Symbols Colored Television Danzy Senna

Jane's Novel Nusu Nusu: Symbol of Ambition, Theft, and Identity

What Is Nusu Nusu?

Nusu Nusu is the unfinished mixed-race epic that Jane Gibson spends nine and a half years writing. The title comes from Swahili, meaning "partly-partly"—a term she learned at a dinner party from a Kenyan diplomat's son. The novel spans from 1813, with the first recorded mention of the Melungeon people in Virginia, through the 1950s life of a quadroon actress, to a vague present-day story of a racially indeterminate family living in a Craftsman house in California. Jane incorporates an essay by the fictional anthropologist Cavendish, whose white, disembodied voice appears at key moments to pronounce the mulatto doomed. She physically cuts up Cavendish's article and pastes sections into her manuscript margins, using his cold, scientific gaze as a "relentlessly haunting specter." The novel is both a historical epic and a personal quest to write a history for "a people without a race."

Where Nusu Nusu Recurs

The manuscript appears in four distinct phases:

  • Writing phase: Jane works feverishly in Brett MacNamara's borrowed studio, taping archival images to the walls—Thomas Jefferson's mulatto math, a photo of O.J. and Nicole Brown, and a sepia-toned family of free people of color. She works every dawn for six months, driven by a "missionary zeal."
  • Completion: In March, she types the final words—"Years from now, that will be us"—and emails the 150,000-word manuscript to her agent, Honor. The novel is rejected; her agent and editor call it "career suicide."
  • Pitch adaptation: During a general meeting with Hampton Ford, Jane repurposes Nusu Nusu as a TV comedy premise. The mulatto tragedy becomes a "kooky but lovable mulatto family" called the Bunches, living in a renovated Craftsman with a Wolf stove. Hampton's sitcom Swirl later closely copies these details.
  • Plagiarized series bible: Months after the family moves to the Golden Eagle retirement home, Brett shows Jane the series bible for Swirl. She reads it and feels shame—it is her novel stripped of its darkness and turned into "jubilant, knee-slapping comedy." The stolen version wins Hampton an Emmy, and Jane watches it in the retirement-home common room, where the old ladies dismiss her claim of authorship.

How Its Meaning Changes

Initially, Nusu Nusu represents Jane's artistic ambition and her belief in the power of literary fiction to give voice to a marginalized identity. She sees it as "the voice of her people" and sacrifices years of financial stability and family time for it. After rejection, the novel becomes a symbol of failure—a "monstrous creation" that wasted a decade. Yet when Hampton steals it, the novel transforms again into a marker of validation: "she reminded herself with each new rejection letter that she’d once written something good enough for Hampton Ford to steal." Ultimately, Nusu Nusu becomes a ghostly double, a work that exists both as her authentic epic and as a televised copy she cannot separate from her own life. The final scene of Jane binge-watching Swirl encapsulates this dissolution of boundaries: "she could not separate her life from its televised copy."

Character Connections

  • Jane: The novel is her life's work, her child, and her burden. Writing it defines her identity as an artist and a mixed-race woman. Its theft leaves her with a strange, ambivalent pride.
  • Lenny Gibson: He supports Jane's writing, urging her to "keep this mulatto girl writing." But the novel's failure deepens their class anxiety and housing instability.
  • Hampton Ford: He represents the commercial machine that commodifies racial identity. He steals Nusu Nusu and transforms it into a sanitized sitcom that wins awards and avoids the tragedy Jane intended.
  • Brett MacNamara: A former literary novelist who successfully transitioned to television. He embodies the path Jane might have taken. His borrowed house enables her to finish the novel, but his showing her the Swirl bible forces her to confront the theft.

Thematic Links

The central themes of racial identity and commodification converge in Nusu Nusu. Jane's novel is an attempt to define a people "that cannot be defined or even located"—the mulatto as a perpetually shifting category. Hampton's adaptation reduces this complexity to a marketable product: a comedy starring "prettier version of herself" with bouncy curls. The theme of artistic ambition versus commercial success plays out in the contrast between Jane's literary labor and Hampton's effortless theft. The novel also reflects marriage and deception, as Jane keeps her Hollywood meetings from Lenny, and later class anxiety and housing instability, as the failure of Nusu Nusu forces the family into the Golden Eagle. Finally, the novel is tied to parental guilt and fear; Jane neglects her children while writing, and later sees Finn's diagnosis as a consequence of her obsession.

Study Questions

  1. How does the Swahili title Nusu Nusu reflect the novel's core tension?
    Answer: The phrase "partly-partly" captures the "doubled" nature of mixed-race identity that Jane tries to depict. It also mirrors the novel's own partial status—never quite whole either as a literary work or as a TV show, and partly Jane's, partly Hampton's.

  2. Why does Jane incorporate Cavendish's essay into her manuscript?
    Answer: She uses Cavendish's anthropological, white-gaze voice as a narrator who sees the mulatto from the outside, "coldly, as a scientist studies a specimen." This adds a distanced, haunting perspective that explains why the mulatto is "doomed." Jane literally pastes his words into the margins to counterbalance her more personal narrative.

  3. What does Hampton's adaptation reveal about how the entertainment industry treats racial identity?
    Answer: Hampton strips the melancholy and historical weight from Nusu Nusu, turning it into a comedy about a "relatable" mixed-race family. He adds a trans character for "prestige" and gives the family a Wolf stove and Carrara marble counters. This shows that the industry packages marginalized identities into palatable, marketable formulations that avoid the uncomfortable truths Jane tried to tell.

  4. How does Jane's relationship to Nusu Nusu change after she watches Swirl?
    Answer: She moves from shame and anger to a strange, private pride. The old ladies dismiss her authorship, but she later tells herself that if her work was good enough to steal, it had value. The novel becomes a private touchstone, proof of her talent, even though it exists publicly only in a distorted form.

Conclusion

Nusu Nusu is the beating heart of Colored Television—a symbol of artistic labor, racial definition, and the wound of commodification. It never becomes the award-winning novel Jane envisioned, but its transformation into the stolen sitcom Swirl speaks to the novel's larger argument: that in America, the story of mixed-race identity is always partly written by someone else. Jane's relationship with her manuscript—from devotion to despair to vindication—mirrors the novel's broader themes of internal conflict, class survival, and the search for an authentic voice in a culture that prefers its narratives sanitized and saleable.