It’s safe to say that Namwali Serpell—award-winning novelist, acclaimed critic and Harvard professor—is brilliant, and yet she has one thing in common with the rest of us (or perhaps just with me): The first time she picked up Toni Morrison’s Beloved, she was baffled. “What is this book?” she remembers asking herself after plucking it from her sister’s bookshelf. “I don’t understand a thing.”
During our phone conversation, which happened to take place on Halloween, Serpell (The Furrows, The Old Drift) reminisced about how, despite that first encounter, the beauty of Morrison’s novels has haunted her ever since. In many ways, Serpell’s newest book, On Morrison, is a labor of love several decades in the making.
“I have been reading Toni Morrison and being inspired by her work since I was a teenager,” says Serpell from her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “But I didn’t actually teach a full course about her works until 2021. We were talking in my old department at Berkeley about what contemporary authors could withstand a whole course just on their work. I immediately said, ‘Toni Morrison.’ When I got to Harvard, it was one of the first courses I taught, and I would come home from my lectures and talk to my then-fiancé. And he was like, ‘You should really write a book. It feels like the world might be ready.’ ”
After an equally enthusiastic response from her agent, Serpell began carefully constructing On Morrison, integrating material from her lectures and previously published essays on the Nobel laureate’s oeuvre. The book is a breathtakingly comprehensive analysis of Morrison’s novels, her lone published short story, “Recitatif,” her literary criticism and several poems. However, don’t be fooled. Although it is the brainchild of an undergraduate course and dinnertime chats with her now-husband, scholar and novelist Jesse McCarthy, Serpell’s On Morrison is a rigorous read. She is fastidious in her analyses, offering new ways of seeing even Morrison’s most popular books. In the chapter on Beloved, Serpell traces the novel’s lineage to the American gothic tradition, highlights Morrison’s use of modernist techniques and shows how the text both haunts its readers and is itself haunted down to the letter—or rather, the number. Serpell surmises a numerological pattern in Sethe’s address in Cincinnati, Ohio: 124 Bluestone Road is missing the number 3, which is Beloved’s birth order as Sethe’s third child. However, the numbers that are included—1, 2 and 4—equal seven, which is the number of letters in Beloved’s name. For a reader who also reread—and fell in love with—Beloved, it is a mind-blowing revelation of how Morrison, ever the craftswoman, stitched the spirit of her texts into their most minute details.
“There’s never a doubt that [reading Morrison] is going to change my life in some way—even if it’s a book I don’t like.”
In other places, Serpell turns her attention to Morrison’s power to explode the meaning of a single word. For instance, in a discussion of the use of “black” in Song of Solomon, Serpell notes how Morrison’s refusal to capitalize the word when referring to people allows for multiplicities of meaning whenever her characters use it.
Serpell’s treatment of Morrison’s canon is as precise as needlework, and as she explains on our call, it is deliberately so for several reasons. The first reason is Morrison herself. As Serpell explains, Morrison’s archives reveal a great deal about the author’s meticulous use of names, symbols and Afrodiasporic cultural references. “In the archives, you will find photocopies and dossiers of thick files of research,” says Serpell. “These are not things she just knows. These are things she want[s] to get right, and is thinking very specifically about them.”
As such, close reading is one of the few ways to truly experience the breadth and depth of Morrison’s craft. “There’s an aesthetic principle working,” says Serpell, “and Morrison is so deliberate about using those aesthetic forms in order to make an argument, one that might not even be the same argument that’s happening in the storyline. And I find that just incredible. It’s something you can only access if you read closely, and if you put together the patterns that are recurring across the work.”
The second reason for Serpell’s rigor is that, as much as Morrison has shaped 20th- and 21st-century American literature, social critique and even politics (New York City’s recently elected mayor, Zohran Mamdani, quoted her in an interview about the racism he faced during his campaign), her books have not always garnered the kind of critical attention they deserve. During our call, Serpell outlined the history of Morrison criticism and its evolution over the course of the author’s lifetime.
“The first wave of reviews and critical assessments [were] sociological,” explains Serpell. “But by the time you get to Song of Solomon, there’s a sense that this is somebody with a real mastery of the form. But the way they talk about the form is entirely in relation to a white Western canon. Interestingly, Black critics are starting to pay attention to her work, but they’re doing the same thing and they’re doing it with Black writers, some of whom she had never read. So, we go from sociological readings to these canonical comparative readings to get at what Morrison is trying to do. And she gets very frustrated by this.”
