Mixed-Race Identity In Senna's Caucasia

Elemeno as a Mixed-Race Identity in Senna’s Caucasia

In Caucasia, Birdie and Cole are juxtaposed as a white-passing mixed person and a visibly black mixed-person, but they are drawn together by their mixed race identity and their shared world: Elemeno. They both experience pressures from blackness and whiteness to conform, and Birdie especially struggles to exist in either category. Senna uses the various aspects of Elemeno to highlight this sense of alienation felt and to examine racial identity outside the context of the black and white. Elemeno the language is critical to Elemeno as an identity, and contrasts languages and dialects of real communities in ways that reflect the mixed-race experience. The Elemeno people and their invisibility

powers provide an interesting lens with which to view Birdies own experience disappearing. Elemeno the place helps define ‘home’ for Birdie. The constantly changing nature of Elemenos reflects Birdie’s identities or, in some cases, lack thereof. Birdie and Cole create Elemeno - the people, language, and place – as a way to establish an identity for themselves as mixed race individuals in a world of strictly white or black, and the Elemeno world goes on to define Birdie’s identity throughout the novel.
Birdie’s experiences with race are reflected in the creation of, and her interpretation of, the Elemeno people. The Elemenos above all represent fluidity and a state of in-between: “The Elemenos, she said, could turn not just from black to white, but from brown to yellow to purple to green, and back again. She said they were a shifting people, constantly changing their form, color, pattern, in a quest for invisibility ... their power lay precisely in their ability to disappear into any surrounding...” (7). This description is very relevant to mixed race people like Birdie and Cole – people who are not just black or white, people often forced to change and blend in to be accepted. Birdie finds herself struggling with this idea of invisibility throughout the novel. Upon hearing Cole’s description originally, Birdie is struck with the question: “what was the point of surviving if you had to disappear?” She is then immediately forced to blend in first with blackness at Nkrumah, then with whiteness as Jesse Goldman, yet her original mentality remains central to her character and her racial identity. Speaking about her time as Jesse, she says “I had become somebody I didn’t like. Somebody who had no voice or color or conviction. I wasn’t sure that was survival at all,” (408). Her experience with having to blend in goes on to support her early idea that being forced to hide oneself is not truly survival, yet for so long she is forced to do it, like the Elemeno.
Birdie’s experiences with understanding herself as a mixed race person in the context of the white/black dyad lead her to struggle with the boundaries of labels and identities.

From an early age, Birdie is immersed in black culture and identifies as black. Various people refer to her as white, or try to invalidate her blackness and, while she does become very insecure at points, she never thinks of herself as white. This can be seen like times when she goes to Nkrumah, Ali throws a spitball at her and says “’what you doin at this school? You white?’” (43), and when a white girl is murdered, after an exchange with her mother reveals “It struck me as odd that my mother hadn’t warned Cole not to go to the park, just me. ‘There are perverts, crazies, dirty old me, and they want little girls like you.’” (67). But in addition to these events, she also recounts many incidents where black individuals, including her father, shame biracial couples or mixed race people. “My father laughed a little and said, nudging Cole, gesturing toward the [interracial] couple: ‘what’s wrong with that picture?’ ... She didn’t seem to remember the right answer – or perhaps she didn’t care – but I did and, throwing my hand in the air like Arnold Horshack, piped in from the backseat, ‘diluting the race!’” (73). Her father, her strongest connection to blackness, accepts her as a black person but rejects her in many ways as a mixed person, which is harmful as she comes to terms with a mixed

