E-Mail This Article to a Friend Saving race (continued)

Q: The Boston Globe recently did a story on your mother, poet Fanny Howe. In it, she said that Boston was a "poor choice of a place to live" for a mixed-race family. Was that something you were always aware of when you were growing up?

A: No. You know, I went to college at Stanford, and I remember sitting around talking to some of the black students from the South, and telling them anecdotes about things that had happened to my family growing up, just racial incidents, and them being shocked, and me thinking, you’re from Mississippi — wait a minute! It didn’t really dawn on me that this wasn’t the common experience. I mean, I had a friend who is biracial who grew up in Greenwich Village, and he had never had any issue around his racial identity — he was black and Jewish and so was everyone else. It didn’t hit me [that my experience was unusual], because that was all I knew growing up. But I don’t remember a moment in my life when I wasn’t aware of race. From the moment I could articulate, I knew that there was this force, and I think that’s very specific to Boston.

Q: You wrote in an essay that "in Boston circa 1975, mixed wasn’t really an option." How did you deal with that?

A: I always identified as black. That was, I think, the only choice for me. The other choice wasn’t psychologically healthy for me, because my whole family didn’t have that option. So I think black was my identity, and in many ways still is, though I think of black and mixed as related in a complicated way. I think of myself as mixed, and I think of myself as part of a long history of African-American writers, so I don’t see them as so distinct as people do these days.

Q: Did you ever feel resentful that mixed wasn’t an option?

A: I didn’t desire that as an option. The black community was where I placed myself, and I felt actually sort of disparaging of people who identified as mixed; that seemed kind of tragic to me, because it seemed like they were avoiding the politics and the power relations that were really at the heart of race, to me. So a lot of my politics grew around this identity growing up, of identifying myself as black and seeing race as much more than a biological category. I think now I don’t worry so much about what I identify as; that just seems sort of simplistic, to suggest that there’s one answer to that. But I don’t feel badly that I didn’t identify as mixed growing up; that seems fine to me. It’s who I was.

Q: What’s your relationship with Boston now?

A: I don’t live there now. It’s sort of like going into the past for me. I don’t have a present life there. I think I still need to be in a city with a large and vibrant black community, and I often feel in Boston like the black community is still kind of marginal; black culture isn’t as present as I would want a city to have. So New York feels more comfortable to me, but I have all these family connections to Boston, so I do come there quite frequently. I don’t have a present life there, though.

Q: Do you ever get tired of talking and writing about race, and being asked about it?

A: I think you have to write about what you’re passionate about, and what you spend years writing, you have to remain interested in, so I’m still fascinated by race. But to me, it’s just one element of the human condition. I think to talk about race is not to limit oneself; I think that’s a kind of fallacy. I mean, I’ve been asked a lot, "Do you feel limited just writing about characters of mixed race?" And I say, "I wonder if Richard Ford gets asked that, about writing solely about middle-class white, straight men." And people don’t assume that that’s a limitation. So I feel like the question itself implies that we aren’t always living in a racialized reality, and we aren’t always — all of us, whether we write about it, acknowledge it, name it — that that’s not something that’s kind of central to our country and the fabric of who we are.

Q: What’s next?

A: I’m writing another novel now. I’m midway into it and having fun. I’m not really talking about it; it’s the soufflé in the oven right now. But I feel like novels are my most natural form that I’m drawn to. I wouldn’t rule out other forms, but that seems to be where I’m most comfortable. I feel uncomfortable if I’m not working on a novel. So that’s what I’m doing now. And I’m going to be, next year, a fellow at the New York Public Library. They have this center for scholars and writers in the main branch of the New York Public Library, where you get an office and you’re given a stipend to live on for a year. I’m just really excited to be writing full-time, which I haven’t had the privilege of doing yet. And I’m writing this novel now, but next year I’m starting work on a nonfiction book that is research. It has to do with my grandmother, my father’s mother, who was a really enigmatic figure, and had this really mysterious secret life. This is an African-American woman from Louisiana who had this — well, let’s just say some very interesting secrets in her past. So that’s something that I’m going to be working on at the library, but I’m working on this novel right now. And it feels really liberating to be working on a third novel! I feel like the second novel — I’m a second born, I’m the second child in my family, and I feel like number two is always about comparison, that the second is always about comparison. I don’t feel like [Symptomatic] will have its real life until I’ve written a third novel, and it’s part of a larger body of work.

Danzy Senna reads from Symptomatic at Tatnuck Booksellers, in Worcester, on May 18, at 7 p.m. Call (508) 756-7644. She reads at Borders, in Boston, on May 19, at 12:30 p.m. Call (617) 557-7188. She reads at Newtonville Books, in Newton, on May 19, at 7:30 p.m. Call (617) 244-6619. Tamara Wieder can be reached at twieder[a]phx.com