Namwali Serpell On Understanding Toni Morrison The Author, Not The Icon

The importance of black literature in America has turned on its relation to the canon, and its proximity to political usefulness. The art and biographies of groundbreaking black figures are often turned into blunt tools with which anodyne lessons about equality and acceptance are fashioned. When I first read the works of James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr., it was often presented as a lesson. Teachers, sympathetic non-black readers, and American culture at large would remind me, explicitly and implicitly, that these were first and foremost well-written and historically significant PSAs relegated to a narrow experience of life. In other words, black writing was rarely more than a category of moving, powerful, but crucially inoffensive examples of speaking truth to power. The not-so-subtle emphasis: that black literature is more useful for a very specific political purpose than as art.

Namwali Serpell’s On Morrison is an intervention into this literary siloing, a work of bracing, rigorous, and thrilling critical appraisal not just of Toni Morrison’s evolution as a writer of fiction, but of the richness and complexity of the black literary tradition. While she is a professor of English at Harvard and an accomplished critic, I knew Serpell first as a novelist and, later, as my workshop mentor. Her epic speculative debut, The Old Drift, blends historical fiction with science fiction, stretching from the Zambezi River to outer space. Her follow-up, The Furrows, charts a family’s grief through the seductive slippage of broken time. With On Morrison , Serpell marshals both her fictive imagination and her critical acumen to bring forth knotted, uncompromising, and often surprising aspects of Morrison’s work.

Over the phone, we spoke about the capaciousness, and frustrations, of the archive, the centrality of Morrison’s difficulty both as a writer and a public figure, Serpell’s focus on the work of the artist over the biography, and how empathy shapes American political thinking. Our conversation has been lightly edited.