WEBVTT 00:01.800 --> 00:03.700 align:left position:20% line:77% size:70% GEOFF BENNETT: The new novel "Colored Television" uses fiction and satire 00:03.700 --> 00:08.000 align:left position:20% line:77% size:70% to spotlight sensitive and often difficult realities of American life. 00:08.000 --> 00:12.100 align:left position:10% line:77% size:80% Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown talks to author Danzy Senna 00:12.100 --> 00:15.333 align:left position:30% line:83% size:60% for our arts and culture series, Canvas. 00:15.333 --> 00:16.933 align:left position:10% line:77% size:80% DANZY SENNA, Author, "Colored Television": I mean, I have affection for all the 00:16.933 --> 00:19.766 align:left position:20% line:83% size:70% places and people I skewer in the book. 00:19.766 --> 00:22.100 align:left position:20% line:83% size:70% JEFFREY BROWN: In Danzy Senna's new novel, 00:22.100 --> 00:26.666 align:left position:10% line:71% size:80% all manor of contemporary culture is subjected to sometimes brutal skewering, Hollywood, 00:28.500 --> 00:32.533 align:left position:20% line:77% size:70% publishing, class and real estate, most of all, attitudes toward race. 00:34.833 --> 00:37.733 align:left position:20% line:71% size:70% DANZY SENNA: People aren't expecting a comedy about racial identity or about someone failing 00:40.233 --> 00:45.200 align:left position:20% line:71% size:70% in financial woes and familial problems, but the comedy in it has a lot of darkness underneath it, 00:48.966 --> 00:53.933 align:left position:10% line:83% size:80% and it feels like freedom to me to be able to work in that tone. 00:55.333 --> 00:56.933 align:left position:20% line:83% size:70% JEFFREY BROWN: Did you have fun writing this book? 00:56.933 --> 01:00.166 align:left position:10% line:83% size:80% DANZY SENNA: I had a lot of fun. Most of all, I'm making fun of 01:00.166 --> 01:05.066 align:left position:10% line:77% size:80% myself or people like me. I'm often writing about people in my world and people like me, 01:07.433 --> 01:10.500 align:left position:10% line:71% size:80% who I never see represented. So, so much of my work is about putting those people into the light. 01:14.700 --> 01:18.733 align:left position:20% line:77% size:70% JEFFREY BROWN: From her first book, the 1998 novel "Caucasia," and on, 01:18.733 --> 01:23.633 align:left position:10% line:77% size:80% Senna has mined and examined her own world of growing up biracial in America, 01:23.633 --> 01:27.866 align:left position:20% line:77% size:70% the tensions within her own community and the broader culture. 01:27.866 --> 01:32.433 align:left position:20% line:77% size:70% In "Colored Television," her protagonist is a biracial, struggling writer, 01:32.433 --> 01:37.300 align:left position:10% line:77% size:80% wife and mother named Jane Gibson who can't finish her epic novel, which her 01:37.300 --> 01:42.300 align:left position:10% line:77% size:80% Black husband playfully dubs her "Mulatto War and Peace," and gets drawn into the epically 01:44.666 --> 01:48.100 align:left position:10% line:71% size:80% nutty world of television executives breathlessly seeking the next big thing, a biracial comedy. 01:50.466 --> 01:55.433 align:left position:10% line:83% size:80% So, you have written a novel in which we have a biracial writer, 01:57.566 --> 02:01.333 align:left position:10% line:77% size:80% you, writing about a biracial writer, who is writing now a TV series about a biracial writer. 02:06.300 --> 02:08.266 align:left position:20% line:83% size:70% DANZY SENNA: Right. It's a hall of mirrors. 02:08.266 --> 02:10.900 align:left position:20% line:77% size:70% JEFFREY BROWN: A hall of mirrors. Was it confusing for you as you were writing? 02:10.900 --> 02:15.133 align:left position:10% line:77% size:80% DANZY SENNA: It felt completely natural. And they're also living in a house that has no 02:15.133 --> 02:20.133 align:left position:10% line:77% size:80% windows on the outside and is all glass on the inside. So it's like this navel-gazing house, 02:22.200 --> 02:25.266 align:left position:10% line:77% size:80% and the book itself is doing the same thing. And she's doing the same thing within the book. 02:27.300 --> 02:31.433 align:left position:10% line:77% size:80% And because it's a comedy, it sort of feels like a joke within a joke within a joke. 02:33.300 --> 02:36.700 align:left position:20% line:77% size:70% JEFFREY BROWN: Senna herself was born in Boston in 1970 to a white mother, 02:36.700 --> 02:41.700 align:left position:20% line:77% size:70% the poet Fanny Howe, and a Black father, editor and author Carl Senna, 02:43.733 --> 02:46.933 align:left position:10% line:77% size:80% in an atmosphere of Black pride and empowerment that shaped her own sense of self. 02:48.833 --> 02:51.966 align:left position:20% line:77% size:70% DANZY SENNA: My siblings and I all look different. And Blackness was the only 02:51.966 --> 02:56.633 align:left position:20% line:77% size:70% identity that holds all those colors in the world I grew up in. It was the only 02:56.633 --> 03:01.500 align:left position:10% line:77% size:80% one that sort of absorbed all of these different complexions into it. Whiteness 03:01.500 --> 03:06.500 align:left position:10% line:77% size:80% was sort of the exclusionary category and Blackness was the inclusionary category. 03:08.266 --> 03:12.033 align:left position:20% line:77% size:70% And my parents also knew that that was the identity that they needed to sort 03:12.033 --> 03:17.033 align:left position:10% line:77% size:80% of uphold and give us pride in. And it wasn't the white side of us. So, for me, 03:19.333 --> 03:22.933 align:left position:10% line:71% size:80% there was no contradiction between looking the way I do and also having a white mother and being 03:25.933 --> 03:30.933 align:left position:20% line:71% size:70% Black because of that moment. Where there was no mixed-race category, that's just what you were. 03:32.266 --> 03:34.400 align:left position:20% line:83% size:70% JEFFREY BROWN: But what about in the larger culture? 