Diversity Roll Call ~ memoir
Susan has posted the latest Diversity Roll Call challenge: food and memoir. I’ve been eating like a fiend today: with the fridge bare, I was forced to place an order online with Fresh Direct, but those groceries won’t arrive until tomorrow…so I ventured out and bought a random assortment of edibles: miniwheats & cranberry juice (for which I had coupons), a box of Crunch ‘n Munch, chocolate soy pudding, some cherries and an unripe nectarine, and finally vegetable pad thai and corn patties. Hormones? I don’t know how to explain it, but when I got home, I inhaled the caramel corn and just picked at everything else…but back to the roll call. I chose Danzy Senna’s Where Did You Sleep Last 
Night? because it was already at the top of the pile of books on my coffee table; my good friend Kate reviewed it a few weeks ago at her blog, The Missing Piece, and I figured I ought to check it out. Now, I feel like I should begin with a confession: I’m not a huge fan of Senna’s fiction, and I’m not entirely sure my judgment of her work can be trusted. We have a lot in common, and perhaps I have some underlying envy around her literary success. I was also annoyed that much of her fiction seemed to be thinly-veiled autobiography; both her novels, Caucasia and Symptomatic, are about mixed-race women who can pass for white. Senna is a mixed-race woman who can pass for white. I can remember telling someone that if her third novel shared the same type of protagonist, I was done. But her third book isn’t a novel; it’s a memoir that chronicles her lifelong struggle to understand her father and the complicated, racially-charged histories that bind the disparate members of her family together. The book doesn’t cohere as well as one might hope, and despite my issues with another mixed-race memoirist, Rebecca Walker, I do find she spins a more cohesive story than Senna. Yet Senna does admit that at times all she has to offer are “fragments”–remembered dreams about her parents, funny or humorless anecdotes about her troubled father, excerpts from the many books published about the esteemed members of her white mother’s Boston “blueblood” family. She is pregnant during some of the search for her father’s ancestors, yet there is little mention of that experience, her husband, her expectations of their relationship, her hopes or anxieties about motherhood. I would love to have known more about her relationship to her two siblings, especially as it is only mentioned in passing at the end that she’s not on good terms with her older sister. The strongest thread is her complicated affection for/hatred of her father. As I said before, Senna and I have some things in common: I, too, am mixed-race and was deeply wounded by my parents’ divorce 
when I was a child; I, too, loved my father deeply, but often felt betrayed by his preference for my older sister and his chronic unreliability; my father also had great potential that many felt he squandered, and he struggled most of his life to come to terms with being rejected by his birth parents. My father never beat my mother, however, and he wasn’t an alcoholic, a radical intellectual, a poet, or a mooch. Senna’s father, Carl, is hard to stomach at times, yet I did sympathize with her inability to flat out reject him and cut him out of her life. What I didn’t understand was Senna’s seeming obsession with blood ties; when she goes down south and meets the women who knew or were raised with her grandmother, she doesn’t see them as kin. Or at least I got no sense that she felt satisfied (or even gratified) by the encounter. In one scene, she fakes a spiritual experience at a relative’s church, which only added to my suspicion of her as a narrator. When the white-looking Senna is denied access to her grandmother’s college records by a suspicious black woman, she simply walks away without a fight. Why? What does she want, exactly? The kind of certainty she has on her mother’s side of the family? I don’t know much about my father’s mother, but I know something about the people who stepped in to raise him and whether they’re “blood” or not, I think of them as family. And I’m ok with not knowing the rest, the facts, “the truth”; to me, as a writer, that’s called “narrative possibility,” and *that* is where *my* story begins. Now, for my friend Kate, who is a transracial adoptee in search of her birth parents, that kind of casual attitude about one’s genealogy is likely impossible; paternity does matter, and Senna does manage to piece together facts of her paternal grandmother’s extraordinary life (two children fathered by a Mexican boxer, and at least two others by an Irish Catholic priest). Near the end of the book Senna thanks her father for the bizarre inheritance of “his fire next time, and the flat feet, and a desk that might never come together” because “at least, when years later I did finally sit down to write, it guaranteed that I would have something to say and the urgency to say it.” Writers do mine their families for material; I can’t begrudge her that, having written a memoir myself and having used aspects of my own experiences in my fiction. And I fully agree with her final words: “we all have our own truth to tell.”
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