From Caucasia, with Love - Softcover

Senna, Danzy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0747557500 ISBN 13: 9780747557500

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2001

Synopsis

Growing up amidst the power politics of 1970s America, Birdie and her older sister Cole are so close they speak their own language. Daughters of a white activist mother and a black academic father, Birdie appears white, Cole black, their relationship a refuge from the rest of their lives. Yet when their parents separate, Birdie and Cole are thrown worlds apart. But Birdie's desperate need to reclaim her family forces her back on to the road, where her search for her sister becomes, inevitably, a search for her self. 'Twists serious issues - race, politics, identity, social and familial responsibility - around the structure of a compelling storyline ...an intelligent, questioning book that sparks with ideas' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

About this title

Review:

In From Caucasia, With Love, Birdie and her older sister Cole speak to each other in their own language, Elemeno:

We whispered questions and answers to each other like calls to prayer. shimbala matamba caressi. nicolta fo mo capsala. The Elemenos ... could turn not just from black to white, but from brown to yellow to purple to green, and back again.

Birdie looks white, while her sister looks black; their mother is white and their father is black. Birdie turns from black to white when she is uprooted by her parent's separation, becoming a small-town Jewish girl in New Hampshire, and back again to black when she searches for her identity and her estranged father and sister. Cole, as black as her father, gets to go to Brazil with him and his black girlfriend. The story begins in mid-1970s Boston--a city divided by race (even, to some, the colour of the subway lines reflecting this division: "My father had told me once that those lines ... of red and green and purple and blue and orange ... were racial codes") and yet bussing its school children across town to try hard at desegregation.

From an all-black activist school to the suffocating traditions of WASPs in Cambridge, Massachusetts, From Caucasia, With Love explores being a "cinnamon-skinned girl" and having parents of different colours. For Birdie, this means that when she's alone with her father in a park people call the police, thinking she is being abducted; for Cole it means not having a mother who can braid your nappy hair and instruct you in moisturising your dusty skin to an ebony shine.

Danzy Senna's novel also explores the bare facts and feelings of having separated parents and being a single parent. Birdie's belief that her father and sister will come back to her and her mother forms an aching backdrop to the second half of the story, with her naiveté shimmering out of the world-weary teenage character. Birdie's feeling also that her mother loves her sister above her--the girl with the "voice that is her firstborn. A voice that is her"--reverberates through the pages as a reminder of the mother-daughter bond that no society, law or ignorance can break. From Caucasia, With Love takes the minutiae of familial and racial ties and mixes them with the upheavals and prejudices of the 1970s and 1980s USA to make a novel that charts one girl's coming of age. --Olivia Dickinson

About the Author:

Danzy Senna was born in Boston in 1970. She graduated from Stanford University and received her MFA in creative writing from the University of California. FROM CAUCASIA, WITH LOVE is her first novel.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0747557500
• ISBN 13: 9780747557500
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 432