Danzy Senna's 'Colored Television' spotlights difficult realities of life with humor

Transcript

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Geoff Bennett: The new novel “Colored Television” uses fiction and satire to spotlight sensitive and often difficult realities of American life.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown talks to author Danzy Senna for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Danzy Senna, Author, “Colored Television”: I mean, I have affection for all the places and people I skewer in the book.

Jeffrey Brown: In Danzy Senna’s new novel, all manor of contemporary culture is subjected to sometimes brutal skewering, Hollywood, publishing, class and real estate, most of all, attitudes toward race.

Danzy Senna: People aren’t expecting a comedy about racial identity or about someone failing in financial woes and familial problems, but the comedy in it has a lot of darkness underneath it, and it feels like freedom to me to be able to work in that tone.

Jeffrey Brown: Did you have fun writing this book?

Danzy Senna: I had a lot of fun. Most of all, I’m making fun of myself or people like me. I’m often writing about people in my world and people like me, who I never see represented. So, so much of my work is about putting those people into the light.

Jeffrey Brown: From her first book, the 1998 novel “Caucasia,” and on, Senna has mined and examined her own world of growing up biracial in America, the tensions within her own community and the broader culture.

In “Colored Television,” her protagonist is a biracial, struggling writer, wife and mother named Jane Gibson who can’t finish her epic novel, which her Black husband playfully dubs her “Mulatto War and Peace,” and gets drawn into the epically nutty world of television executives breathlessly seeking the next big thing, a biracial comedy.

So, you have written a novel in which we have a biracial writer, you, writing about a biracial writer, who is writing now a TV series about a biracial writer.

Danzy Senna: Right. It’s a hall of mirrors.

Jeffrey Brown: A hall of mirrors. Was it confusing for you as you were writing?

Danzy Senna: It felt completely natural. And they’re also living in a house that has no windows on the outside and is all glass on the inside. So it’s like this navel-gazing house, and the book itself is doing the same thing. And she’s doing the same thing within the book.

And because it’s a comedy, it sort of feels like a joke within a joke within a joke.

Jeffrey Brown: Senna herself was born in Boston in 1970 to a white mother, the poet Fanny Howe, and a Black father, editor and author Carl Senna, in an atmosphere of Black pride and empowerment that shaped her own sense of self.

Danzy Senna: My siblings and I all look different. And Blackness was the only identity that holds all those colors in the world I grew up in. It was the only one that sort of absorbed all of these different complexions into it. Whiteness was sort of the exclusionary category and Blackness was the inclusionary category.

And my parents also knew that that was the identity that they needed to sort of uphold and give us pride in. And it wasn’t the white side of us. So, for me, there was no contradiction between looking the way I do and also having a white mother and being Black because of that moment. Where there was no mixed-race category, that’s just what you were.

Jeffrey Brown: But what about in the larger culture?

Danzy Senna: I mean, I have faced confusion from people all my life. And I think it’s — in some ways, it’s why I became a writer or it sort of formed me as a writer, because I was always feeling like an other amongst others.

I also found that I felt like a spy oftentimes in America, that I was seeing things that other people didn’t see. And so, with my work, I’m always sort of trying to write from the complexity and the nuance of being within that experience, because it’s really a story that’s weirdly undertold.

Jeffrey Brown: “Guess What’s Coming to Dinner,” American Girl dolls, nice liberal neighborhood Senna dubs multicultural Mayberrys, the Kardashians, and a whole lot more, they’re all here. In popular culture today, Senna sees a kind of glamorization, even what she calls a fetishization, of being mixed, some of it referenced with humor in her novel, including the fad for labradoodle dogs.

Donald Trump, Former President of the United States (R) and Current U.S. Presidential Candidate: So, I don’t know. Is she Indian or is she Black?

Jeffrey Brown: But she also sees something else, as when Donald Trump said this of Kamala Harris:

Donald Trump: Because she was Indian all the way, and then all of a sudden she made a turn, and she went — she became a Black person.

Danzy Senna: That tone that he spoke about her with was so familiar to me. It was the tone that I have heard my whole life, where you’re not really Black. You can’t be Black. You don’t look Black. Let me see your family picture. Let me see — and this idea that you’re an impostor of yourself, and that your family story is constantly being discounted.

These things that you hold inside of you that feel naturally who you are, you’re not half-in-half, you’re a whole person, are constantly being met with suspicion and a kind of hostility or disbelief from the world, because you don’t fit this kind of cartoonish or kindergartenish idea of what the races are.

Jeffrey Brown: Now on a book tour that included the Center for Fiction in Brooklyn, Senna continues to play with that never-ending fraught American story, giving it her own twist, one that mixes some serious issues of our time with some serious laughs at the way we try to negotiate them.

Danzy Senna: I do think people really want to laugh right now. Like, there’s a feeling that — about these subjects that — you look at Twitter and everybody’s on tenterhooks, and it’s like something — anxiety is released when we laugh, and there’s sort of this little change that occurs in us when we find a way to laugh at ourselves.

So, for me, this is laughing at ourselves, and all of the sort of deeper messages are hidden in this laughter and in this comedy. And, that, I feel excited about, that tone and that emotional range that people are getting from this.

Jeffrey Brown: The novel is “Colored Television.”

Danzy Senna, thank you very much.

Danzy Senna: Thank you.