Orginally
published in Creative Loafing
Disappearing Girl
Danzy Senna's first novel Caucasia
is the story of a disappearance, not just the disappearance of
Birdie and her mother, Sandy, but of Birdie's identity. "I
disappeared into America," she says, "the easiest place
to get lost."
Birdie and her sister Cole are
two children at the mercy of their parents' flightly behavior.
They speak to each other in their own language, "Elemeno,"
providing each other with an enviable intimacy. But while Cole
can easily pass for black, Birdie's appearance is more ambiguous:
she is variously taken for Jewish, Sicilian, even Pakistani, but
seldom ever African-American.
Birdie's white mother is heavily
involved in the underground civil rights movement. Her father
Deck is black, a man more devoted to his thought life than his
family life. After Deck leaves for Brazil with Cole and his young,
black girlfriend, Sandy panics and decides she and Birdie must
leave Boston for fear of Federal agents nabbing her for whatever
underground activities she has been involved in. She pulls Birdie
out of school--just as she was making friends--and hauls her around
from commune to commune, sleeping in parking lots, working the
odd job until they settle down in New Hampshire. Birdie is now
Jesse Goldman, her mother tells her. They must alter their identities
for fear of the authorities, she says; so now her father is a
recently deceased Jewish intellectual, and Birdie must begin to
live a lie. She must live her life as a white girl.
Senna poignantly depicts troubles
unique to interracial marriages, from a mother's despair at her
inability to reproduce the cornrows other girls are wearing in
her own dark-skinned little girls' hair to the special, humiliating
discrimination reserved for mixed couples and their children.
Whether in the "black power"
private school in Boston or the nearly all-white public school
in New Hampshire, Birdie doesn't feel at home. The children at
the former school only grudgingly accept her as black; and though
the children at the latter school accept her readily enough, in
an effort to pass herself off as white, she ignores their racial
epithets, making her feel like a sell-out.
Birdie's first-person narration
adds pathos to her story; the voice of the older, wiser narrator
underscoring and illuminating the more naive viewpoint of the
young girl, as she begins to suspect, for instance, that her mother
may never have had to leave Boston in the first place.
Caucasia provides Senna with a
unique opportunity to critique both sides, black and white, at
once, to divulge a world in which even the kindest of people have
reservations about people whose skin color differs from their
own. It's a fair, sober critique, leveling equal amounts of blame
and understanding at all involved.
In this strong, deftly written
novel, Senna's thoughtfully constructed plot explores the nooks
and crannies of race, family, and identity. Senna doesn't falter;
as a young writer, she is admirably sure of her themes.
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