TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. Writer Toni Morrison died in 2019, and something interesting has happened since. The tributes haven't slowed down. They've actually accelerated. Publishers have reissued her novels. I come across her quotes on social media almost every day. And there's a real conversation happening right now about her legacy, what it means, whether the reverence around her has gotten so massive that it's actually getting in the way of the work itself.
My guest today, author and Harvard professor Namwali Serpell, has been reading Morrison since she was a teenager and teaching her for nearly two decades. She's watched the critical conversation circle the same territory - Morrison's identity, her biography, her iconic status - while the genius of what Morrison was actually doing on the page hasn't really been examined. That gap is what has become her new book "On Morrison," which moves through all 11 of her novels, from "The Bluest Eye" to "God Help The Child," as well as Morrison's criticism, plays and poetry. Namwali Serpell is a professor of English at Harvard University, and her own novels "The Old Drift" and "The Furrows" have won the Clarke Award and been finalists for the National Book Critics Circle.
Namwali, welcome to FRESH AIR.
NAMWALI SERPELL: Thank you so much.
MOSLEY: Namwali, the word difficult - it has been used to describe both Morrison as a person and as a writer. And you write early in this book that, quote, "I have been called difficult more times in my life than I can count, but I only began to understand, to discover the meanings and uses of my own difficulty because of Toni Morrison." What did Morrison show you?
SERPELL: It's very interesting to look back at the way that an author was received at their time from the perspective of the 21st century when we are surrounded by this kind of sense of Toni Morrison, Nobel laureate. When you look at the earlier articles and interviews and reviews of her work, you find this notion of her difficulty appearing in all kinds of ways. It's sort of cropping up often in personal ways, describing her as a difficult personality, that she's someone who is impatient with others. And it's actually come back into the contemporary discourse recently with some social media posts about her supposed "meanness," quote-unquote.
MOSLEY: Yes.
SERPELL: I really was very curious about this 'cause I felt - I also have experienced this double personal, political and literary difficulty as a kind of accusation. And what if - what I found is that Morrison had a similar kind of surprise - that there were moments in her career where she would be described as difficult or be kind of confronted with the difficulty of her works. And she sort of felt like she had been misread or misunderstood because what was really happening was a refusal of the reader to be open to what she was presenting.
It was - it's almost as though her personality or her persona or the projections that we put on a Black woman writer, a Black woman genius, were getting in the way of people actually thinking about the work. So there's this wonderful moment in a Vogue profile where someone complains about the difficulty of understanding her work because he's just not familiar with African American culture, and she remembers saying, well, you must have had a hell of a time with "Beowulf" then.
MOSLEY: Right, right. Yes.
SERPELL: (Laughter) And there's a sense, like, well, you know, difficulty in art is supposed to be there, so why does it keep being translated as this personality flaw?
MOSLEY: Well, I wanted to interrogate that a little bit more because, I mean, we know that Morrison was fully credentialed. She was a Random House editor, a Princeton professor. I mean, she's a Nobel laureate. But she also talks about how African writers freed her because in reading them, they didn't have to explain anything to white people in their writing. And so when you talk about this difficulty that people have with her writing, it made me think, what does it mean to write from that place, where Blackness is assumed as the center, and what does a reader have to bring to access that?
SERPELL: That's exactly right. I think there's an assumption of what needs to be explained or what needs to be translated, what - even, you know, what sorts of ideas or messages are comforting to an audience that is very particular to being a Black writer, to being an African writer, to being an African American writer.
When she first starts working at Random House, one of her first projects was an anthology of contemporary African literature. And she's reading a lot of African literature really for the first time, which is interesting given the fact that one of her credentials is that she went to Howard University. But she went to Howard in the late '40s, early '50s - right? - so the syllabus then was still being decolonized, as we like to say now, and she really wasn't encountering African literature until she was living in New York, working in publishing. And she said that reading someone like Chinua Achebe, reading Bessie Head, reading Camara Laye, she encountered writing by Africans that did not assume that you needed to explain your culture to the white audience that you were writing for.
