From Caucasia, With Love Danzy Senna Bloomsbury, 413pp, £16.99 ISBN 0747550425

Danzy Senna's first novel, From Caucasia, With Love, is impressively worthy. Senna comes from a mixed-race Boston family - not unlike, in fact, the family portrayed in her novel. Certainly, this has the feel of a rite-of-passage memoir, slightly rambling, although raising important issues.

The offspring of a white activist mother and a black academic father, Birdie and Cole Lee are growing up in 1970s Boston amid the fallout of the civil rights and black power movements. The sisters feel so close as to be almost merged. Their story is told through Birdie's voice: "Before I ever saw myself I saw my sister. When I was too small for mirrors, I saw her as the reflection that proved my own existence."

A mirror would have shown, however, that Cole is black, Birdie white. At first, the sisters are schooled at home; but when they start to attend a black power school, the differences others see between them begin to alter their relationship. When their parents break up, Cole leaves for Brazil with her father and his "brown sugar", the black mother she always wanted. Birdie is left to look after their chaotic mother, Sandy, as they drift between communes and seedy hotels, denying their history, denying Birdie's blackness. Desperate for some sort of home, they settle in a New Hampshire town, where Birdie transforms herself into a white teenager with a white history. Eventually, denial becomes intolerable and she heads back to Boston, seeking out her father, her sister and her past.

The ghost of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man haunts this novel. As Birdie says: "A long time ago, I disappeared. One day I was here, the next I was gone." Here is a black girl creeping around white America incognito. Senna develops the classic theme by allowing uncensored voices, black and white, to speak about each other. Sandy's white lover beats up some black kids and says: "I swear, I try to be liberal . . . But when you meet fucking punks like that, you start to wonder." Birdie never belongs. In the black power school, she looks different but feels at home. In the white school, she looks the same but feels alien. That she never fits in means that she is always a kind of spy. Through all this, however, Birdie is not invisible, but white. Her colour does not tell others that she is really black. Black is what she has to find for herself.

In spite of some elegant descriptions and moments of metaphorical precision, much of the writing remains vague and disconcertingly cliched. Senna seems uncomfortable writing with emotional depth. Passages that should be moving are merely sentimental or coy. As a result, politics, not emotions, are engaged. With some rigorous editing and a tighter narrative, this might have been a wonderful novel. Perhaps her second will be.

Kathryn Heyman is completing her third novel, Noon Reef

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website