I've always been fascinated by stories of self-reinvention: the way someone can simply walk out of their life and create an entirely new one somewhere else. Maybe I'm so drawn to these tales because they so dramatically and dynamically consider the meaning of identity. Which aspects of the self are fixed and which are fluid? Is personality a performance or an expression of who we inherently are as human beings? Can we change who we are through sheer willpower and if we lie about who we are enough does it eventually become the truth? These are questions at the heart of Brit Bennett's new novel “The Vanishing Half” whose utterly compelling story considers many different types of dualities and personal transformations. It's also a heartrending tale of a family split apart by inherited notions of classism and racism.
Twins Stella and Desiree Vignes ran away from their small Louisiana town of Mallard in the 1950s when they were teenagers and went on to live very different lives. Mallard isn't a large enough place to be included on any map. Its citizens are primarily made up of light-skinned African Americans who still suffer the brutal effects of racism while simultaneously looking down at darker-skinned black people. This is the sort of community so powerfully described in Margo Jefferson's memoir “Negroland”. Over ten years after abruptly leaving the town, Desiree returns with a daughter who has very dark skin and the locals are appalled by what they consider to be her diminution of status because they believe “Once you mixed with common blood, you were common forever.”
Although Desiree makes a new life for herself by returning to her hometown, Stella remains conspicuously absent and cannot be found even by Desiree's compassionate new partner Early whose profession is locating lost people. Once she left her place of birth and everyone she ever knew Stella choses to pretend she is white because she finds “All there was to being white was acting like you were.” But this means she must completely hide her past and never contact her family again. As time goes on, she becomes increasingly anxious that her secret will be revealed and her caginess emotionally distances her from the people she should be closest to. Over the course of a few decades the twins' different stories unfold as their daughters eventually insist on knowing more about the truth of their origins than either Stella or Desiree are willing to disclose.
Although the twins are the catalyst for this engrossing story many of the additional characters also grapple with different transformations of identity. Desiree's daughter Jude becomes extremely self-conscious about her skin colour early in life and goes through laborious processes to try to lighten it early on. Her feelings of isolation are powerfully described: “You could never quite get used to loneliness; every time she thought she had, she sank further into it.” Stella's daughter Kennedy becomes an actress with mediocre success and craves attention from the audience even though she realises it is “Strange that the greatest compliment an actress could receive was that she had disappeared into somebody else.” This contrasts sharply with the life of her mother who is trapped in the pretence of acting white and tragically feels that “she was living a performance where there could be no audience.”
Jude befriends a man named Barry who secretly performs as a drag queen a couple of nights a week. He feels his drag act is a hidden but necessary part of his life and that it is possible to sustain this duality because “You could live a life this way, split. As long as you knew who was in charge.” Jude also becomes romantically involved with a trans man named Reese and it's so powerful how Bennett describes his struggle at that time in the 1980s to obtain corrective drugs and surgery. The enormous challenge and expense associated with such treatments is made evident and it's moving how his journey is detailed alongside his tender relationship with Jude. When Jude wonders aloud at one point if Reese would have loved her before he changed his name, Reese definitively replies “I was always me.” This is such an impactful and validating statement.
All of these fully-rounded and complex characters come together to form a dynamic portrait of our uneasy and constantly evolving sense of identity. The story also makes a strong statement about American life and the way a tradition of discrimination regarding class, gender and race in the US leads to such painful personal strife and divisions in families. It causes individuals to distort and conceal who they really are in some instances or struggle against unnecessary adversity to express and realise their true sense of being in others. Bennett has written a richly-rewarding and compassionate story that intelligently dramatises these issues while creating many unique and memorable characters I grew to love.
