What could be more absurd than the very idea of race and anti-Blackness as prominent structures of relation in modern American society? This question has spurred countless satires, speculative tales, and darkly comic fictions in 20th- and 21st-century American literature: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, George S. Schuyler’s Black No More, Fran Ross’s Oreo, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, Mateo Askaripour’s Black Buck, Mat Johnson’s Pym. At its heart, race is an incoherent form of logic-making, reliant on extraordinary systems of violence to produce a mirage of coherence. In its illogicalness, race often leads to stereotypes—to seemingly few paths for organizing one’s life. Whatever a person’s chosen avenue is, it always seems to destabilize matters in fiction.
The characters who populate author Danzy Senna’s fictions are often biracial Americans who trouble and problematize dichotomous race-making by their mere presence. Senna’s highly anticipated forthcoming novel, Colored Television, revolves around Jane, a biracial novelist who struggles to complete a draft of her second book—titled Nusu Nusu, after the Swahili phrase meaning “partly, partly”—after the promising critical acclaim of her debut. She is married to a painter named Lenny, and both deal in lofty opinions of what it means to be an artist: Lenny refuses to engage in the trappings of race in his own work, while Jane believes that her quest to write what her husband calls the “mulatto War and Peace” is akin to a higher calling. They hold steadfast to their convictions and beliefs, which, as the years go by, land them in a state of bleak financial precarity, in which they bounce from dwelling to dwelling in Los Angeles. Together, they have two kids: Finn, aged six, whom we come to learn is neurodivergent, and Ruby, aged eight, who is mild-mannered but resentful of the family’s poverty.
When the novel opens, the couple has managed to land in the home of Jane’s friend Brett, who is a screenwriter and, years ago, attended the same MFA program as Jane. House-sitting for Brett and his family fortuitously coincides with the year that Jane is on sabbatical, which means she has ample time to complete her novel.
While Jane writes her novel, she remembers a (fictional) scholar, who influences the trajectory of her project. Not only does Hiram Cavendish declare that “the mulatto in America never grows old,” but he also argues, “The mulatto will always be the first mulatto who ever lived. For you see, my dear reader, the mulatto in America is permanently on the cusp of discovery but never really found.” In these words, Jane finds her purpose. The narrator explains, “She was attempting the impossible—to write a history for a people without a race.” While occupying an interstitial identity that is also the site of the “unthought” might produce anxiety, here that occupation becomes a locus of self-invention. One night, Jane dreams that Brett is “from the same land she was from, a region ancient and contested.”
In this way, Nusu Nusu serves as an opportunity to craft a transcendent mythos of self and community. Indeed, pulsing throughout Colored Television are questions about how much of one’s life is constricted by notions and scripts of one’s race and circumstance, and what are the possibilities of escaping them. The specter of slavery and the Middle Passage necessarily haunts the book, but underpinning the narrative, too, is the terror of not being able to control one’s fate or redirect bad luck. What else explains Jane’s fixation on her psychic’s premonition? What else explains the anxiety of falling into the trap of common archetypes she sees all around her—failed artists, sellouts, wannabes, self-righteous artists with nothing to show for it—and not into the type she aspires toward, with their Hanna Andersson veneers, their comforts of upper-middle-class existence, and their ability to provide for her children? Because of race’s inherent absurdity, to attempt to grapple with it is, indeed, to reconcile with the nonsensical, and this is often where Senna’s novel finds its riotous humor.
When Jane does finish the manuscript, she is received poorly by her agent and editor, which leads her to an emotional breakdown, in which she decides that her only option is to sell out. She goes from holding Tolstoyan ambitions to wanting to become “the Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies,” as Hampton Ford, a big-shot producer, says. But later on, Hampton’s actions seem to leave Jane in an emotional place similar to the one she tried to escape.
At the novel’s start, Jane has taken Finn to see a specialist, who asks Jane whether he notices shapes, and the narrator concedes, “Tunnels were everywhere if you knew how to look.” The underground. The underworld. The subterranean. As the novel progresses, a new place and vision do seem possible, if one has the fortitude to mine for them.•
Join us on September 19 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Senna will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss Colored Television. Register for the Zoom conversation here, and preorder the book, which will be published on September 3.