And this was something that felt very different to her from African American literature, which, if you think about just the birth of the tradition and the slave narrative, was pitched to white audiences. And because literacy had been denied to Black readers, there weren't really Black readers to read those slave narratives. So the tradition starts in a very different place, and she felt that reading African literature and seeing this new framework, it kind of gave her this sense of freedom. I don't actually have to explain. I don't actually have to translate all the elements of my culture.
MOSLEY: I want to ask you a little bit more about this misreading, though, from - maybe just from the larger - from larger literary circles or media. So sometimes it just felt like the misreading felt like resentment. You write about a 1979 New York Times profile, and Morrison had just won the National Book Critics Circle Award for "Song Of Solomon." And I want to read directly from that article. They described her as a big, handsome woman, often breathless, often late. She will often put on an act, suddenly get down and be very chicken and ribs, sucking her teeth, poking a finger into her scalp and scratching - a strange, primitive gesture. What do you take from that?
SERPELL: Oh, goodness. I mean, it's like a punch in the stomach whenever I read that. The first time I read it, my jaw dropped. I just - or my mouth fell open. I just thought, how could you possibly talk about anyone in terms like that, a Black woman in terms like that and a Black woman of Toni Morrison's stature and genius? It just felt - I mean, it just feels - I don't know how to put it except just incredibly racist. I think racism, however, as you know, often comes out of a kind of insecurity and a kind of resentment. And Morrison is one of the incredible thinkers and theorists of racism as a pathology. And when she describes what it is to be racist, she's very insistent that this is a problem of the racist. This isn't actually a problem of the Black person. This isn't something that we have to take up and push back against and defend ourself on. As she says, you know, you can spend all your time trying to prove that we are humans, that we had civilization, that we have art, that we have culture. But it's a distraction because there's always going to be one more thing. And actually, the problem is not us. The problem is the racist who has no other way of feeling full, no other way of having integrity, other than putting someone else down.
When I read that thing - and I show it to my students because I think there is an assumption that for Morrison to win the Nobel Prize, to be this widely acclaimed, canonized author means that she would have escaped this kind of racist rhetoric. And I think it's very important for people to understand what she actually had to confront, what she actually had to deal with and how much more difficult it would have been for her to achieve what she did given those obstacles, given that this is the voice of The New York Times, the liberal-minded New York Times doing this big profile of this Black woman writer who's just won a major award, is on her third novel, and this is the kind of rhetoric that's being used, right? It's kind of remarkable.
MOSLEY: Well, I mean, almost 40 years later or more, a British magazine comes to you, and they ask you for a hard-nose, critical piece on Morrison, specifically from the perspective of a Black writer. Were they asking you to write kind of a takedown, or how did you interpret what they wanted from you?
SERPELL: That's how I felt. I felt that there was a desire to take her down a couple of notches. There was this assumption that she couldn't possibly have been that good (laughter). And the thing about it is, you know, I - as I started writing the book, as I started researching the book, I was seeing all of this haunting Morrison as she's coming up in her career. And there are all these moments in the archives where she feels that she's being mistreated by publishers, by people who've invited her to travel to other countries, that there's a kind of constant dog nipping at her ankle, which is just this - you know, this racist assumption about what she is worth and what is worthy of her.
What I found really, frankly, startling was that as I was writing the book and researching the book, I was still encountering people's commentary along these lines and a kind of dismissal. And this is what - I described this as a kind of - it's a double-edged sword when it comes to Morrison, because there are the people who secretly, you know, behind their hands, say, well, she couldn't have been that good. And then there are the people who say, well, obviously, she was incredible, and she is this icon of Black excellence. And in between those two competing views is the work itself, which gets - which just falls out of the picture, right? Because what we're doing is we're battling about reputation, we're battling about race, again, and gender, again. What we're not actually talking about are the words on the page. And I found that very frustrating. And part of my aim is to just redirect our attention to the miracle of what she's able to do with language and with the novel form.
MOSLEY: Well, let's get into some of the work, but first, let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is author Namwali Serpell, and her new book is called "On Morrison." This is FRESH AIR.
