Who Owns the Story: ‘Colored Television’

In Danzy Senna’s novel Colored Television, the September California Book Club selection, which was released today, themes of ownership assume different valences, beautifully entertaining but also deepening into more subtly posed existential questions, if you’re inclined to go there.

Protagonist Jane Gibson is a biracial novelist who longs for a certain kind of upper-middle-class life, one marked by a beautiful house, plentiful wine, white cashmere sweaters, a German-made coffee machine, organic vegetables, and good schools in a bougie multicultural neighborhood. At one point, she doesn’t tell her husband, Lenny, who fantasizes about raising their children abroad, “what she really wanted—a home, a real home, a patch of land in this California dreamland.… She didn’t tell Lenny she wanted to live somewhere, not everywhere, that for her everywhere was the place she’d lived since she was born, always and already, and that the solid ground was new to her. She didn’t tell him that the sky he longed for was inside of her already and she’d seen its limits.”

All of Jane’s desires for material things might read as signs of her funny, all-too-American desire for an Instagrammable life, but what’s more interesting here is that while Jane is enchanted by markers of a more extravagant life than her lifelong more precarious one, she’s driven not only by consumerist impulses but also by a different concern salient in every person’s life—the longing to define one’s own path, to be able to own and express signs and markers of one’s reality, whether these signs take the forms of mere conversation or novels, paintings, films, or TV shows.

Jane’s need to carve out a place for herself in literature and society at large is evident in the novel’s subtext, the iceberg of reality, luminous and ghostly and cool, lurking beneath Senna’s diamond-cut prose and the colorful, socially observant particulars of the novel’s surface story. Colored Television hinges on a certain kind of smart, post-structuralist outlook that refuses binaries and fixed centers—and opts instead for a dazzling destabilization of the system that produces meanings from those signs. While property is the means by which we readily see Jane’s dissatisfaction, the novel’s central drama suggests that commodification of one’s identity presents a dangerous artistic trap. Write one book about the historic traumas of a marginalized experience and the rest of your career as a novelist could be defined by that. For artistic work that finds consumers, there is bound to be a demand for the same sort of thing, for another narrative that is both proven and approved by the capitalist forces that provide financing for artistic visions to become large in scale.

Reclamation of experience, of an artist’s capacity to “own” her sensibility and narrative through art, is itself a question of ownership, of a certain more philosophical, interior sort than the tangible real property and accoutrements of wealth that Jane thinks will make her life better. Who owns a story? Who gets to tell it, and what does it mean when the powerful claim ownership of a narrative and deaden it, producing it into some sort of pleasant mush that might be more palatable to a broader range of consumers? Colored Television refuses easy answers, instead casting a spotlight on crucial questions that every novelist who sees their work as an art, and every person in hope of self-definition, must ask throughout their career.

Part of the work those questions of ownership, possession, and expression do in the lives of novelists, artists, and screenwriters can be observed in the lives of other artist-characters as they stand in relation to Jane. There are the dramatic, almost-binary choices of Jane and Lenny, both of them artists who, despite their intimate relationship, make radically different choices and have different aims in mind, and also of Jane and Brett, a wealthy biracial screenwriter and director who is also the friend for whom Jane’s family is house-sitting.

As a Black painter, Lenny eschews the figurative, the explicitly Black in his paintings, but rather revels in the abstract and, in a sense, refuses commodification, the property-fication of the system, and the marketplace altogether. Jane advises him to include some sort of sign or marker of Blackness in his paintings to generate others’ interest in buying the work, but he simply goes about making the abstract art that interests him most deeply, irrespective of audience. Conversely, Jane struggles to gather sufficient markers or signs—physical property, language, a piece of evidence such as DNA test results—that would soothe and render visible her complicated existence in a world that demands easy categorizations; the rejection of her second novel by her agent that happens early on in the novel seems to stand in for a greater rejection of the story she knows about herself and how she fits, or not, into the world. Who wouldn’t feel wildly obsessed with ownership—including reclamation of the self and its narrative—under circumstances where that self-ownership is perpetually, relentlessly denied?

Brett is also, in some profound symbolic sense, Jane’s double. The narrator cleverly undercuts Jane’s own moral position by revealing that she serves as a potential impediment to Brett’s reclamation as a mixed person. Her reaction is to tell herself that he doesn’t have sufficient Black consciousness to tell the story—and then to appropriate his idea for a TV show. Without giving anything away, ownership—who gets to assert it—becomes a central consideration in the novel’s climax and denouement.

Crucially, Lenny’s decision to stay artistically pure, in some sense, propels Jane’s feeling that she must sell out. Wanting her two children to have more comfortable lives than her own, Jane becomes desperate to commodify her experience, to take it out of the realm of the novel and into that of television. Jane explains her outlook, the impetus for reclamation behind her novelized 400-year history of mulattoes, to Black TV producer Hampton Ford by saying, “Mulattos are like the queer people of races. Like gay characters, you might have noticed, who always kill themselves in movies. So do mulattos.… We usually end up offing ourselves by act two. But in the show I want to make, see, I want to show mulattos in a different light. Show us being, you know, just regular.”

On an allegorical level, and also in a very real, moving way, Jane hopes to vivify her story and both socially and historically place herself for readers. Rather than have the market dictate her story by relying on past tropes of tragedy for biracial people, she wants to rewrite how people understand her and how she’s interpreting the world. In other words, the larger objective for her is to create a novel or TV show that serves as kind of a sign of her existence, a space, a container, a piece of intellectual property, a house that is hers.

As Colored Television progresses, often moving into an acerbic comedy of manners, and Jane tries hard to sell out by making entertainment, we watch how an individual artist’s experience of their own truest self can be flattened in an atmosphere of the collective. Colored Television is astute and hilarious about this sort of thing. Hampton, somewhat an inversion of Lenny, announces at one point, “I mean, this is America. Everybody deserves a show,” but there is also, in these group television-related conversations, always a second-guessing, a denial of lived experiences as being not plausible or not appealing to what most people, for whom the census is not an issue, want.

In the novel’s many amusing repudiations of characters who are trying to define their own place in difficult industries—all of it played brilliantly by Senna as black existential comedy—attention is also paid to the real hardships today’s novelists and artists face and the interpolated tenderness and envy felt by others who understand this reality of art-making too. Shouldn’t our deepest stories, our art, our stories of ourselves, our signs to society express difficult nonbinary truths, systems notwithstanding, since they are, finally, our own?•

Join us on September 19 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Senna will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Porochista Khakpour to discuss Colored Television. Register for the Zoom conversation here.

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