well you point you push it to the point of ridiculous so that you can see how absurd some of these stereotypes are right yeah and i think it was um you know they're such a fearful and self-conscious atmosphere especially in certain worlds that we're in and um you know i've been living and thinking about this subject for my entire life and um and i i felt like i needed to write about it in a way that was released and was not full of fear and and caution because it's i think that's actually stopping us from moving forward no i would agree completely i would agree completely what talking about risks one of your subplots is the jonestown mass suicide of a cult right which we which those of us who were in the 70s remember horrific and you turn it into um well i won't characterize it as comedy but it definitely has this highly ironic role in the in and i wanted to um and and also your characters maria's writing about not about that which would be you know heavy-handed serious right she's writing about the music that they played so i mean i just that's what academics do right they take a really specific sort of i mean the funny part to me was sort of a satire of academia in a way like she's gonna write about the jonestown massacre but she's just gonna write about this album they produced in 1974 like just the music that they made they did make an album and it's kind of an amazing album but but i like the idea of you know academics the plot of land getting smaller and smaller yeah into this minuscule thing i just want to read maria is trying to write about their music and ethnomusicology of the people's temple which is jonestown she's trying to uncover the modes of resistance in the hymns and she's trying to excavate using their music the clues not only to why they would commit suicide but how they survived as long as they did i mean the the whimsy of that is just hilarious and i i really have to ask you why were you listening to this album well i would say listen i i actually i keep saying to people i've been obsessed with the jonestown massacre for seven years but then i spoke to my mother and she said what are you talking about you've been obsessed with that since high school you know i've been reading about jonestown my whole life and um i think for people who are writers there are certain historical events that you kind of can't turn your eyes away from and you're not even sure why it's so compelling to you but it's like a compulsion and you keep going back to some moment in history and for me it was that 1978 multi-racial utopia gone horribly wrong and i mean there's many ways to analyze why i would be interested in that and my parents divorced around that same year like an interracial couple and there was like a personal sort of catastrophe um but clearly not on the scale of jonestown because i'm still here but um you know there was a sense looking at jonestown that this was sort of my family adjacent my parents being very left thinking left-wing and they were political activists and um and our world was filled with people who would have gone to jonestown and i went to an afrocentric school for a year at that that same year in 1978 um which was sort of under the influence of socialist ideas and and so much of it was familiar to me and so just i found myself mesmerized by the beauty of the idea of jonestown set against the reality of what happened and i'm always interested in the gap in um in sort of the rhetoric and then what is the actuality and jim jones you know led all these people to this um what he was calling this black socialist utopia which was actually very multiracial and a lot of the children were mixed and then um he led them there to their deaths yeah no i mean it's it's just really i mean i i remember it as being incredibly tragic and poignant and then to see you sort of mine this for other meanings it was revelatory especially for a news person who sees things very much as this is what happened and then to see you go deeper and analyze it like that it was yeah i think i wanted to set it against sort of if if there was a subject you could study that would drive you mad because we watched maria sort of spiral like looking at the jonestown massacre and listening to those voices would be the thing to drive you over the edge the the thing that struck me is you have a film crew doing a documentary about interracial couples sort of in the middle of this and it gives the sort of distance perspective on a lot of the characters and i loved how you did that because it's very close all and then all of a sudden it goes at a distance it's like holding the mirror out and um how did you come up with that that is a wonderful i i won't even um demean it by calling it a plot device it's a it's a wonderful technique to try to get an overview on on a situation well it's it's written um it's set actually in the 90s and i remember there being all these articles saying like mixed people you know sort of commodifying my my group of people as like the solution to the race problem like what if we could all just mix and aren't they pretty in their benetton commercial and you know it was like this moment that mixed-ness became very fetishized and i think in some ways it keeps happening over and over again and um and so i was kind of making fun of that that khalil and maria are chosen as the couple that this documentary filmmaker wants to follow for her movie called new people and um maria just never quite you know drinks that kool-aid so to speak she she's always kind of cynical about this idea of mixed people being the solution to the 400 years of you know the bloody mess of america i need to open this up i'm sure you're all dying so anybody with a question sir um yeah i'm working on something that i realized through this process that i'd work best in secrecy and not mentioning at all what i'm working on so um it's like opening the door of the oven and the souffle falling um but the novel that i was working on um you know it did have elements of what i ended up writing in it very small elements of that and i had a very kind british editor once say to me you know um time spent on a novel is never wasted and you know i don't i think she was just trying to make me feel better at that time but um but i do think that some of the work i was doing over those years was coming into this in a sideways way and you know really what went wrong with that novel are running around out there my nine and ten year old motherhood was a constant interruption to that dream state i needed to be in to write a novel the young years of my my children being very young and needing me a lot so um so now that they're a little older i was able to kind of get back that attention so i really think that you know we have to like be kind to ourselves as mothers and say those were years i really needed to be present for these children and was enjoying my children so that disrupted the art part excuse me the book i've not read but it's described as being uh comedy is this something you could have written 10 years ago or has you your relative age helped you uh write comedy it's a difficult thing to do yeah you know i think there's been um i i've actually written comedy from the beginning and i think it's much more natural to me than um and i've sort of given myself permission at this age to do that but it feels much more my anyone who knows me and sits with me like knows that's where i go as as a thinker is towards satire and comedy and um i think i i i see elements of it in my first novel caucasia and moments where it hits that note and i think i've just allowed myself to get further and further into that but i i think so i've come into it but accepting it about myself yeah i have a question uh while we're on comedy could you see this and i don't mean to trivialize it but could you see it as a sitcom because i could actually see many more