1 00:00:01,800 --> 00:00:03,700 GEOFF BENNETT: The new novel "Colored Television" uses fiction and satire 2 00:00:03,700 --> 00:00:08,000 to spotlight sensitive and often difficult realities of American life. 3 00:00:08,000 --> 00:00:12,100 Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown talks to author Danzy Senna 4 00:00:12,100 --> 00:00:15,333 for our arts and culture series, Canvas. 5 00:00:15,333 --> 00:00:16,933 DANZY SENNA, Author, "Colored Television": I mean, I have affection for all the 6 00:00:16,933 --> 00:00:19,766 places and people I skewer in the book. 7 00:00:19,766 --> 00:00:22,100 JEFFREY BROWN: In Danzy Senna's new novel, 8 00:00:22,100 --> 00:00:26,666 all manor of contemporary culture is subjected to sometimes brutal skewering, Hollywood, 9 00:00:28,500 --> 00:00:32,533 publishing, class and real estate, most of all, attitudes toward race. 10 00:00:34,833 --> 00:00:37,733 DANZY SENNA: People aren't expecting a comedy about racial identity or about someone failing 11 00:00:40,233 --> 00:00:45,200 in financial woes and familial problems, but the comedy in it has a lot of darkness underneath it, 12 00:00:48,966 --> 00:00:53,933 and it feels like freedom to me to be able to work in that tone. 13 00:00:55,333 --> 00:00:56,933 JEFFREY BROWN: Did you have fun writing this book? 14 00:00:56,933 --> 00:01:00,166 DANZY SENNA: I had a lot of fun. Most of all, I'm making fun of 15 00:01:00,166 --> 00:01:05,066 myself or people like me. I'm often writing about people in my world and people like me, 16 00:01:07,433 --> 00:01:10,500 who I never see represented. So, so much of my work is about putting those people into the light. 17 00:01:14,700 --> 00:01:18,733 JEFFREY BROWN: From her first book, the 1998 novel "Caucasia," and on, 18 00:01:18,733 --> 00:01:23,633 Senna has mined and examined her own world of growing up biracial in America, 19 00:01:23,633 --> 00:01:27,866 the tensions within her own community and the broader culture. 20 00:01:27,866 --> 00:01:32,433 In "Colored Television," her protagonist is a biracial, struggling writer, 21 00:01:32,433 --> 00:01:37,300 wife and mother named Jane Gibson who can't finish her epic novel, which her 22 00:01:37,300 --> 00:01:42,300 Black husband playfully dubs her "Mulatto War and Peace," and gets drawn into the epically 23 00:01:44,666 --> 00:01:48,100 nutty world of television executives breathlessly seeking the next big thing, a biracial comedy. 24 00:01:50,466 --> 00:01:55,433 So, you have written a novel in which we have a biracial writer, 25 00:01:57,566 --> 00:02:01,333 you, writing about a biracial writer, who is writing now a TV series about a biracial writer. 26 00:02:06,300 --> 00:02:08,266 DANZY SENNA: Right. It's a hall of mirrors. 27 00:02:08,266 --> 00:02:10,900 JEFFREY BROWN: A hall of mirrors. Was it confusing for you as you were writing? 28 00:02:10,900 --> 00:02:15,133 DANZY SENNA: It felt completely natural. And they're also living in a house that has no 29 00:02:15,133 --> 00:02:20,133 windows on the outside and is all glass on the inside. So it's like this navel-gazing house, 30 00:02:22,200 --> 00:02:25,266 and the book itself is doing the same thing. And she's doing the same thing within the book. 31 00:02:27,300 --> 00:02:31,433 And because it's a comedy, it sort of feels like a joke within a joke within a joke. 32 00:02:33,300 --> 00:02:36,700 JEFFREY BROWN: Senna herself was born in Boston in 1970 to a white mother, 33 00:02:36,700 --> 00:02:41,700 the poet Fanny Howe, and a Black father, editor and author Carl Senna, 34 00:02:43,733 --> 00:02:46,933 in an atmosphere of Black pride and empowerment that shaped her own sense of self. 35 00:02:48,833 --> 00:02:51,966 DANZY SENNA: My siblings and I all look different. And Blackness was the only 36 00:02:51,966 --> 00:02:56,633 identity that holds all those colors in the world I grew up in. It was the only 37 00:02:56,633 --> 00:03:01,500 one that sort of absorbed all of these different complexions into it. Whiteness 38 00:03:01,500 --> 00:03:06,500 was sort of the exclusionary category and Blackness was the inclusionary category. 