New People by Danzy Senna

 

                                                                          

The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series continued on June 3rd, with a discussion of New People by Danzy Senna. This 2017 novel features a young woman, Maria, who is engaged to Khalil, but becomes increasingly obsessed by a poet in their community who is unambiguously Black. Maria and Khalil are both mixed-raced people and are being featured in a documentary about multi-raced Black people who are exceptionally light complexioned and consider themselves upwardly mobile. Maria was adopted by a Black woman named Gloria who didn’t realize that her baby was never going to appear Black. Maria is writing her dissertation on the musicality of the Jim Jones cult and Khalil is starting a dot-com company with his best friend Ethan. The book discussion was quite contentious and brought up questions on who has the authority to write this kind of book.

Janice: I’d go so far as to say I liked it. The whole time I was thinking is this writer a woman of color? 

Shalara: There were some things that the protagonist did that made me say this writer was not raised by a Black woman. She should have had a beta reader.  

Janice: I was intrigued by it. I’ve been reading a lot of non-fiction books lately, so it was nice to have a quick read that wasn’t too heavy and kept my attention. I thought the protagonist was weird.  

Danzy Senna 

Marian: So, Bonnie and I were talking about what made Maria crazy and I thought it was Gloria who made here crazy, specifically, Gloria's death, leaving Maria unmoored at a young age. Gloria adopted Maria as a newborn, thinking the child's skin would eventually darken. Gloria thought the baby's paleness was simply because she was newborn. I think that Gloria conveyed her disappointment in Maria's appearance, not necessarily in words but in how she treated Maria.  

Gloria had spent ten years on a dissertation and carried $50,000 in student loan debt. she also hid the fact that she was sick and had sought alternative therapies instead of professional medical care. I think that Gloria caused her daughter’s mental problems and because they lived outside society not seeking traditional medical help, she would not have sought mental help for Maria. When Maria got to college she was damaged already. There was nothing that made me think she loved Gloria but at the same time she repeated everything that Gloria did. She pursued the PhD like Gloria. Gloria said, “Marry this guy” and she agreed and it’s so obvious that this guy is not satisfactory to her.  

Shelara: I think that Maria is telling us a version of herself. There’s a chapter toward the end where she thinks about what her life could have been and there’s these two different lines. I think this is one of these lines. She told us that she’s a liar. She told us about the biggest prank she ever played, and she never come clean about it. Maybe Gloria did make her crazy or maybe she’s telling us a version of Gloria and maybe somewhere in there, there’s a truth. I don’t think we can trust Maria enough to say. 

Laura: I found it really confusing  

Shelara I found that Maria was unreliable. She’s always thinking about something else. I don’t think it’s a complete novel. I don’t think I actively disliked it, but it’s not entertaining in a way that makes it okay for me to say it doesn’t have to be about much. There are some funny lines. I genuinely laughed out loud. Maria is not a reliable person. This could be one of her many thoughts.  

Marian: When she went to the Scientology meeting, she said the people had on 80’s clothes and asked herself why everyone was dressed in clothes from a decade ago. So, let’s talk about the Scientology meeting that she happened to go to on her way to be fitted for her wedding dress.  

Marian: One thing I have to say is structurally she did use good transitions. When one guy kicked another and she said “What a good prank that was, I remember my greatest prank…” Another such example was when she took the baby out and all the people were smiling at her because she had a baby from another ethnic group. That reminded her of something Gloria said about taking her out when she was a baby. “Oh yeah, when you have a different race baby, everybody smiles at you.”  

Barbara: The way the author presented it was a lot of work. There were like five different story lines. Did anyone find the identity of the presence in her house? It ran her out of the house.  

Marian: I thought it was mental illness.  

Laura: I thought it was a switch in her mental state, an emotional pivot.  

Shelara: I thought it was her because she had a conversation with Gloria, in which Gloria told her that she’s always trying to find a way to pivot. She started her dissertation on Jonestown, it changed to the musicality of Jonestown. 

Janice: Do you believe that it was the author’s attention? 

Bonne” It’s almost implying when you say the word culture that cultures are monolithic. There’s a wide spectrum within each culture.  

Barbara: I don’t think truth should be the measurement, not always because it depends on what message you want to deliver. If I looked at this, she almost killed a baby, she’s got these obsessive things, she’s under a bed, there’s a story she told. 

Marian: Why doesn’t poet have a name? He told her his name, but it’s never shared with us. In my opinion this means he’s an unreachable ideal. 

Barbara: Maybe that entity was him, she brought it to life and made it him. 

Janice: He also didn’t appear that fabulous right?  

Shelara: If he was the entity, why was she scared of him then? 

Laura: He had to know someone was in his apartment, she would drink a soda and leave the can out on the table 

Barbara: Maybe she didn’t exist. 

Bonnie: Look how they brought in every ethnicity. June was the Asian baby, the Jewish grandma, Consuela the babysitter. 

Barbara: I was saying, “What if I took race out of this? Was race the vehicle that let the author say what she wanted to say? She hated everybody.  

Shelara: She was making commentary, but it wasn’t that deep. It wasn’t good enough to make it effective.  

Laura: I think she wanted to write a book about colorism and the impact on her life. 

Barbara: When did we decide she’s crazy? 

Janice: That was Marian said but I do want to challenge it a little. Marian said her mother was the cause of her being crazy. I push back on that because I remember how I was parented. Some things I loved about the way I was parented and some things I hated. I made a deliberate decision to parent differently. If you see crazy and you don’t like crazy you have the agency to not replicate crazy.  

Barbara: I thought in the 90’s she wouldn’t be trapped into this idea of finding a good man and getting married. She didn’t want to get married. She didn’t even like him. 

Marian: It was Gloria who put that idea in her mind. 

The one thing we didn't get into in the discussion was her dissertation topic. This year is the 50-year anniversary of the massacre at Jonestown. Some of the most interesting writing in the book has to do with her research.

p. 166 "There's a tarnished, macabre quality to the footage. If you look past the smiles, the dancing, the laughter, the people in the crowd look tired and dirty and thin and coated in a layer of jungle sweat. They are malnourished. Their joy and applause feel manic and desperate."

That same "look past" could be applied to Maria and Khalil.