Passing and Intergenerational Trauma in Ladivine and The Vanishing Half

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This essay presents two structurally similar novels that tell stories of racial passing: Marie Ndiaye’s Ladivine and Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half. Both novels follow a light-skinned woman of African descent who leaves home and passes as White, getting married and having a family from whom she keeps the secret of her origins. Ndiaye’s novel, despite being set in France — where there is not the same tradition of the « passing novel » as it has existed for nearly 200 years in the (African-)American tradition — bears many similarities to what has historically been one of the best-known examples of the genre: Douglas Sirk’s film Imitation of Life. The emotional and psychological experience portrayed is very different in the American context versus the French based on the historical, social, and demographic contrast between the two countries. What is unique about these two novels, however, is that they focus not only on the person passing, but on the effect of that action on their children, even though they are unaware of what is being kept from them. Both novels portray passing as a decision that has intergenerational consequences, but through those consequences we see the distinct understandings of the nature of racialized identity by both authors.