Namwali 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.

And I really was very curious about this because I felt I also have experienced this double personal, political, and literary difficulty as a kind of accusation.

And what I found is that Morrison...

had a similar kind of surprise.

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'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.

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?

That's exactly right.

I think there's an assumption of what needs to be explained or what needs to be translated.

Even 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?