Caucasia

"The author, Danzy Senna is just a brilliant, remarkable woman, who is a hero of mine. This novel is about two sisters, Birdie and Cole, their father is black and their mother is white. Birdie looks like her mother and Cole looks like her father and it creates this really conflicted dynamic within the family. The mother is Boston blue bood, but she’s rejecting all that in favour of becoming a civil rights activist and she is married to a man who is very active politically. The two of them together are very aware of how they look to the outside world and how, even for the 70s, their marriage is radical. When things start to go wrong between the parents, the sisters react by creating this private language that they speak and they have this really profound intimacy. There’s this sense that the government –someone – might be after the parents because of their political activities and as their marriage is falling apart they split up and the father takes Cole, the daughter who looks most like him, and the mother takes Birdie. They go on the lam separately, Cole and her father go to Brazil, Birdie and her mother go to New Hampshire. Birdie’s mother betrays her in this really complicated way by asking her daughter to pass for being white. She actually poses as being Jewish. It’s just such a powerful book about the time period, about what it means to have a complicated identity, and then to have that identity compromised by a parent, a person who is supposed to know best. Then there’s the political drama that fuels the book. But really it’s a beautiful love story between sisters and how they end up saving each other. Yes. Danzy Senna’s mother is a poet called Fanny Howe and her father, Carl Senna, is a writer and editor, and their relationship is sort of similar to the dynamic in the actual novel. But the book is all from her imagination. That’s the great beauty of fiction, you draw on features of your life but then make it something entirely different."

"This book really struck a chord because it shows how racism is both an intangible social construct and also something which is a very real destructive force in people’s daily lives. “He says there’s no such thing as race.” “He’s right you know. About it all being constructed. But” – she turned to me, looking at me intently – “that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.” “I know it does.” Birdie Lee is a fair-skinned biracial individual. The reader understands she is a black person but society judges her on appearance and does not recognize her as such. That is in stark contrast to her older sister Cole who has dark skin and fits in with the other children and their school. Their mother, Sandy, is White and their father, Deck, is Black. They are both highly involved in the Civil Rights Movement in Boston during the 1970s and they are often arguing. The setting is important as it is soon after the landmark civil rights decision of the US Supreme Court in 1967 when an interracial couple, Richard and Mildred Loving, successfully challenged the constitutionality of the ban on interracial marriage in Virginia. Through the marriage of Sandy and Deck, Danzy Senna starkly reflects the reality that interracial marriages must withstand additional pressures compared with marriages between people who have the same skin colour. Once he separates from Sandy, Deck Lee changes as he re-integrates into black society. He grows an Afro, dates an African American woman, and he actively rejects white society and culture. Part of that is how Deck considers the house as a place which isn’t safe for him, a threat to his blackness. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The sisters are torn apart as Cole goes to Brazil with her father and his black girlfriend and Birdie goes on the run with her mother pretending to be the family of a deceased Jewish professor. This juxtaposition of leaning into a Black identity and hiding it makes the novel such an essential part of the body of books which considers interracial marrage and the identity of biracial people. “There was safety in this pantomime,” writes Senna from the perspective of Birdie. “The less I behaved like myself, the more I could believe that this was still a game. That my real self – Birdie Lee – was safely hidden beneath my beige flesh, and that when the right moment came, I would reveal her, preserved, frozen solid in the moment in which I had left her.”"