39 00:03:08,266 --> 00:03:12,033 And my parents also knew that that was the identity that they needed to sort 40 00:03:12,033 --> 00:03:17,033 of uphold and give us pride in. And it wasn't the white side of us. So, for me, 41 00:03:19,333 --> 00:03:22,933 there was no contradiction between looking the way I do and also having a white mother and being 42 00:03:25,933 --> 00:03:30,933 Black because of that moment. Where there was no mixed-race category, that's just what you were. 43 00:03:32,266 --> 00:03:34,400 JEFFREY BROWN: But what about in the larger culture? 44 00:03:34,400 --> 00:03:38,733 DANZY SENNA: I mean, I have faced confusion from people all my life. And I think it's -- in 45 00:03:40,633 --> 00:03:43,433 some ways, it's why I became a writer or it sort of formed me as a writer, 46 00:03:43,433 --> 00:03:48,433 because I was always feeling like an other amongst others. 47 00:03:49,933 --> 00:03:53,900 I also found that I felt like a spy oftentimes in America, 48 00:03:55,433 --> 00:03:58,533 that I was seeing things that other people didn't see. And so, 49 00:03:58,533 --> 00:04:03,500 with my work, I'm always sort of trying to write from the complexity and the nuance of 50 00:04:05,566 --> 00:04:09,533 being within that experience, because it's really a story that's weirdly undertold. 51 00:04:11,333 --> 00:04:13,300 JEFFREY BROWN: "Guess What's Coming to Dinner," American Girl dolls, 52 00:04:13,300 --> 00:04:18,266 nice liberal neighborhood Senna dubs multicultural Mayberrys, the Kardashians, 53 00:04:20,000 --> 00:04:23,033 and a whole lot more, they're all here. In popular culture today, 54 00:04:23,033 --> 00:04:28,033 Senna sees a kind of glamorization, even what she calls a fetishization, of being mixed, 55 00:04:30,133 --> 00:04:34,333 some of it referenced with humor in her novel, including the fad for labradoodle dogs. 56 00:04:37,633 --> 00:04:40,100 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? 57 00:04:40,100 --> 00:04:42,700 JEFFREY BROWN: But she also sees something else, as when Donald Trump said this of Kamala Harris: 58 00:04:44,000 --> 00:04:46,100 DONALD TRUMP: Because she was Indian all the way, 59 00:04:46,100 --> 00:04:49,666 and then all of a sudden she made a turn, and she went -- she became a Black person. 60 00:04:49,666 --> 00:04:54,666 DANZY SENNA: That tone that he spoke about her with was so familiar to me. It was the 61 00:04:56,733 --> 00:04:59,800 tone that I have heard my whole life, where you're not really Black. You can't be Black. 62 00:05:01,933 --> 00:05:04,866 You don't look Black. Let me see your family picture. Let me see -- and this idea that 63 00:05:06,966 --> 00:05:11,000 you're an impostor of yourself, and that your family story is constantly being discounted. 64 00:05:14,233 --> 00:05:19,233 These things that you hold inside of you that feel naturally who you are, 65 00:05:20,466 --> 00:05:22,833 you're not half-in-half, you're a whole person, 66 00:05:22,833 --> 00:05:27,333 are constantly being met with suspicion and a kind of hostility or disbelief from the world, 67 00:05:29,700 --> 00:05:34,700 because you don't fit this kind of cartoonish or kindergartenish idea of what the races are. 68 00:05:38,566 --> 00:05:42,233 JEFFREY BROWN: Now on a book tour that included the Center for Fiction in Brooklyn, 69 00:05:42,233 --> 00:05:46,833 Senna continues to play with that never-ending fraught American story, 70 00:05:46,833 --> 00:05:50,933 giving it her own twist, one that mixes some serious issues of our 71 00:05:50,933 --> 00:05:55,400 time with some serious laughs at the way we try to negotiate them. 72 00:05:55,400 --> 00:05:59,466 DANZY SENNA: I do think people really want to laugh right now. Like, there's a feeling 73 00:05:59,466 --> 00:06:04,466 that -- about these subjects that -- you look at Twitter and everybody's on tenterhooks, 74 00:06:06,333 --> 00:06:11,066 and it's like something -- anxiety is released when we laugh, and there's sort 75 00:06:13,066 --> 00:06:16,433 of this little change that occurs in us when we find a way to laugh at ourselves. 76 00:06:16,433 --> 00:06:21,433 So, for me, this is laughing at ourselves, and all of the sort of deeper messages 77 00:06:23,366 --> 00:06:26,500 are hidden in this laughter and in this comedy. And, that, I feel excited about, 78 00:06:28,300 --> 00:06:31,633 that tone and that emotional range that people are getting from this. 79 00:06:31,633 --> 00:06:33,266 JEFFREY BROWN: The novel is "Colored Television." 80 00:06:33,266 --> 00:06:35,000 Danzy Senna, thank you very much. 81 00:06:35,000 --> 00:06:35,800 DANZY SENNA: Thank you.