...How does Senna’s portrayal of Birdie Lee challenge the existing literary and critical conceptions of the tragic mulatto and, by extension, the conception of race in America? Birdie represents an agency unavailable to earlier formulations of the tragic mulatto. While most of her literary counterparts ultimately accept or are forced to accept the futility of contesting their place in American society, Birdie refuses to accept life as an “other” or as someone who doesn’t fit comfortably into America’s racial categories... By turning the traditionally stereotyped tragic mulatto into a fully realized character, Senna’s book has gone beyond defying this archetype to challenging American assumptions about race. Ultimately, Birdie does not die, disappear, pass, emigrate, or live a passive miserable existence, avoiding all of the possible deaths that have traditionally been available to biracial characters in American literature. Instead, she exercises her agency in order to gain the opportunity to be who she is – all of who she is. Her active choice is ultimately not to choose.
By the end of the novel, Birdie claims her right to be both black and white, and in doing so she chooses not to accept the marginality that has traditionally been ascribed to the biracial experience. She chooses to distance herself from her mother and the choice of identity she represents. She also chooses, however, not to deny the white side of her family. In fact, even as she searches for her father and her sister, she turns down multiple opportunities to settle down and belong to a certain group or a certain family, whether black or white... This is much more than the stark survival posited as an end goal in discussions of the tragic mulatto archetype. Much more than surviving, Birdie is staking her claim on a true experience, on the opportunity to live a rich, nuanced life that encompasses her whole identity. Beyond the context of the novel, Birdie’s active choice as an individual also makes her an agent of change in a larger sense. Within the plot, Birdie’s struggle is largely a personal one, a choice enmeshed in the particular circumstances of her fragmented family. In the larger world of American culture, however, Birdie’s character helps to contradict and prove false the existing concepts of race and the language used to discuss them...
Both drawing on and expanding these changing narratives of race, Senna’s Caucasia demonstrates how the traditional American conception is inadequate to describe how race works in the contemporary social landscape. The book makes the categories and words usually used to define race inadequate to the task by portraying Birdie neither as definitively black nor definitively white... In different contexts throughout the book, other characters classify Birdie in different ways...Characters in the novel are not the only ones who have different views of Birdie’s racial identity, however. The potential for different readers of Caucasia to read her racial identification differently provides further evidence for the inadequacy of America’s racial language. As a young black female reading the novel for the first time, I found myself identifying strongly with Birdie and the identity issues she confronts during her adolescence – society’s struggle to classify her permanently as a member of black America or white America, her daily encounters with simultaneously fitting in and not fitting in with each community, and her personal choice not to identify or be identified by the racial boundaries that American society has erected to define the un-definable. But if Birdie chooses to defy racial classification and is successful, then why am I so quick to identify with her and to view her as coded to represent a modern young black woman?
While Birdie cannot simply be characterized as a young black female, the aspects of her particular identity crisis speak to the struggles felt by other youths whose identities do not fit comfortably within the boundaries of the group identity American society has defined for them. Seen as “too black” by some of her white counterparts, criticized as “not black enough” by some of her black peers, Birdie’s character provides identification not only with the racial coming-of-age of a girl whom American society defines in some contexts as black, in others as white, but also with one who can understand the personal dilemmas inherent in that schizophrenic classification. Birdie’s choice to defy inadequate and false racial definitions manifests itself in a racial and cultural mobility that may be familiar to many readers living at the intersections of more than one group identity.
Caucasia also proves the traditional American conception of race false to the reality of the contemporary racial landscape, showing readers through Birdie’s life that the lived experience of biracial Americans cannot be contained by or represented in this conception. The analysis Senna offers through Birdie’s eyes speaks to the artificial choices mandated by American society’s constructions of race and attempts to disprove the need for such choices... The fact that there is not one word which captures this experience – neither a ethnic nor a political definition of this new and un-classified racial experiences – proves the futility of attempting to describe this experience with the terms and concepts Americans have traditionally used to discuss race.
Birdie’s character demonstrates the need for a new American concept of race, one which is truer to the realities of life in the contemporary United States. The idea is revolutionary, and in some ways, frightening. How, in this age of political correctness, can we afford to let go of the terms and concepts we were just beginning to master? How can we deal with fellow Americans on the basis of experiences particular to their skin color or ancestry or family – or even to their individuality? In a country where we call a biracial American the first “black” president, it is surely a good time to try.
Copyright (c) 2009 by Weslie Turner
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