![]() Intrigued to learn that Larsen wrote just two novels in her lifetime, I settled down with a copy of her most recent biography, George Hutchison’s In Search of Nella Larsen. ![]() Though Helga is not necessarily a ‘likeable’ character, her strength and tenacity in the face of adversity make her an engaging and compelling protagonist, and her story will grab the attention of any number of audiences. This search for identity, while arguably a universal experience, is one felt perhaps most keenly among members of marginal groups, or those seeking a sense of acceptance among a group they don’t immediately ‘belong’ to. From the affluent white elites of Denmark to churches on the streets of Harlem, Larsen offers her reader a vivid and insightful depiction of Helga’s enduring search for fulfilment and happiness. It also engages closely with questions of class, gender and political dynamics in a diverse range of communities. But Quicksand is a novel about more than just race. In some ways, Helga’s eventual return to the United States, and her “facile surrender to the irresistible ties of race” (92) seems almost inevitable, as we witness her trying and failing to transcend the issue of race in each community she inhabits. In the narrator’s words, “ could neither conform, nor be happy in her unconformity” (Larsen, 7). Larsen’s novel draws upon her own identity as a Danish-West Indian woman born in the United States, who travelled to Europe as a result of feeling ostracised by both ‘white’ and ‘black’ communities. This semi-autobiographical work tells the story of Helga Crane, a young mixed-race woman of Danish and West Indian parents, and her search for a sense of belonging as she grapples with her racial, religious and gender identities. A similarly slender yet powerful read, Quicksand puts a woman’s desire to reject societal expectations in direct conflict with her inherent desire to ‘belong’, a tension which resonates throughout this book. Keen to read more of Larsen’s work, I settled down with her first novel Quicksand (1928). The fact that it took enrolling in a seminar built around race before it was addressed in one of my classrooms speaks to the prevailing issue of the erasure of minority voices in academe. It’s an injustice to the quality of Larsen’s prose to see it pigeonholed into the category of ‘black’ fiction, rather than used to enhance a course on something else entirely. A concise but complex novel, Passing packs articulate discussions of class, gender, sexuality and race into just over 100 pages. Although I initially I felt guilt that I’d apparently chosen classes with so little diversity, I soon realised that Passing would have made a fitting addition to a range of courses I’d studied previously. Art by Jazmine Sheckleford jasmineillustrations13ĭespite taking courses titled ‘International Modernism’, ‘World Gothic’ and ‘Comparative Feminist Drama’, it wasn’t until enrolling in a ‘Black American Fiction’ seminar in the final semester of my degree that I was first assigned a text written by a woman of colour, Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929).
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