Geoff Bennett:
In her new book, award-winning novelist Namwali Serpell takes on one of the towering figures in American literature, Toni Morrison.
Serpell guides readers through Morrison’s extraordinary body of work, from her celebrated novels, to her criticism, poetry and plays, offering close readings that illuminate the depth of Morrison’s imagination, innovation and craft. And it asks what it means to read Morrison with fresh eyes in our time.
I recently spoke with Namwali Serpell about her book “On Morrison.”
Namwali Serpell, thank you for being here.
Namwali Serpell, Author, “On Morrison”: Thank you so much for having me.
Geoff Bennett:
In this book, you focus on the entirety of Toni Morrison’s work, the 11 novels, the play, beyond.
And early in the book, you write: “I never met Morrison. I never tried to either. I have loved knowing her through reading her over the decades of my life.”
Why was it important to establish that distance at the beginning to make clear that the work, not the woman, was the primary focus?
Namwali Serpell:
Thank you so much for that question.
Morrison herself had a version to what she called biographical writing. She thought that human beings had a kind of copyright on their selves. And so she said, for her, writing was very much about invention, imagining someone from the curl to the full human being, she said.
She often advised her creative writing students, I don’t want to hear about your little selves. Don’t write about yourself. I want you to write about other people.
And when she contracted to write a memoir, she ended up canceling that project, because she said, my life’s not that interesting.
So I sort of feel like I have the privilege of getting to know Morrison through her work, in a way, because she gives us that permission. Reading and writing were also so foundational to what she believed and to how she herself related to other people. She said, writing for me is a slow and advanced form of reading.
And so, in that sense, I felt that kind of literary relationship was something that I really wanted to unfold in my analysis of her work. Rather than thinking about her as this kind of monument to Black excellence, I wanted to really dig in and play with her language.
Geoff Bennett:
And her work is so often understood to be and described as difficult, sometimes as a criticism, sometimes as a warning.
And in the book, you argue that the difficulty isn’t a flaw; it’s really a demand placed on the reader. Tell me more about that.
Namwali Serpell:
Morrison was very good at articulating why she did the things that she did in terms of her choices, her formal choices, the choices of design.
And she spoke about, for example, having gaps and spaces in the work so that the reader has to step in to piece things together. And, for her, this was part of an ethos that had to do with egalitarianism, treating the reading experience, the writing experience, the whole literary experience as a kind of communal, mutually enforcing engagement.
You have to actually work to make the work come to life with her. And I think, for her, that was very important, very much a part of a Black aesthetic. When you’re in a jazz show, the hoots and hollers and the calls and the clapping is as much part of the performance as the playing of the music.
Geoff Bennett:
A question just occurred to me. How can a writer like Toni Morrison be fully institutionalized, in the sense that she is taught everywhere, and yet fundamentally misunderstood and not read on her own terms?
Namwali Serpell:
This is a really, really key question.
And it’s a paradox that her very good friend Fran Lebowitz articulated when Morrison passed away. She said Morrison’s writing was underappreciated, curiously enough, perhaps because people always looked at it through the prism of her being Black and her being a woman. There’s a way in which her stature, her success came to overshadow the work itself.
There’s a kind of presumption that Morrison’s work is brilliant, it’s beautiful, but people don’t actually need to read it. And, in this way, there’s been a lack of attention to how experimental her writing was and how innovative her writing was, how much she broke the form of the novel open.
I also think, for a long time, there were not readers able to bridge, as she did, her understanding of the novel with her understanding of Black cultural forms, things like signifying, things like shade, things like jazz.
And it’s by having this kind of balance of the two forms of knowledge, as a professor myself, as a Black woman, as a writer, that I feel like I wanted to contribute to the conversation about Morrison’s work, focusing on her mastery of Black form.
Geoff Bennett:
It’s interesting. I hear you say that the paradox of Toni Morrison was that, the more she was celebrated, the less rigorously she was read.
Namwali Serpell:
She was read, yes.
Geoff Bennett:
And in this moment that prizes clarity and accessibility and instant comprehension, what added value does Toni Morrison’s work yield?
Namwali Serpell:
I think Morrison wanted to go back to what she described as village literature, which is a notion that literature is a social form, it’s a community form, and therefore it can’t just tell you, the individual reader, what to do.
It has to open up questions so that we can talk about it as a community. We’re not just being given a message or a single slogan. We’re being given an experience. And that experience is raising questions, is opening up all sorts of topics for debate so that, when you close the cover of the novel and you turn to the final page, you immediately want to seek someone out and talk to them about it.
That, to me, is the power of literature.
Geoff Bennett:
You end the book by saying that you aspire to Morrison’s freedom to be at ease with being difficult. What does that freedom look like, especially for Black women?
Namwali Serpell:
It’s a very tricky time to be willful, to be unreasonable, to be angry.
These are all ways in which Black women get relegated to the category of being difficult. But I think we have to have a faith and a commitment to the complexity of our experience, to the complexity of our lives, and to the incredible complexity of art itself.
Morrison said, when someone considers you difficult, that’s a good sign. It means that you have insisted on being taken seriously. And, to me, that’s what I aspire to. I want my work to be taken seriously. I want to be taken seriously. I don’t want to be thrown into a position where I’m here nearly to comfort, or placate, or translate things for people.
I want to inspire them. I want to engage with them, and I want to make them think.
Geoff Bennett:
The book is extraordinary.
Namwali Serpell:
Thank you so much.
Geoff Bennett:
“On Morrison.”
Namwali Serpell, thank you for being here.
Namwali Serpell:
Thank you.
