Namwali Serpell

There's a kind of flow drip of information that is provided without context.

Yeah.

And the whole point of the rest of the book is to almost cast a light on those shimmering, glittering, foreshadowing elements so that they light up.

And you suddenly see them in that whole pattern, but also just in the plot sometimes.

Morrison, in at least, I think, two or three of her novels...

opens with a plot summary of the whole book.

She tells you exactly what's going to happen and or what has already happened.

And The Bluest Eye is one of these.

My favorite fact that I learned as I was teaching that book is that she printed that first page on the cover of the hardback edition of

of the book.

So you have the whole story on the cover of the book.

It sort of makes you wonder why anyone would buy it after that, right?

But she said, as you mentioned, she thought, I want you to be curious, not just what happened, but about how and why it happened.

And if that doesn't work, I want you to be compelled by the beauty to keep reading.

She said this in an interview.

And I think for Morrison, the

And then it happened and then it happened and then it happened.

Ian Forster describes this as the shock heads around the campfire.

This is the origins of storytelling.

What happened next?