Chapter 1: What is the significance of Toni Morrison's legacy?
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley.
Chapter 2: How has the perception of Toni Morrison changed since her passing?
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?
It's very interesting to look back at the way that an author was received at their time from the perspective of the 21st century when we are surrounded by this kind of sense of Toni Morrison, Nobel laureate. When you look at the earlier articles and interviews and reviews of her work, you find this notion of her difficulty appearing in all kinds of ways.
It's sort of cropping up, often in personal ways, describing her as a difficult personality, that she's someone who is impatient with others. And it's actually come back into the contemporary discourse recently with some social media posts about her supposed meanness, quote unquote.
And I really was very curious about this because I felt I also have experienced this double personal, political, and literary difficulty as a kind of accusation. And what I found is that Morrison... had a similar kind of surprise. There were moments in her career where she would be described as difficult or be kind of confronted with the difficulty of her works.
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Chapter 3: What insights does Namwali Serpell offer about reading Morrison's work?
And this was something that felt very different to her from African-American literature, which, if you think about just the birth of the tradition and the slave narrative, was pitched to white audiences. And because literacy had been denied to black readers, there weren't really black readers to read those slave narratives. So the tradition starts in a very different place.
And she felt that reading African literature and seeing this new framework it kind of gave her this sense of freedom. I don't actually have to explain. I don't actually have to translate all the elements of my culture.
I want to ask you a little bit more about this misreading, though, from maybe just from the Sometimes it just felt like the misreading felt like resentment. You write about a 1979 New York Times profile, and Morrison had just won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon. And I want to read directly from that article.
They described her as a big, handsome woman, often breathless, often late. She will often put on an act, suddenly get down and be very chicken and ribs, sucking her teeth, poking a finger into her scalp and scratching, a strange, primitive gesture. What do you take from that?
Oh, goodness. I mean, it's like a punch in the stomach whenever I read that. The first time I read it, my jaw dropped. I just, my mouth fell open. I just thought, how could you possibly talk about anyone in terms like that? A black woman in terms like that? And a black woman of Toni Morrison's stature and genius? It just felt, I mean, it just feels...
I don't know how to put it except just incredibly racist. I think racism, however, as you know, often comes out of a kind of insecurity and a kind of resentment. And Morrison is one of the incredible thinkers and theorists of racism as a pathology. And when she describes what it is to be racist, she's very insistent that this is a problem of the racist.
This isn't actually a problem of the black person. This isn't something that we have to take up and push back against and defend ourself on. As she says, you can spend all your time trying to prove that we are humans, that we had a civilization, that we have art, that we have culture, but it's a distraction because there's always going to be one more thing. And actually, the problem is not
The problem is the racist who has no other way of feeling full, no other way of having integrity other than putting someone else down. When I read that sort of thing – and I show it to my students because I think there is – An assumption that for Morrison to win the Nobel Prize, to be this widely acclaimed, canonized author – means that she would have escaped this kind of racist rhetoric.
And I think it's very important for people to understand what she actually had to confront, what she actually had to deal with, and how much more difficult it would have been for her to achieve what she did given those obstacles, given that this is the voice of The New York Times, the liberal-minded,
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Chapter 4: What does Namwali Serpell mean by the term 'difficulty' in relation to Morrison?
Right. Because what we're doing is we're battling about reputation. We're battling about race again and gender again. What we're not actually talking about are the words on the page. And I found that very frustrating. And part of my aim is to just redirect our attention to the miracle of what she's able to do with language and with the novel form.
I want to focus in on Song of Solomon, which was one of Morrison's most celebrated novels, and it was published in 1977. It was her breakthrough novel, cited by the Swedish Academy when they awarded her the Nobel Prize. You open this chapter by noting that despite all the gravitas, Toni Morrison was funny. And that humor isn't incidental.
It has a name and a very specific function in Black culture. It's called signifying. Can you define what that is for us?
So there's a lot of attempts by... lexicographers of black English to define what it is. They are seeing something that's happening in their families on the streets between black boys. And it's a kind of back and forth movement. Art of insults.
Like shade.
Like shade or the dozens. Yeah. And so you're going back and forth. Rap battles do this as well, right? You're going back and forth. We just saw a really, I think, clear...
elaboration of signifying in the Kendrick Lamar versus Drake battle that happened over the course of several months and culminated at the Super Bowl where you have people are making fun of each other they're ridiculing each other you're signifying something when you are ironically taking someone to task or giving somebody a rundown of all of their flaws
Where does signifying originate from? I think you sort of allude to it in the book where you talk about, you know, as a means of survival, it's almost a way to toughen one up. I've been to many funerals where the funeral will end up being a roast. You know, it's a way to turn what is something that is unbelievably tragic or hard into a moment of levity and connection.
Yes. I mean, I think this is one of the theories of why signifying emerged as such an important cultural form that I find really compelling, which is that it's a way of kind of releasing the burden of the oppression or the violence that you're facing. And it's almost like you're domesticating it, right? You're bringing it home, right?
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Chapter 5: How does Morrison's writing reflect cultural identity and history?
And when you look at the drafts of Dreaming Emmett, which you can now do in Morrison's archives at Princeton, what you find is this movement toward greater and greater distortion of the history. It's a way that she is emphasizing... how we interpret the past, and it's inevitably going to misconstrue the past. It's always going to mistranslate the past, right?
But I think she's also trying to preserve the sanctity of the real history. It's a way of respecting the past and by not trying to depict it or appropriate it, really almost extract from it. So it's this kind of double vision in a way. When she's writing about the story of Margaret Garner in Beloved, she says, when I was writing that novel, I didn't do too much research.
I didn't want to get too much into what actually happened. Because I wanted to invent – I had been inspired by this historical incident, but I wanted to invent – but also there's this way that she wanted to respect the real history. And you find her then turning to that real history in the libretto that she wrote for the opera, Margaret Garner.
So there's this way that these are – there are these double stories, right? The stories we tell about the past and then there's the past itself. And I think she's really keen on respecting that past.
You mentioned the play, Dreaming Emmett, and it's about Emmett Till's ghost coming back to stage a play about his own death. And in the final version, the ghost actually isn't Emmett Till at all. It's a different black boy who invented himself as Emmett.
And reading about that play, Namwali, made me think about the visceral pain that Black folks feel when we see racist, brutal acts of violence against us. It actually hurts so bad it might as well be us.
Yes. I mean, I think what's really – it's so moving, this moment in the play where you realize that it's a different black boy. He got shot while he was trying to steal a kite from a store in Chicago. And he's decided to pretend to be Emmett because there's this sense that he was more famous. People actually cared about him.
Wow.
Yeah. It's so – yeah, it's heartbreaking. I think one of the incidents that had happened more recently – you know, police brutality happens all the time. But the playbill of Dreaming Emmett had as a kind of little piece of – it's just a little piece of information. It points out that the play was partly inspired by the death of Michael Stewart.
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