situations where the humor would be brought out i would love to see this as a sitcom um i i give i live in la and you know five years ago i was still only five years out of new york five years ago and i i had the sort of new york snobbery of you know this isn't real art about television and film and and like in the last five years i've been like oh my god i think some of the smartest storytellers in the world are here in this city and some of the most interesting and liberated work is coming out of television and so i i would have no problem with that you know all right well we we put the note right on on there we go to the universe yeah um any other questions that's okay it's a short question what was caucasia oh i just wanted to know about caucasia her first novel which i read about before coming here it's got awards and it sounds very intriguing was that 1978 1988 what what year 1998.98 you were born in 1970 yeah um and that was my first novel that i wrote in graduate school and it was about a family um a young girl growing up in the 70s and 80s in an interracial family and um and it was sort of sold as very autobiographical but it actually wasn't the thing i had in common was that i'm from an interracial couple and um and have siblings who maybe look different racial read racially differently than i do but um but really i wrote about a story of passing and of a girl going into the political underground with her mother and um and having to pass as white and in a way it was a study of whiteness and the construction of racial identity through this character um and caucasia the title is actually what she calls new hampshire land of white people so yeah i notice that you have an ambiguous ending in fact i i not only noticed that you have an ambiguous ending i projected out 50 different ways it could end i mean you bring everyone right to the edge of the cliff and then you say figure it out people what happens next did you decide to do that did you have right endings did you just lop it off i mean it feels a little it feels lopped off but it feels perfectly lopped off like surgically locked off like it was very much an intention but i know as a writer you try you try you try and then you just cut i know in one of my books um i had an ending and my son read it and he said mom that's just lame just stop it right there and you know he's he was right yeah um i endings are actually the in all of my work it feels like the only place i am certain and my beginnings i write 50 times but um after i've written the ending but um but the ending of this book i was absolutely certain when i got there that i wanted to end there and it's a very unusual we're not telling you yeah but um it's worth seeing but but i i tend to like work that leaves um in a way leaves the conflict alive and doesn't tie things up i don't like things that have very clear redemption and closure um so you're always trying to write the book that you want to read and for me that was that was the place of where i felt really sure of myself and and i know some people have expressed unhappiness that that was where i ended and that's that's also fine i think coming into this being my fifth book i'm also like totally comfortable if not everybody loves those choices it's it's a nice thing to kind of come to the age where you're you're like that's okay that's where i wanted to end it so yeah this is also a novel about romantic obsession i mean romantic obsession pervades every single page and um you know we've all whether we were four or whether we were 16 or whether we were 35 have all been in the throes of hopefully not as severe romantic obsession stalking yeah um but um i mean how did you get in touch with that because it's very palpable yeah i um i tend to write from um all of my work has a kernel of autobiography and i look for the story that didn't happen within the story that did and what i mean is i think about a moment that makes me anxious or uncomfortable in myself that you know a place in myself um and usually those those things of shame or obsession um those those emotional states are really rich for for me as a fiction writer and i start thinking you know what if certain um stabilizing factors were not there what might have happened and where would i have gone with this and so it starts out in a way from a position of autobiography and then what's exciting for me is when i start to let it kind of the character do things i wouldn't have done or or things happen to that character that i wouldn't want to have happen to me so she slowly becomes not me and um that's that's sort of my process of writing and so i i think a character who is messed up enough to do the things that maria does is the character i love the most because she's going to take the story to the place it needs to go oh she took it um you you do mention martha's vineyard listen let's while we're sitting here we might as well celebrate that you mentioned the beach plum inn and they're about to they're going to get married in this idyllic martha's vineyard what was all that coming from tell us a little bit i mean i've been coming here since i was a young child and and part of the appeal of it for my particular family was of course the racial mix of the island and we were in oak bluffs most of my childhood and you know come it's an unusual place in that way that there's like a large you know black summer population and multiracial families here and um and so you know that's part of the fantasia of khalil and maria they're they're they're the perfect they call themselves or she refers to them as um king and queen of the racially nebulous prom um and they're gonna come to martha's vineyard and have a wedding where you know they jump over the broom in the african-american tradition and they step on a glass in the jewish tradition and they have a harlem um chef being flown in to make um low-fat soul food and her mother you know has reminded her that it it's not soul food if it's low fat and um so they're all those things that i was kind of poking fun at about what this island would represent to this couple but you also make fun of brooklyn a little bit which isn't that cool to make fun of brooklyn now i i think finally we could make fun of brooklyn well it was also brooklyn of the 90s when i came of age there was um not the brooklyn we see now and you know i've been struck going back to the neighborhood where i came of age in my 20s in fort greene by you know the intense gentrification of that neighborhood and remembering this moment right after college when i moved there with a bunch of my friends and we were sort of it had this harlem renaissance some feeling where we were you know it's like the brooklyn renaissance where a bunch of black artists and writers were all living in a kind of 10 block radius and i remember i lived on a block where at one end of my block was spike lee's production studio and at the other end of my block was a cafe called cocoa bar that um alice walker and tracy chapman had had started and i called it the dreadlock delete the neighborhood because it was like but but it was like the it was a gentrification in a way because it was all these college educated aspiring artists and writers moving into a working class neighborhood but it was um very much a kind of a black identified group of people and and that i have a lot of love for that moment in brooklyn too it's not completely making fun of it and everything i'm making fun of i'm part of the problem that i'm making but you make fun in such a tender way i mean it's it's so much fun look i cannot recommend this more this is the most wonderful funny book you will just clear your afternoon though when you start it because you you will absolutely want to read this this is new people and thank you so much thank you okay oh [Music] oh and then and i need to them that's a good idea i could do that exactly