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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR, and today I'm talking with author and Harvard professor Namwali Serpell. Her new book, "On Morrison," is a close reading of Toni Morrison's entire body of work - 11 novels, the criticism plays and poetry. Serpell argues that the more Morrison was celebrated, the less rigorously her work was actually read.
I want to focus in on "Song Of Solomon," which was one of Morrison's most celebrated novels, and it was published in 1977. It was her breakthrough novel, cited by the Swedish Academy when they awarded her the Nobel Prize. You open this chapter by noting that despite all the gravitas, Toni Morrison was funny, and that...
SERPELL: Yes.
MOSLEY: ...Humor isn't incidental. It has a name and a very specific function in Black culture. It's called signifying. Can you define what that is for us?
SERPELL: So there's a lot of attempts by lexicographers of Black English to define what it is. They are seeing something that's happening in their families on the streets between Black boys, and it's a kind of back-and-forth art of insults that's...
MOSLEY: Like shade. Like shade.
SERPELL: Yeah.
MOSLEY: Shade...
SERPELL: Shade.
MOSLEY: ...Or the dozens. Yeah.
SERPELL: Yeah, yeah. And so you're going back and forth. Rap battles do this as well, right? You're going back and forth. We just saw a really, I think, clear elaboration of signifying in the Kendrick Lamar versus Drake...
MOSLEY: Yes.
SERPELL: ...Right? - battle that happened over the course of several months and culminated at the Super Bowl - right? - where you have - you know, people are making fun of each other. They're ridiculing each other. You're signifying something when you are ironically taking someone to task or, you know, giving somebody a rundown of all of their flaws.
MOSLEY: Where does signifying originate from? I think you sort of allude to it in the book, where you talk about, you know, as a means of survival. It's almost a way to toughen one up. I've been to many funerals where the funeral will end up being a roast, you know?
SERPELL: Yes (laughter).
MOSLEY: It's a way to turn what is something that is unbelievably tragic or hard into a moment of levity and connection.
SERPELL: Yes. I mean, I think this is one of the theories of why signifying emerged as such an important cultural form that I find really compelling, which is that it's a way of kind of releasing the burden of the oppression or the violence that you're facing. And it's almost like you're domesticating it - right? - you're bringing it home. It's a way of, like, training yourself to withstand the much more consequential insults that society is going to throw at you, but it's a way of doing it in a - that allows for pleasure. It allows for bonding, it allows for community.
MOSLEY: OK, I want to get to an example now in Morrison's writing, and I have this passage that I want you to read. And to set it up, we're talking about the "Song Of Solomon." And the hero of "Song Of Solomon" is a young Black man nicknamed Milkman. His real name is Macon Dead III. And Dead is actually the family surname, and it came from a clerical error at the Freedmen's Bureau after the Civil War, so the name is both a comedy and a prophecy. And Guitar is Milkman's best friend - the person who knows him better than anyone. They're also, as the novel unfolds, on a collision course together. And I want you to read this exchange and a little bit of your explanation of it from the book.
SERPELL: (Reading) Morrison offers her own definition of the dozens in an offhand description of how Milkman and Guitar speak to each other as young Black men. Quote, "when in conversation, they came to the battleground of difference. Their verbal sparring was full of good humor." Their repartee over the course of the novel is indeed all jabs and feints marked by extremes of humor and violence, but the threatening tone is really directed toward each other. You going to do me in? My name is Macon, remember? I'm already Dead. Guitar didn't smile at the familiar joke, but there was enough recognition of it in his face to soften the glare in his eyes. Somebody ought to tell your murderer that, said Guitar. Morrison emphasizes the joke for us by capitalizing the D in, I'm already Dead. This wouldn't be audible in a spoken exchange, but he's talking here about his own name.
MOSLEY: This is pretty remarkable to me because there's something happening also with a level of language through the names themselves.
SERPELL: Yes.
