Namwali Serpell

There's a bookstore she holds out specifically in New York where she's reading African literature for the first time.

And these two things are coming together right as she starts to write her own fiction.

And then a big part of what she wants to do, as I said earlier, is write books that she had never encountered before.

And what she meant by that is she wanted to write about African-American culture, Black American culture, in a way that it hadn't been written about before.

So she wanted to tell the stories of her parents and her grandparents

And she's drawing on all of these resources in what I call a syncretism, right, which is that means an amalgamation of different cultures and forms.

It's often used to describe certain religions like Candomblé or Voodoo, right, where you're drawing from the West and from, you know, the continent and you're creating the form.

So that's how I see that coming together for her.

Yes.

So the way that rereading works in my classroom is that you have to do the reading that's assigned on the syllabus and then you come to class and it is in the process of lecturing

to the students, having conversations with the students about pieces of the text, which we reread in class, right?

We put the quotes up on the PowerPoint or I actually force them to have the paper book and bring it to class.

Right.

And we read again.

And so you're not rereading the whole thing.

Maybe, you know, you will find yourself wanting to reread the whole thing when you write a paper about it or revisit it.

But there's just a small kind of staggered rereading that happens in the classroom.

And what you find is that you learn things now that you have finished the whole book.

When you go back, you realize that certain seeds have been planted.

And Morrison is particularly interested in doing this.