Up until a few years before her death in 2019, Morrison was grateful for some of the conversational shifts but still lamenting the state of her own literary legacy in academia. As Serpell notes, as late as 2012, Morrison said she found it strange that she was being taught in law schools and social science courses, but not in English departments.
“So, what’s happening in the new era is there is a new reading of Morrison that is not [strictly] sociological, but remains very oriented toward political thought, theory, history and the history of slavery,” says Serpell. “It becomes very oriented around these concepts, but what’s still being neglected is her form and the specificity of her Black form.”
Read our starred review of ‘On Morrison’ by Namwali Serpell.
On Morrison takes on this task of situating Morrison firmly within literary conversations, but without the hagiographic gloss, never eliding the difficulties, contradictions and failures that inevitably occur in any career that spanned five decades. In the penultimate chapter titled “Playing in the Shade,” Serpell writes, “Quiet as it’s kept, Toni Morrison’s poetry is not good.” It is a statement made in reference to two specific pieces, one titled “Black Crazies,” in which the speaker grapples with an attraction to an unhoused person asleep on the street, and “The Dead of September 11,” a poem Morrison read for an audience only two days after the twin towers fell. While both pieces’ shortcomings could be attributed to the phenomenon that often plagues literary powerhouses like Morrison, who are quickly called on to make sense of current events and are sometimes published without editorial pushback, Serpell does not allow these writings to escape scrutiny. She is also unsparing of Morrison’s later novels, including her last, God Help the Child, which was published in 2015. When I ask Serpell about the difficulties of critiquing a writer of Morrison’s stature, she explains the fine line she draws in her treatment of Morrison’s oeuvre, saying that “there’s a condescension” in praise given without at least some acknowledgment of what isn’t working.
“There’s a point where [Morrison] is talking about Black criticism and she says, ‘We have to be able to criticize each other.’ And because she was so comfortable in reflecting back on her work and saying what was good and wasn’t good, that gave me confidence in being able to use that method of attending closely, not just to uncover what makes something so good, but also to look at where things aren’t quite working.”
This stance, according to Serpell, is also designed to counterbalance some of the criticism levied against Morrison during her lifetime, criticism that often turned away from the writing to the writer herself.
“I did not want to participate in that history of demeaning and diminishing her work, which I think is very misogynistic and racist, that is very evident in her early career, and which continued to plague her even after she won the Nobel,” says Serpell. “I was like, if I’m going to do this, I really have to present it as a critique of the work and not of the person. It was really moving and inspiring to me to think about the uses of failure. As I talk about it [in the book], Morrison was always like, ‘Failure is just information.’ That was my goal: My critique of this is just information. It is not a moral condemnation of her as a person or even of her as a writer. This was maybe just a misstep. But in some cases, those missteps are tremendously illuminating and productive.”
Indeed, Morrison’s legacy is no less powerful in light of these readings, and analyses like Serpell’s are no less vital—in fact, they are more so, since, as she has pointed out, historically, Morrison criticism has either done too much by trying to link her to every other Black writer in the Diaspora, or too little by dismissing both her and her books as too difficult. On Morrison is perhaps one of the few books to do neither of the above. Instead, it handles the author with the same scholarly analysis given to Shakespeare, Faulkner and Woolf, all of whom were Morrison’s influences. And fortunately, Serpell’s book is part of a host of new scholarship about the author, much of it from Black women writers who have forged their own journeys through Morrison’s canon as well as her archives. I was curious to know how Serpell felt about this, and her answer is one befitting of the literary scholar she is and perhaps speaks to the teenager she was, who might have benefited from such conversations after first encountering Beloved.
“Reading Morrison is—I don’t even know how to describe it,” she says. “There’s never a doubt that this is going to change my life in some way—even if it’s a book I don’t like. [And] the thing about good books is the experience. You close the book and feel this deep satisfaction. But for me, what makes me know that something is good is that I immediately want to talk to someone else who has experienced it. And because so many people have read Morrison, it means you can have really, really deep, detailed conversations about specific scenes and moments in books. This is the time for mutual support and conversation rather than a sense of competition. So, it feels like a really positive thing.”
Photo of Namwali Serpell by Jordan Kines Photography.