MOSLEY: There's the joke there. The joke is he's - you know, his last name is Dead, and they're talking about death and murder. But the names of these characters - Milkman, Guitar, Pilate, Magdalene, Hagar - each one carries the weight of the story in really interesting ways. What did her choice of names tell us about how deliberate she was in her writing?
SERPELL: Morrison felt that naming and the way Black Americans name each other was a particular form of language. It was very - and she - when she's listing off various things we do - call and response, the blues form, antiphony, back and forth - she'll say, and naming. And it's because the specific way that people named each other often has a kind of pun in it - right? - or kind of irony to it. So you have - for example, Milkman is named Milkman because he breastfed too long, right? This is - so it's punning on Macon and Milkman. They sound a little bit similar. But this is - in his name is built in an insult that he received for breastfeeding too long, right?
And Pilate is a wonderful example because it's said very specifically that Pilate - whose name comes from Pontius Pilate in the Bible - that that act - anything about Pontius Pilate, the figure, the character, the person that inspired the naming of this young girl, it was the look of the letters - that her father liked the look of the letters. Her father couldn't read, so he just liked what the letters look like. But for Morrison, there's another pun available here, which is that Pilate sounds like pilot - like an airplane pilot - and this novel is all about flying, right? So you have Morrison kind of taking advantage of the irony of punning names to do her own thing aesthetically.
MOSLEY: Our guest today is author and Harvard professor Namwali Serpell. We're talking about her new book "On Morrison." We'll be right back. I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR.
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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. And my guest today is Namwali Serpell, a novelist, critic and Harvard professor who was born in Zambia, raised across three continents and has spent nearly two decades teaching Toni Morrison's work at Berkeley and Harvard. Her own novels, "The Old Drift" and "The Furrows," have won the Clark award and been finalists for the National Book Critic Circle. Her new book is "On Morrison," a deep dive into Toni Morrison's writing.
Morrison seemed to have a complicated relationship with history, specifically with the idea that fiction owes history accuracy. So in the "Song Of Solomon," she includes Emmett Till's murder, but she changes the details. She spells his name wrong. She changes how he died. She changes the year. Why would she deliberately alter the facts of one of the most documented murders in American history?
SERPELL: It's so interesting because that specific historical incident, the killing of Emmett Till, also became the basis for Morrison's play "Dreaming Emmett." And when you look at the drafts of "Dreaming Emmett," which you can now do in Morrison's archives at Princeton, what you find is this movement toward greater and greater distortion of the history. It's a way that she is emphasizing how we interpret the past and it's inevitably going to misconstrue the past. It's always going to mistranslate the past, right?
But I think she's also trying to preserve the sanctity of the real history. It's a way of respecting the past by not trying to depict it or appropriate it, really almost extract from it. So it's this double vision in a way. When she's writing about the story of Margaret Garner in "Beloved," she says, when I was writing that novel, I didn't do too much research. I didn't want to get too much into what actually happened because I wanted to invent. I had been inspired by this historical incident, but I wanted to invent.
But also, there's this way that she wanted to respect the real history. And you find her then turning to that real history in the libretto that she wrote for the opera, "Margaret Garner." So there's this way that these are - there're these double stories, right? The stories we tell about the past, and then there's the past itself. And I think she's really keen on respecting that past.
MOSLEY: You mentioned the play, "Dreaming Emmett." And it's about Emmett Till's ghost coming back to stage a play about his own death. And in the final version, the ghost actually isn't Emmett Till at all. It's a different Black boy who invented himself as Emmett. And reading about that play, Namwali, made me think about the visceral pain that Black folks feel when we see racist, brutal acts of violence against us. It actually hurts so bad, it might as well be us.
SERPELL: Yes. I mean, I think what's really - it's so moving, this moment in the play where you realize that it's a different Black boy. He got shot while he was trying to steal a kite from a store in Chicago. And he's decided to pretend to be Emmett because there's this sense that he was more famous. People actually cared about him.
MOSLEY: Wow.
