Z.z. Packer's "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere": Summary and Review

Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by Z.Z. Packer is a series of stories that focus on the main character, Dina. Dina is an African American girl who is raised in Baltimore, but who later studies at Yale. Dina doesn’t like most people and has a hard time meeting and liking new people. This is likely because she has difficult events happening in her life. These events are partially why Dina initially isolates herself from others. When Dina arrives at Yale for freshman orientation, all the freshmen are being told to play games with each other. Dina refuses to play trust fall with these predominantly white students.

During the next game, students are supposed to describe an object they would want to be. Not amused by the games, Dina says that she would be a gun, so she could eliminate everyone off the face of the earth. The dean overhears this, and doesn’t appreciate her response when she is playing the game. Dina responds the way that she did because she hates most of the students at Yale because at one point, they were all slave owners. Because of this incident, Dina is forced to go to psychiatric counseling and meet with the dean every week. Later in the book, Dina hears someone knocking on her door. Dina opens the door and is greeted by a white girl, who is crying. Dina realizes that this girl has the same poetry class as her. This girl is introduced as Heidi.

When Dina asks why Heidi was crying, Heidi says it was because boys were calling her derogatory words. Over the next few days, Heidi and Dina become relatively close friends. Heidi lesbian, and sometimes jokingly says that Dina is lesbian too. Dina doesn’t think too much about Heidi’s jokes, but later starts to question her sexuality. Dina and Heidi both sign up for jobs at the dining hall as dishwashers. The job is standard, but sometimes Dina has conflicts with people who she talks to at the dining hall. This job makes Dina and Heidi grow closer and closer every shift they have together.

Later, Dina is starting to question if she is attracted to Heidi or not. That’s all I'm going to say because I don’t want to spoil the main events in the book. The main themes of Drinking Coffee Elsewhere are issues that relate to identity, race and authority. One of the main themes is identity. This is because the whole book focuses on Dina and her process she goes through to find her true identity. During the book, Dina also has to deal with being African American in a predominantly white school. Dina doesn’t like or respect the authorities.

One example of this is when the Dean starts sending a counselor to Dina’s dorm room. Dina initially deals with the counselor, but that doesn’t last long. Dina starts showing up naked to make the counselor feel uncomfortable. This is Dina’s way of showing that she doesn’t want to deal with the dean’s “punishments”. The dean was probably trying to help Dina, but this situation certainly didn’t help Dina at all. I think this just made Dina feel more like an outcast. One of the stories in the book is called Brownies. This story is about a group of girls at a Girl Scout camp. In this camp, there is a group of African American girls, and a group of white girls. The white girls are described as “babyish”. The white girls also show up with stuffed toys. The African American girls are too grown up for those types of things and label the other girls as babies. During this story, apparently one of the people in the white girls camp called Dina’s group the N word. The person making this accusation is named Arnetta. Arnetta says that they should fight the white girls. As they start to creep up on the other troop, they soon realize that the white girls’ group is mentally handicapped.

The person that Arnetta accused of saying the N word couldn’t even form a complete sentence. This passage interested me because it showed how racism and stereotyping is a mutual thing. It’s not something that just one group of people does. Everyone stereotypes and assumes things. This passage shows that people should think with insight before they act. Drinking Coffee Elsewhere is an interesting book. This book shows the perspectives of Dina in many situations. It also shows some modern problems that some people have to deal with every day. This book did a good job focusing on Dina and events in her life. Some of these events happen when Dina is young, and some occur when Dina is older. I thought this book was decent, but if I had to be honest, I would’ve picked a different book. This is because I personally like books with more action in them.