Namwali Serpell

And I just thought this is the fact that.

I feel compelled to go back to this, that Morrison feels compelled to go back to this.

This is something that just keeps haunting us and haunting the pages of the novels that we're trying to write.

But there's also this kind of really, as you say, painful sense that this just keeps happening.

And it's this kind of endless series of stories

young Black boys being killed, you know?

And there's something very spooky about feeling like this is a haunting that we're just not really able to exorcise.

So when I was thinking about why I feel so drawn to Morrison in terms of the way she talks about racial politics, I was struck by the fact that we have very, very different upbringings.

And my blackness as Zambian, my blackness as an American, we're very different from hers growing up in Lorain, Ohio, and being someone who, as it turns out, never actually went to Africa, even though Africa is invoked a lot in her work.

And what I realized is that as she perceived in the work of someone like Chinua Achebe and

Blackness is so central to the way that I conceive of the world that there is a kind of – it's my default position because growing up in Zambia, you know, this is a majority black country.

I'm surrounded by black people.

I have a kind of awareness that.

that black and brown people are the majority of the world.

And so the sense that we are somehow a minority, which is very much the rhetoric in the United States, was really strange to me.

And Morrison somehow managed to have that same powerful sense of centrality and black centrality and black as the default.

She says, when I say people, I mean black people.

And some people, when they hear that, feel rejected or that she's marginalizing non-Black people.

But it's just – I think it's just like that's her default mode.

That's just the way she thought about things.