SERPELL: It's so - yeah, it's heartbreaking. I think one of the incidents that had happened more recently - you know, police brutality happens all the time. But the playbill of "Dreaming Emmett" had, as a kind of little piece of - it's just a little piece of information. It points out that the play was partly inspired by the death of Michael Stewart, who was a young Black man who was arrested for writing graffiti at the First Avenue subway station.
And he had been arrested by New York City Transit Police. He was beaten, he was unconscious, his wrists were bound to his ankles. And there were signs that he had been strangled. And he died. And this had just happened in New York. Morrison, you know, was living in Albany while she was teaching there. But it happened in New York, where she was living most of the time.
And so there's this recent thing that had just happened that made her think about Emmett Till again, because she had already been thinking about Emmett Till in writing "Song Of Solomon." So it came back to her. It haunted her. The other thing that inspired her was she was in an airport. And she saw two little Black boys just walking through the airport but just, like, playfully, like, playing with each other. And immediately what flashed through her head was, what if one of them got shot right now? I found that very eerie because I had not read that interview with Morrison about "Dreaming Emmett" before I wrote my novel "The Furrows." But I have an incident in which a young Black man gets tased in an airport in that novel.
And I just thought, this is - the fact that I feel compelled to go back to this, that Morrison feels compelled to go back to this, this is something that just keeps haunting us and haunting the pages of the novels that we're trying to write. But there's also this kind of really, as you say, painful sense that this just keeps happening. And it's this kind of endless series of young Black boys being killed, you know? And there's something very spooky about feeling like this is a haunting that we're just not really able to exorcise.
MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is author Namwali Serpell. We've been talking about her new book, "On Morrison," and about what Toni Morrison was actually doing on the page that the critical conversation about her work has largely missed. This is FRESH AIR.
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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR, and today I'm talking with author and Harvard professor Namwali Serpell. Her new book is called "On Morrison," and it's a close reading and analysis of Toni Morrison's body of work.
I want to talk about you a little bit as a writer and what brought you to this work. You describe yourself in this book as mixed race - born in Zambia, African American in the most hyphenated sense. And you note that you and Morrison share something - what you call the strange privilege of zooming out from or boomeranging around race. What does that mean, and how do you think it's kind of shaped the way you read her?
SERPELL: So when I was thinking about why I feel so drawn to Morrison in terms of the way she talks about racial politics, I was struck by the fact that we have very, very different upbringings. And my Blackness as Zambian, my Blackness as an American, were very different from hers growing up in Lorain, Ohio, and being someone who, as it turns out, never actually went to Africa, even though Africa is invoked a lot in her work. And what I realized is that as she perceived in the work of someone like Chinua Achebe, Blackness was - is so central to the way that I conceive of the world that there is a kind of - it's my default position (laughter) because growing up in Zambia, you know, this is a majority Black country. I'm surrounded by Black people. I'm - I have an - a kind of awareness that Black and brown people are the majority of the world. And so the sense that we are somehow a minority, which is very much the rhetoric in the United States, was really strange to me.
And Morrison somehow managed to have that same powerful sense of centrality and Black centrality and Black as the default. She says, when I say people, I mean Black people. And some people, when they hear that, feel rejected or that she's marginalizing non-Black people, but it's just - I think it's just, like, that's her default mode. That's just the way she thought about things. And I realized, oh, wow, I think somehow we both managed to lock into that perspective about Blackness from a very early age for very different reasons. But I do think it's a privilege. It allows for a kind of groundedness in that double consciousness that we all experience growing up in the West where the default position is that Black culture is central.
MOSLEY: She returns to this again and again in her writing, but what is distinctive is that it's not the border between Black and white, but the differences within Blackness itself. There's a moment in "Song Of Solomon" where the character Pilate says, you think dark is just one color, but it ain't. There are five or six kinds of Black. So Morrison seemed to be very interested in those distinctions within Blackness.
SERPELL: Yes.
MOSLEY: Which brings us to "Sula," which was published in 1973. And so for listeners who haven't read it, can you tell us what this novel is about, briefly, and then how Sula herself kind of embodies that insider-outsider idea?