03:34.400 --> 03:38.733 align:left position:10% line:77% size:80% DANZY SENNA: I mean, I have faced confusion from people all my life. And I think it's -- in 03:40.633 --> 03:43.433 align:left position:20% line:77% size:70% some ways, it's why I became a writer or it sort of formed me as a writer, 03:43.433 --> 03:48.433 align:left position:10% line:83% size:80% because I was always feeling like an other amongst others. 03:49.933 --> 03:53.900 align:left position:10% line:83% size:80% I also found that I felt like a spy oftentimes in America, 03:55.433 --> 03:58.533 align:left position:10% line:83% size:80% that I was seeing things that other people didn't see. And so, 03:58.533 --> 04:03.500 align:left position:10% line:77% size:80% with my work, I'm always sort of trying to write from the complexity and the nuance of 04:05.566 --> 04:09.533 align:left position:10% line:77% size:80% being within that experience, because it's really a story that's weirdly undertold. 04:11.333 --> 04:13.300 align:left position:20% line:77% size:70% JEFFREY BROWN: "Guess What's Coming to Dinner," American Girl dolls, 04:13.300 --> 04:18.266 align:left position:10% line:77% size:80% nice liberal neighborhood Senna dubs multicultural Mayberrys, the Kardashians, 04:20.000 --> 04:23.033 align:left position:20% line:77% size:70% and a whole lot more, they're all here. In popular culture today, 04:23.033 --> 04:28.033 align:left position:20% line:71% size:70% Senna sees a kind of glamorization, even what she calls a fetishization, of being mixed, 04:30.133 --> 04:34.333 align:left position:10% line:77% size:80% some of it referenced with humor in her novel, including the fad for labradoodle dogs. 04:37.633 --> 04:40.100 align:left position:10% line:65% size:80% DONALD TRUMP, Former President of the United States (R) and Current U.S. Presidential Candidate: So, I don't know. Is she Indian or is she Black? 04:40.100 --> 04:42.700 align:left position:20% line:71% size:70% JEFFREY BROWN: But she also sees something else, as when Donald Trump said this of Kamala Harris: 04:44.000 --> 04:46.100 align:left position:10% line:83% size:80% DONALD TRUMP: Because she was Indian all the way, 04:46.100 --> 04:49.666 align:left position:10% line:77% size:80% and then all of a sudden she made a turn, and she went -- she became a Black person. 04:49.666 --> 04:54.666 align:left position:10% line:77% size:80% DANZY SENNA: That tone that he spoke about her with was so familiar to me. It was the 04:56.733 --> 04:59.800 align:left position:10% line:77% size:80% tone that I have heard my whole life, where you're not really Black. You can't be Black. 05:01.933 --> 05:04.866 align:left position:10% line:77% size:80% You don't look Black. Let me see your family picture. Let me see -- and this idea that 05:06.966 --> 05:11.000 align:left position:10% line:77% size:80% you're an impostor of yourself, and that your family story is constantly being discounted. 05:14.233 --> 05:19.233 align:left position:10% line:77% size:80% These things that you hold inside of you that feel naturally who you are, 05:20.466 --> 05:22.833 align:left position:20% line:83% size:70% you're not half-in-half, you're a whole person, 05:22.833 --> 05:27.333 align:left position:20% line:71% size:70% are constantly being met with suspicion and a kind of hostility or disbelief from the world, 05:29.700 --> 05:34.700 align:left position:10% line:77% size:80% because you don't fit this kind of cartoonish or kindergartenish idea of what the races are. 05:38.566 --> 05:42.233 align:left position:10% line:77% size:80% JEFFREY BROWN: Now on a book tour that included the Center for Fiction in Brooklyn, 05:42.233 --> 05:46.833 align:left position:20% line:77% size:70% Senna continues to play with that never-ending fraught American story, 05:46.833 --> 05:50.933 align:left position:20% line:77% size:70% giving it her own twist, one that mixes some serious issues of our 05:50.933 --> 05:55.400 align:left position:20% line:77% size:70% time with some serious laughs at the way we try to negotiate them. 05:55.400 --> 05:59.466 align:left position:10% line:77% size:80% DANZY SENNA: I do think people really want to laugh right now. Like, there's a feeling 05:59.466 --> 06:04.466 align:left position:10% line:77% size:80% that -- about these subjects that -- you look at Twitter and everybody's on tenterhooks, 06:06.333 --> 06:11.066 align:left position:10% line:77% size:80% and it's like something -- anxiety is released when we laugh, and there's sort 06:13.066 --> 06:16.433 align:left position:10% line:77% size:80% of this little change that occurs in us when we find a way to laugh at ourselves. 06:16.433 --> 06:21.433 align:left position:10% line:77% size:80% So, for me, this is laughing at ourselves, and all of the sort of deeper messages 06:23.366 --> 06:26.500 align:left position:10% line:77% size:80% are hidden in this laughter and in this comedy. And, that, I feel excited about, 06:28.300 --> 06:31.633 align:left position:20% line:77% size:70% that tone and that emotional range that people are getting from this. 06:31.633 --> 06:33.266 align:left position:20% line:83% size:70% JEFFREY BROWN: The novel is "Colored Television." 06:33.266 --> 06:35.000 align:left position:20% line:83% size:70% Danzy Senna, thank you very much. 06:35.000 --> 06:35.800 align:left position:20% line:83% size:70% DANZY SENNA: Thank you.