Caucasia

Caucasia is the first novel by the American writer Danzy Senna, published in 1998.

It begins in Boston in 1975, in the years when the city's schools were being desegregated by court order and the protests against busing repeatedly turned violent. Birdie's parents married in the 1960s, when a marriage like theirs was still illegal in many American states, and they raised their daughters inside a circle of activists and organisers. The two girls invent a private language and live as a pair, but the world outside their house reads them differently, and the book is about how much of a life that difference arranges. When the family breaks up, her father leaves for Brazil with Cole, and Birdie and her mother start again in New Hampshire under another name. What follows is the story of a girl who is passing: an adolescence spent waiting for the moment when somebody works out who she is, and a search for the sister who looks the way she is supposed to look. The portrait of Boston in those years takes in the desegregation fight as the city's families lived it, and it is written in Birdie's own voice, moving between the New England town, her father's letters from Brazil and the neighbourhood she left.