SERPELL: Yes. So, you know, Pilate says, Black may as well be a rainbow, which is a beautiful way of talking about the many internal varieties and differences within Blackness - not just the color, but also the culture.
"Sula" is a beautiful story of friendship. It's really about the relationship between Nel Wright and Sula May Peace, who meet as young girls and fall in friends is the phrase I like to use about it. And as they grow up in this fictional community - The Bottom, in the fictional town of Medallion, Ohio - you find them negotiating their relationships with the community, but also their relationship with each other as very different kinds of people, right? Nel Wright is very - she comes from a very orderly household, a very respectable household, where Sula comes from a kind of wayward, ramshackle environment - all women - run by her grandmother and her mother.
A lot of violence happens in that family, some of it accidental, some of it intentional, and Sula becomes this kind of wayward woman. She leaves town and goes to college and she comes back. And she has a kind of status in the community of - where people respect her, but they also fear her. She has - she's a bit of a pariah because she's happily willing to sleep with anybody's husband, but she doesn't seem to be particularly pressed about being in real romantic relationships with them.
So she has the quality, I think, of glamour that Morrison really conjures for us in the way she dresses, in the way she talks and the way that she thinks, but she also has this - there's a sense about her that she's an - as Morrison puts it, she's an artist without an art form, right? She doesn't have the painting or the sculpture or the musical instrument that would allow her to express her gifts, and so her life becomes her art. And that is both a beautiful thing and a bit of a dangerous thing.
MOSLEY: This novel ends in one of the most devastating lines Morrison has ever written. I mean, I guess it depends on your perspective, but from my perspective, Nel finally understands, decades later, as an old woman, that what she has been mourning all of this time was not her late husband, it was her friendship with Sula. And I actually want you to read from your book a revelation that you had about this.
SERPELL: There's this kind of incredible building in the last chapter of the novel toward this moment of revelation, where Nel finally realizes, as she says, we was girls together.
(Reading) Oh, Lord, Sula. Girl, girl, girl, girl, girl. And the cry that she releases rises up in these circles of sorrow. And when that sentence comes into my life - whether I'm reading it to teach, whether I'm rereading it to write, whether I'm reading it out loud, even just now - tears always spring to my eyes. It's just such an incredible evocation of what it feels like to lose the love of your life, which is your friend.
MOSLEY: Namwali, around the time that your book has come out, there's just been lots of discourse and discussion about Toni Morrison and her work. The New York Times produced a podcast and a piece called "Don't Make A Saint Out Of Toni Morrison," Wesley Morris. Their argument was that sanctification puts her too far away to touch, too far away to actually read, which is also what you are saying - that she's being misread. But at the same time, does a book called "On Morrison" risk becoming part of that problem?
SERPELL: That's a really good question. I, in my book, make a similar argument to the discussion that was on the New York Times podcast, but rather than thinking about her as a saint, I am thinking about her and the way she's been turned into a monument. And I find it helpful to think about Morrison's relationship to monuments as a way of reframing how we think about her because she was very skeptical of monuments in certain kinds of ways. And there's - for example, I visited Ohio, and I had the wonderful opportunity to go to Lorain, where Morrison was born and grew up. And in Lorain, the public library has a room dedicated to her.
This was how Morrison wanted to be honored - by a room in a library filled with books, where people could come and read, which isn't the same as having a statue or having, you know, a plaque attached to a building. They renamed a building at Princeton Morrison Hall, and she sort of very wryly said that there's a kind of inevitability to that. She really liked the fact of this. But at the same time, I think it's very clear to me that what Morrison wanted most of all was for people to read and to read her - that that's actually what was so important.
MOSLEY: Namwali Serpell, thank you so much for this conversation, and thank you for this book.
SERPELL: Thank you so much for having me, and thank you for these wonderful questions.
MOSLEY: Author and Harvard professor Namwali Serpell. Her new book is called "On Morrison."
Coming up, jazz historian Kevin Whitehead reviews two new biographies of composers and pianists born 43 years apart - James P. Johnson and Alice Coltrane. This is FRESH AIR.
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