Review: Where Did You Sleep Last Night? by Danzy Senna

Danzy Senna subtitles her latest book, Where Did You Sleep Last Night?, as a "personal history" rather than a memoir. The difference between the two terms is subtle but important--the book is as much a chronicle of her ancestors and a racially-divided world as it is a story of her own life.

Outwardly, the book hinges on the relationship between Senna's parents: Fannie Howe, a writer from the prominent white Boston upper-crust, and Carl Senna, a black intellectual from fuzzy Southern origins. The unlikely couple married in 1968, full of hope and revolutionary zeal, only to divorce in 1975, their union a victim of alcoholism, domestic abuse, and the social pressures of an inter-racial marriage on the heels of the Civil Rights Movement. More significant, however, is the relationship between Senna and her father. At the book's core is the author's dogged search for information regarding her father's roots--an often exhausting and heart-wrenching search that propels her on a journey through the South.

I found myself completely wrapped in the tangled threads of Senna's family history, eager for her to solve the mystery of her heritage. However, there was something keeping me from becoming completely involved in the story--something in her tone that's always bothered me. Senna was a visiting writer where I attended college and I took a creative writing seminar with her my last semester of senior year. I don't remember much about her--only about the writing prompts she gave us, the circles we would form for peer review. I think it's because she never seemed fully present or fully invested in our development as writers. Something about her kept us at a distance, even when we were surrounding her at a long table.

Given that I had taken a writing course with her, I read the book on multiple levels. On one of those levels, I wondered if her multi-racial identity grants her writing an authenticity and depth that would be somehow lacking in my own. All of her books (two novels and this memoir) focus on this idea of racial duality--of the constant struggle for identity when there isn't just one constant. But what does it mean when you're just...white?

While reading the book, I couldn't help feeling like without some element of another ethnicity to add dimension and significance to our experience, we racially plain people are one-dimensional, flat, without substance. There is an underlying tone of scorn for her mother's side of the family, described at one point as "a crowd of screaming red Irish faces, or a room of tight-lipped dismissive Wasps who assume their own significance and wit and intelligence as if they were still central, despite the evidence to the contrary." It was frustrating to feel like our ethnicity alone defines us and how we feel, see, and think about the world around us. Perhaps this is because my experiences have never hinged on my race--a luxury I certainly don't take for granted; however, I would like to believe that it is the totality of our life experiences that define us--not just our DNA.

Writing Under Stress

Several weeks ago, two days before my twenty-fifth birthday, I was struck by a case of appendicitis and had to undergo an emergency appendectomy at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn. I had never been hospitalized before, had never even broken a bone before (though I suffered a nasty sprain resulting from a too-spirited game of Wii Tennis).

Before you get all freakily concerned, I'm fine. Appendectomies are like the bean burrito of surgeries: you can't really mess one up, and the professionals have probably done thousands of them in their careers. Going under the knife (or rather, the tiny little instrument they now use) didn't bother me as much as the fact that everything was taking place, in my mind, in sort of an abstract sense.

I experienced it not as, I think, a normal person should experience an illness. Or maybe it is and I just never had a chance to find out before now. But my mind was stuck seeing things as if I was jotting down mental notes for Chapter Five of a best-selling memoir. I couldn't remember for the life of me what the name of my nurse was or who I had given my insurance card to or where I'd dropped my blood-soaked backpack (an IV needle went badly during admittance). I could only remember really, really good imagery and symbolism, metaphors and morbid jokes.

I recall vividly the old woman, stuck in the ER hallway with me, beating the metal railing of her hospital bed with her red velvet slipper and shouting "I need help! I have a terrible pain!" over and over while everyone ignored her.

I remember drifting off to sleep while waiting for a CAT scan, only to be woken up by an old man vomiting blood into a small blue plastic tupperware at my elbow.

I know for sure that before I went under, the surgeon said to me, "Boston, huh? Just think: if it'd only been a few months earlier, you might be getting this surgery at Harvard. But now you're at Maimonides!" He seemed to think was fantastically bad planning on my part. (It is a testament to the amount of pain I was in, I guess, that I didn't bother to point out the nonexistence of The Harvard Hospital.)

But I can't remember what my last thought was before they snuffed me out, or who was with me when I woke up, or what they had dressed me in and at what point. Important, applicable facts escape me. I was only interested in writing my memoirs.

After a miraculous recovery that I attribute to my relatives force-feeding me bacon and cream-based soups, I can't help but wonder if all the things I'm experiencing in my life are viewed through this delusional lens of Writer. Historian. The Hero of Our Tale. What arrogance is this, that I refuse to remember what plan my health insurance is, but I expect my rendering of a red velvet slipper smacking against metal to somehow be of importance to someone else?

As with most of my existential crises, this one was solved in a homosexual way. I had volunteered with SAGE (Services & Advocacy for GLBT Elders), and they've decided to put me to work on a project, along with tons of fantastic and talented writers, to collect my elders' life stories and write them up in a book. It's an exciting project that could go in many different directions, and it serves to remind me that I am not my own best character. I am not the hero of this memoir (that doesn't exist and probably wouldn't get published if it did). The best characters are the people around me, and I need to be concentrating on their stories.

I guess this post has a moral? I am sorry about that. Here, have a picture of a cute kitten.

The Art of Concision

Or – ‘That agonisingly elusive skill I used to possess but somehow lost, leaving my powers of persuasion hopelessly, painfully, pathetic.’ I’d say ditto to being witsome as well, but that would imply I’ve ever being blessed with such a hallowed gift. Anyway, I’m reminded of my fall from grace by a recent challenge urging succinct scribblers to submit a six word memoir in the form of a suitably pithy postcard.

The shortlist is not as impressive as I’d hoped, but having morphed into a rather long-winded buffoon of late, it’s not as if I would have had anything better to offer myself. My personal favourite is, ‘Divorced, broke, spinal tumor. Otherwise fine.’ However, pollsters have been seduced by the rather more romantic, ‘I made everything up, except you.’

I can happily swallow such sentiment only if I feel it’s sincere - this particular slither leaves me torn; I want to like it, but it’s a muddled sort of like. Remember when PostSecret offered touching, funny revelations... and then got inundated with unashamedly contrived cheese? The superior stuff lives on; it’s just that now it’s mixed up amongst the slush. Such is the way of these things, I suppose.

But yes, back to my original point: fellow Fringers! Show me what you’re made of. Make every one of those six words count. I await them with a silent shiver of anticipation.

(On an unrelated note, I came across an interesting book-to-screen article today, perchance anyone is interested in what screenwriter David Hare has to say about translating Bernhard Schlink's The Reader into something cinematic. And, um, yes; I am shamefully aware that I read far too much Guardian. Only yesterday I resolved to branch out into other bringers of newsworthy goodness.)