Namwali Serpell

So the events that we do, we take a passage from one of Morrison's novels and we give little bookmarks with them printed to the audience.

And we close read the passage together for about 15 minutes just to show what what I essentially do in the book.

Right.

Which is focus on form and show what form can generate.

And just this last rereading of this passage from Jazz, I realized that there was a slant rhyme happening between crazy and razor, and that every sentence of this passage, Morrison is playing with...

we might going to call it contradiction or ambivalence or dark and light, but in every single sentence.

It was not something I would have just guessed, even when I chose the passage for us to close.

I hadn't noticed that.

So it's in conversation with people that I've learned new and fascinating things about Morrison.

I can give you an example, though, for my research, and I didn't actually end up including much analysis of this in the book, but

When I was rereading Beloved to write the book,

I realize that there, I always describe it as a kind of threnody, because that's her word.

There's a section of the book that has chapters from the perspective of three women, Sethe, her daughter Denver, and the ghost of her daughter, her dead daughter, Beloved.

And each of them begins with a riff on, I am Beloved and she is mine, or she is Beloved and she is mine.

So the word Beloved and she is mine appear together.

And there's a chapter that puts sentences from each of those three in almost like a poetic, in almost like a poetic form.

And I always described it that way.

There's the three chapters and then there's this like kind of threnody where they're all threaded together.

But then I realized in looking at the manuscripts and at Princeton as well, that there is a part to that section, which is in the prose form,

And it is in a perspective that you cannot determine.