Review: New People

New People by Danzy Senna
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I hadn’t heard of Danzy until I wound up seated next to her right before she went up to give a reading. Sitting next to her, I loved her voice, not just her speaking tone (which is great, and I’d love to hear her do an audiobook of one of her works) but her candor. She was hysterical as she made fun of her children in a way that made it clear how much she loves them.

Then she got up and read most of a chapter from this book, and I heard the same voice, the same capacity for humor in the service of something serious.

It helped me a lot in reading this to have Danzy’s explanation that she wanted to find a way to write about a potentially representative heroine – Maria is a mixed-race woman who sometimes refers to herself as mulatto and who generally embraces her African-American identity – who’s ultimately not very likeable. Maria may be charming on the surface, but she’s really a mean-spirited selfish woman, someone who uses others casually for her own ends.

I don’t have to give much of a spoiler to reveal how unpleasant Maria can be. In the opening chapters, she essentially ruins the life of a mostly white boyfriend from her Stanford college days. Greg Is in love with her, and with him she has a version of the have-it-all dream. He’s tall, handsome, accepting of her, and they have great sex. She’s angry, though, at herself more than at him, for being with a white man, so she pulls the plug on the relationship. There’s nothing wrong with calling it quits, of course, but with her it’s scorched earth. She won’t tell him the issue; she takes a grey area and insists it’s only black or white. (And, yeah, I use that metaphor carefully.) She won’t even acknowledge that they were a couple. He’s so devastated that he “dies” in the sense that – and here’s one glimpse at Danzy’s terrific sense of humor – he reinvents himself as “Goya” and, claiming license from a Chilean grandmother he never met, embraces his “Latino” identity.

We see something similar in the awful prank she pulls on Khalil. Irritated that she’s helped him acknowledge his Blackness – that she’s succeeded in pulling him out of his floaty, frat-boy life – she leaves a racist message on his answering machine. In doing so, she creates a campus furor, with everyone but her reacting as you’d hope in properly expressing horror over the incident. She not only gets off scot-free, but she succeeds in furthering her plan to “rescue” Khalil from his care-free hipster tendencies.

As funny as almost all of this is, it’s also disturbing. Danzy talked about her frustration with the happy-ending impulse in literature, and she warned that she’s not interested in waving a wand and resolving her characters’ problems. At bottom, Maria dislikes herself. She lives in a strange historical moment, an instant in which – as a consequence of many factors – her being a mulatta puts her in a desirable position. She’s Black, and that gives her claim to the history of violence and segregation African-Americans have experienced, but she’s also light-skinned enough to be distinguished from, for example, her own dark-skinned adoptive mother. (Who, as the book makes clear, intended to adopt a darker-skinned child.)

As a consequence, Maria has the personal good fortune to be the recipient of a portion of white guilt. She is just Black enough to be representative, but she is also white enough to benefit from white privilege. She’s often mistaken for white – or at least Jewish – and she’s beautiful in a way that’s reminiscent of the exotic without appearing altogether other. (I want to be sure to clarify that last point – much of what makes this so powerful is that it doesn’t presume a White gaze. This isn’t an argument with how Whites see Blacks or Mulattos – as she uses the term. Instead, it’s all from the perspective of Maria. She doesn’t presume whiteness; as a White reader, I get to overhear this, but it’s not a story told directly for me.) In other words, Maria has a shot at what her mother calls “it all.”

In the middle of all that, though, Maria can’t accept her good fortune. I suppose it’s to her credit that she feels it’s unearned, but that fundamental self-dislike seems to be what drives her profound, for lack of a better word, mean-ness. [SPOILER] Instead of learning from her cruelty to Greg/Goya, she follows the same pattern as she loses interest in the almost-too-perfect Khalil. As their wedding nears, she grows increasingly intrigued by their mutual friend, “the poet,” a darker-skinned guy who’s appropriately friendly to her but nothing more.

In the slapstick heart of the novel, she finds herself accidentally conscripted into caring for the infant daughter of the poet’s next-door neighbor. It’s a great scene (and Danzy knows it). The privileged neighbor has read her as a dependent Latina maid. The baby seems an obligation she didn’t ask for but recognizes. And the poet, who’s next door going about his daily affairs, represents a purity of identity that she yearns for. He’s unambiguously Black; she’s no longer quite certain about herself.

[SPOILER] The scene is so good that Danzy reprises it in the final pages. She returns to the neighbor’s apartment, uses the shared fire escape to go into the poet’s room, and finds herself trapped underneath his bed as he makes love to her future sister-in-law. It’s excruciating, both for being so uncomfortable and so funny. More than that, though, it’s representative of her ultimate inability to come to terms with her rich and varied history.

The fact of her hiding under the bed recalls the way an older woman survived the Jonestown massacre – a subject Maria is writing about for her dissertation. That woman hid beneath a bed to avoid Jim Jones’s death squads, and she emerged to a changed world. As Maria sees in her scholarship, that woman and her peers fled to Jonestown in part to escape racism, in answer to Jones’s claims of a post-racial utopian future. The weight of the massacre has fallen largely on African-Americans, though, and the surviving woman is left with a sense she cannot articulate of her own foolishness in thinking she can wish the historical weight of race away.

Maria, as she lies under the bed, realizes she cannot reach her personal utopia. She cannot both claim the status of racist victim and then live a life without the discomforts of race. She comes so close to having it all that everyone thinks she does. We already know that hiding under a bed means, after the excruciating moment is over, that she’ll survive. We already know as well that it’s a survival that teaches nothing new, that reminds us that the legacy of racism endures, that it’s foolish to think it’s possible to escape the weight of a history that presses her into the floor leaving her just enough room to breathe and stay alive to the next challenge.


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