 "Photo: Christine Soriaga")
In part, most of us live in marginality. We are all somewhere between child and adult, "A" student and "B" student, internship or summer job, studying and partying. The list goes on.
But the essence, and one could say intensity, of marginality changes significantly when the space between decisions that we all so often inhabit becomes a lifestyle. And all too frequently, the marginality of marginality, when referred to as a lifestyle, is made not by the person whom the decision might affect, but by a society's harsh stereotypical habits.
Skin-deep, it would seem as though America has come far from its racial segregating roots and has moved on to bigger and better things. After all, CEO of the country is no longer a white man's club. And that appearance is fine for most Americans who chose to ignore the embedded racial slurs tossed out by commercials and TV shows on a daily basis.
Ever notice that a white girl's Pantene commercial offers ways to improve her hair whereas a black girl's offers ways to fix it? Not exactly equivalent, but that's beside the point.
America is a country run by skin-deep appearances and identity check boxes and from the surface, there seems to be nothing wrong with that. After all, if you can check the black box and I can check the white one and neither of us has to honestly think about our heritage therefore not remembering perhaps a history that burdens us all, as most histories do, that is just fabulous.
Of course, within these placements of sorts there is a group of people wholly displaced for their inability to part. Marginality becomes their way of life not because they chose it, but because "what they are" can't be answered in check box form. It is this marginal lifestyle that Emily Raboteau, author of "The Professor's Daughter," knows all too well.
Raboteau visited the A&M campus Thursday to discuss her first novel.
Growing up with a black father and white mother, Raboteau faced the "what are you" question daily, "which is not an everyday question, but one she gets asked everyday."
It's a question we are all guilty of at least pondering upon others and one in which we must take the time to back track upon what answer we are expecting. Have we all given in to the societal acceptance of skin-deep identity? Is it a racial answer we are expecting? I'm black. I'm white. I'm Arabic. I'm a student at Texas A&M.
What are we expecting? And the bigger question, what part does that expectation play on the ones who find it exceedingly difficult to answer simply?
It comes, then, "The Professor's Daughter," a coming-of-age tale about a young girl whose life more-often-than-not mocks that of Raboteau's herself. Emma's father is black and her mother is white and she lives in the shadow of her brother, feeling comfortable and whole only when around him.
Her split identity between black and white carries over into the family where her father and brother pass as black and her mother and herself pass as white. Sexually and racially, the family has an invisible line drawn down their living room.
It isn't until Bernie, Emma's brother, is rendered brain dead by a freak accident and alive via only life support that Emma is forced to recognize and perhaps undo the separating forces within her family.
The novel takes the reader through an in-depth look at Emma's personal struggle and her father's. Growing up decades ago in the southern United States was no easy task for a black man. The experiences that take place in his lifetime mold him to become the person, for better or worse, that Emma knows as "dad."
Raboteau points out "the truth of the novel is in its emotion, not in its facts. It's a novel, not a memoir," but even the marginality between fact and fiction is hard to distinguish. In the end, the validity of the book brings the reader to this: There is no tragic mulatto; there is only a tragic history that all Americans so desperately are trying to overcome.
After all, if we do nothing else this generation, the stigma that comes from being mixed should lose its tragic precursor and be seen for what it really is: the most human form of black and white becoming one. Now, that's equivalent.
The Professor's Daughter by Emily Raboteau 288 pages Henry Holt and Co. $14
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