Color schemes
When Danzy Senna’s novel “New People” begins, 27year-old Maria is planning her wedding to her college sweetheart, the adoring Khalil, and finishing her dissertation. She’s on track to upwardly mobile domestic harmony, in Brooklyn, circa 1996. The trouble is, she’s not really attracted to Khalil, whom she mockingly refers to as a “highly educated mulatto,” and whose skin is “the same shade of beige” as her own.
Maria becomes obsessed with another man, referred to only as “the poet,” who, as “a brown-skinned black boy with a shaved head, a scar in his eyebrow ... has the body, the skin, the face that cabdrivers pretend not to see, that jewelers in midtown refuse to buzz inside.” The poet isn’t that into her. Maria continues her “wooden lovemaking” with Khalil and tries to console herself with the idea that sex isn’t so important. “The best sex she ever had [back in college] was with a white guy she despised and fantasized about bludgeoning to death with an African statuette.”
The thorniness of desire is inextricably intertwined here with the fraught history of race in America, and, as in Senna’s previous work, she aims to satirize characterizations of racial identity at every turn. Maria “find[s] whiteness tiresome ... like a lecture you wish would end but keeps droning on and on and on for eternity.” She’s also bothered by the kind of elevation of blackness that Khalil’s sister engages in, “her darkness ... something she can lord over people.” And Maria is deeply skeptical of celebratory multiculturalism, the fantasy that “someday Barbie and Ken would come in all the colors of the rainbow.” The imp of the perverse is what drives her, the impulse to act against expectations, propriety, her own best interests.
Semi-stalking the poet, Maria presses the apartment buzzer next to his and is mistaken by a frazzled white mother for her baby’s Latina nanny, Consuela. Though the mother comments, “You changed your hair . ... It looks nice. Changes your whole face,” she fails to see that Maria is not actually Consuela. Maria neglects to correct her, and spends the day discovering that babies “are a kind of hell.” The incident feels a bit contrived for plot purposes. Would the mother truly not realize Maria isn’t the woman who’s been taking care of her daughter every day? Wouldn’t the real Consuela have called to say she couldn’t make it? Yet as an embodiment of the ways in which liberal-minded folks may not recognize their own blind spots when it comes to race, Senna’s seeming contrivance is perhaps painfully astute.
Maria’s dissertation takes up that awful episode in American history known as the Jonestown Massacre, when in 1978 almost a thousand people killed themselves, or were lethally injected by others, under the sway of the cult leader Jim Jones. A self-avowed advocate for civil rights, Jones envisioned a multiracial utopia, luring his followers with such a promise. The majority of people who died in Jones’ compound were black, Maria reflects ruefully. “And how much Jim Jones loved black people before he killed them. What a warrior against racism.”
This disturbing history hangs over Maria’s consciousness, as does the memory of her mother, Gloria, who died of cancer at 49. “When she was just a kid, Gloria told her never to trust a group of happy, smiling multiracial people. Never trust races when they get along, she said.”
Teaching contemporary literature to college students, I’m often accused of choosing depressing works. My defense is usually to claim that literature can be redemptive for its aesthetic power, that such readings are ultimately not depressing because the writers have articulated difficult human experiences so finely, so intimately, so beautifully. That is not the case here. “New People” is not a beautiful novel, not the kind of book I finished reading with a deliciously mournful sigh. It is relentlessly grim — about the constructions of race in America and the consequences of those constructions, and about what constitutes bourgeois success — and it is this grimness that bestows its harsh ring of truth.
Facing the completion of her dissertation, Maria resists. “The longer Maria looks at the people of Jonestown, listens to their voices, and stares at the pictures of their smiling hopeful faces, the more she can see that there is no way to say enough about them.” Since she’d begun studying this terrible history, “she could not look away.” Maria’s deliberate refusal to embrace a more hopeful future keeps eating away at her, leaving her in a potentially ruinous fix by the end of her unresolved story. And yet that refusal — and this novel — is also an antidote to the attempt to dismiss continuing racial inequalities within a narrative of progress. Yes, right now, it’s knotty, and uncomfortable, and depressing. And we must not look away.
Polly Rosenwaike has written for the New York Times and the Millions. Email: books@ sfchronicle.