Professor Autumn Womack

Thank you for having me.

It's fun to be here.

Yeah.

Yeah, you know, it's such a deceptively difficult question.

And I think one of the things that makes her the classes writer is the way that she is taking up seemingly universal terms or questions or concepts.

And I really hate to use that word universal in relationship to her work because there is something so specific and particular about

about the arenas and the individuals and the histories that she's routing these stories through.

But I mean, they aren't like these enduring open questions that are not easily resolved.

And there are questions about morality or how does one access history?

Or there's questions about like voice and language.

And I think all of the texts that we think of as quote unquote classics, whatever our individual canon is, and I was trying to run back, like what are the classics for me?

And they all do kind of orbit around these seemingly simple questions that

are really unanswerable or have to just keep coming back to them.

So I think that's, I mean, this is what Morrison is especially good at.

I think there's a couple, but I think the big overarching one, if we think of Piccolo,

Bread Love or Breed Love, however you're reading her name, as the center of it.

I mean, it is this question about how does society's view of this child utterly crush her, right?

And in this particular world, it's a very racialized view of this child.

right she crumbles under the weight of that everybody really crumbles under the weight of that and then they crumble on top of her and and decimate her but it's not i mean that question is enduring what happens to these to this child or these children because claudia and her sister frida they're not unaffected by this either and so it's a question that i think is not

easily answered in the text.