identity. Later in the novel she questions if he would accept her despite her non-normative sexuality and realizes that he probably would not. Deck as a father figure serves to truly further Birdie from her blackness by gatekeeping black identity, and she likely struggles with general fluidity of self due to the influence of his quite rigid thinking. The conception of the Elemeno’s as “a shifting people, constantly changing their form” then creates an idea of non-identity that becomes a safe haven for Birdie, racially and otherwise. A constantly changing people avoid categorization and boundaries cannot be established. Birdie is like this with her race, as well as with her gender and sexuality. She knows that she isn’t white, but often questions if she is actually black because there aren’t clear boundaries for what it means to be black. Like the Elemeno people, she doesn’t fit neatly into any category. Her gender is always vague, she often questions her characteristics and desires and how they relate to gender – one time unsure whether she identified with the man or the woman in her sexual fantasy. Her sexuality is vague too, she can’t determine exactly how she feels but it is clear she is not hetero or homosexual. In a more literal example, Birdie often describes herself as blurry, out of focus, lacking definition, or someone constantly in motion: “My makeup was smeared by rain and maybe tears, I couldn’t remember – making my face appear blurred, like a photograph of someone caught in motion,” (297). Like the Elemeno her form, visually, seems to always be in motion and therefore never fully discernable. She learns to like living on the move because she never has to face any one clear, defined conception of herself, but at the same time she feels as though it is all a game – she’s not really living during this time and eventually she feels the need to return to real life.
Throughout the novel, language is shown to be central to racial identity, and the language of Elemeno is a critical part of Birdie’s development.

Many characters, including Deck, Redbone, Cole, and Birdie, “blacken” their speech to fit in, and in Decks case to affirm their identity. Sandy benefits multiple times from her language, for example when the Marshes allow her to rent the house, “-an educated voice. They heard her accent, so like their own, and knew she would do just fine,” (150). Elemeno further reflects this trend of a group being defined and understood through their language. Birdie describes Elemeno as “a complicated language, impossible for outsiders to pick up – no verb tenses, no pronouns, just words floating outside time and space without owner or direction” (6). The inability for outsiders to understand Elemeno differentiates it from the language of black radicals and of WASPs – both are understood and can be spoken by others – whereas Elemeno is exclusive to the Elemeno people. Sandy describes Elemeno words as “achingly familiar, but just beyond ones grasp.” (7) while Deck describes the language as “high speed patois” (7). Both descriptions leave an idea of the language being a derivation of something known, unintelligible but only barely, just as someone of a mixed racial background may be so similar but still falls completely outside the ‘pure’ racial

group.
Elemeno is said to be a physical place, described my Col as a far-off island, but birdie also has metaphorical elemeno islands. Birdie reflects on the island as follows: “’aku-aku means ‘brothers-brothers’ in Polynesian. It means ‘guardian spirit’ to the natives of Easter Island in the south-east Pacific, the loneliest inhabited island in the world. On this barren and isolated island, men of mystery built huge stone images – and then disappeared.’ It sounded like the land of Elemeno to me.” (119). The loneliness of the island is representative of the loneliness Birdie feels as a mixed race individual – she only has Cole for most of the novel. In a symbolic sense, the land of Elemeno for Birdie is originally in her attic, with Cole – a place she describes as protecting her from the outside world. When she leaves with her mother, she loses not only her physical house but the land of Elemeno, and that is what she is seeking and yearning for when she returns to boston. In the end however, she seems to find it: “For a second I thought I was somewhere familiar and [the mixed girl] was a girl I already knew. I began to lift my hand, but stopped, remembering where I was and what I had already found. Then the bus lurched forward and the face was gone with it, just a blur of yellow and black in motion.” (413). Birdie finally finds herself in a place of racial diversity, where there are people like her. The blurring motion imagery in the last sentence is critical too – it is very reminiscent of the Elemeno as a people constantly changing, constantly in motion – and suggests that perhaps she has again found the land of Elemeno there with Cole.
Whether or not Birdie finds her home at the end of the novel, her journey of self-understanding leads to clear parallels with the Elemeno. She understands herself through them and in contrast to them. The unique identity of Elemeno grows from simply a child’s understanding of race to be a substitute for the nonexistent separate mixed-race category and an affirmation of change and fluidity in identity.