Tanya Mosley

If you're just joining us, my guest is author Namwali Serpell.

We've been talking about her new book On Morrison and about what Toni Morrison was actually doing on the page that the critical conversation about her work has largely missed.

This is Fresh Air.

I want to talk about you a little bit as a writer and what brought you to this work.

You describe yourself in this book as mixed race, born in Zambia, African American in the most hyphenated sense.

And you note that you and Morrison share something, what you call the strange privilege of zooming out from or boomeranging around race.

What does that mean?

And how do you think it's kind of shaped the way you read her?

She returns to this again and again in her writing, but what is distinctive is that it's not the border between black and white, but the differences within blackness itself.

There's a moment in Song of Solomon where the character Pilate says, you think dark is just one color, but it ain't.

There are five or six kinds of black.

So Morrison seemed to be very interested in those distinctions within blackness.

Which brings us to Sula, which was published in 1973.

And so for listeners who haven't read it, can you tell us what this novel is about briefly and then how Sula herself kind of embodies that insider-outsider idea?

This novel ends in one of the most devastating lines Morrison has ever written.

I mean, I guess it depends on your perspective, but from my perspective, Nell finally understands decades later as an old woman that what she has been mourning all of this time was

was not her late husband.

It was her friendship with Sula.

And I actually want you to read from your book a revelation that you had about this.

Namwali, around the time that your book has come out, there's just been lots of discourse and discussion about Toni Morrison and her work.