“The Vanishing Half” by Brit Bennett.
Be its beginning in a matter of daring or of jest, by mistake or with deliberation, the act of passing, and in respect to racial identity, is not unique to the United States. But, with a relatively young history so defined by slavery and migration, it is the place that has long provided the most fertile ground from which to spring complex narratives of personhood – and to feed a hungry national imagination. And it is within this context, that Brit Bennett’s best-selling novel of last year The Vanishing Half finds its place.
The title hints at where this novel may take the reader. Brit Bennett’s protagonists are the Vigne twins, Desiree and Stella. Twins are oft sought subjects in many branches of scientific research; for reasons that are as obvious as they are many. And most especially so should they be separated at birth; growing up under disparate socio-economic conditions, a nature versus nurture debate would be the consequence. However, as a fictional narrative device, twins with all their particular character attributes have been surprisingly neglected.
Bennett gifts us such a literary pair. Desiree and Stella, are not separated early in their lives, and so not the best fit for scientific experiment; in fact, they grow up together in small town Louisiana of the 1940s and 50s, intimately bound in one another’s shadow and shared experience, both bearing the trauma of witnessing as children the lynching of their father, wanting only to escape the cruel hand dealt to their mother. And, what a peculiar small town this Mallard is! Populated, and most deliberately so, by “coloured” folk determined to get less so as generations pass, and the home-town twins a shining example of do-it-yourself social engineering. A different sort of experiment. (I can’t help but wonder whether such a place as Mallard ever really existed, but it could be an imagined “coloured” – and uppity – version of Zora Neale Hurston’s Florida town of Eatonville in Their Eyes Were Watching God, which was inhabited and governed by Black people, and based on the real Eatonville that was the childhood home of Hurston. To digress: Now that is a novel I love, and must say something about sometime soon!)
Still together as teenagers, and on not much more than a whim, the girls flee their suffocating nest to the city of New Orleans. And, in search of what? Freedom, perhaps. Perhaps, not explicitly that for which their forbears had yearned for and fought for, but some how akin. As alike these light skinned pair physically, so different are they in temperament, but circumstances and chance then determine their fate – and that they will not share, for their ways now part. For the serious, reticent Stella it will mean leaving behind her very self; choosing instead a path paved with deceit, and for Desiree, in youth the so much more adventurous of the two, there will be only some years of adventure – ending badly, and back in Mallard. But both will bring forth a new generation; daughters who must make their own choices, but each burdened with those made by their mothers.
Continue reading “The sum of their parts”