Tanya Mosley

Writer Toni Morrison died in 2019.

And something interesting has happened since.

The tributes haven't slowed down.

They've actually accelerated.

Publishers have reissued her novels.

I come across her quotes on social media almost every day.

And there's a real conversation happening right now about her legacy, what it means, whether the reverence around her has gotten so massive that it's actually getting in the way of the work itself.

My guest today, author and Harvard professor Namwali Serpell, has been reading Morrison since she was a teenager and teaching her for nearly two decades.

She's watched the critical conversation circle the same territory.

Morrison's identity, her biography, her iconic status, all the genius of what Morrison was actually doing on the page.

hasn't really been examined.

That gap is what has become her new book, On Morrison, which moves through all 11 of her novels, from The Bluest Eye to God Help the Child, as well as Morrison's criticism, plays, and poetry.

Namwali Serpell is a professor of English at Harvard University, and her own novels, The Old Drift and The Furrows, have won the Clark Award and been finalists for the National Book Critics Circle.

Namwali, welcome to Fresh Air.

Thank you so much.

Namwali, the word difficult, it has been used to describe both Morrison as a person and as a writer.

And you write early in this book that, quote, I have been called difficult more times in my life than I can count.

But I only began to understand, to discover the meanings and uses of my own difficulty because of Toni Morrison.

What did Morrison show you?

Well, I wanted to interrogate that a little bit more because, I mean, we know that Morrison was fully credentialed.