I have read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye a few times, and I have felt relatively engaged with the novel’s themes, symbolisms, and allusions, until my recent rereading, where I unearthed something new about one of the novel’s tertiary characters, Geraldine. She is a sexually repressed, staunch colorist who is emotionally disconnected from her husband and son. In my recent reading, I learned that this passage, “She sits reading the ‘Uplifting Thoughts’ in The Liberty Magazine, and the cat will jump into her lap. She will fondle the soft hill of hair and let the warmth of the animal’s body seep over and into the deeply private areas of her lap,” was not a quotidian expression of affection for an animal. This petting is sensual and a symbol of Geraldine’s need to pleasure herself, but her inhibitions and observed patriarchal constraints force her to reduce her sexuality.
I thought I was reading too much into this passage, but in my recent interview with writer and scholar Namwali Serpell, about his latest essay collection, On Morrison, which focuses on Toni Morrison’s writings, intellectual and cultural contributions to the literary world, she confirmed my suspicions. “That’s one of the reasons why we have to read her closely,” Serpell said. “Because we can’t take everything she’s saying literally, because there’s always another meaning lying behind it.”
On Morrison is a comprehensive examination of Toni Morrison’s writings, intelligence, her use of the Black literary form, her reading and writing process, and how she fragments language to make it her own. This book turned me into a lover and supporter of literary criticism because it expands our field of vision about literature.
I was delighted to talk with Namwali Serpell over Zoom about her brilliant literary contribution, On Morrison.
The Rumpus: On Morrison is a gorgeous exploration of Toni Morrison’s complete body of work, including her fiction, criticism, poetry, and drama. You’ve taught me to love and appreciate all sides of Morrison’s work, even when I have to read some paragraphs over and over.
Namwali Serpell: Morrison has had such a profound influence on me as a person, but also as a critic and as a teacher, and then as a writer. My entire relationship to her is premised on exchanging words on the page, what she calls “the dancing mind of the reader and the writer.” These two minds are in this kind of literary dance. I never met Toni Morrison, and my whole relationship to her is based on reading. So it seems to me, there’s almost like no other basis on which I could write a book like this. It’s not just my commentary or my thoughts on her, but how reading this incredible reader has influenced my life, and the work that I produce.
Rumpus: Your book is scholarly, yet accessible, and you weave your own experiences into your analysis of Morrison’s work and her intellectual and cultural contributions to the literary world. In your first essay, “On Difficulty,” you said, “I only begin to understand, to discover the meaning of my own difficulty because of Toni Morrison.” Why was it important to start your book about speaking about the perceived difficulty of Morrison, reading her book, and how this shapes the way we view her?
Serpell: Morrison had a reputation for being haughty, for being a mean girl, for being difficult and impatient. Morrison ranged from controversial takes to contrarian takes on matters of gender, race, and politics. She challenged us to read closer, to read again, and to experience things that we might not otherwise be comfortable with. A few years ago, I was invited by a magazine in the UK to write a piece about Morrison’s book, The Source of Self-Regard, which is a collection of her nonfiction essays and speeches that was going to be published in the UK as Mouth Full of Blood. When I sent an initial draft to the editors of this magazine, they essentially responded with comments that suggested that the essay was too difficult because it was too academic, too complicated, and too jargony for their magazine. They also said that they wanted someone to give a really tough, hard-nosed take on whether Toni Morrison could really withstand the mantle of fame and renown that we place on her. It seemed very clear that they wanted this hardnosed critical take about whether we are too admiring of Toni Morrison from a woman of color. I responded kind of vehemently and defended Toni Morrison, and of course, they refused to publish the essay, and I ended up publishing it elsewhere. After that incident, I realized that once again, Morrison was being accused of not being accessible enough, not clear enough, not comforting enough, not placating enough to a white audience. I started thinking about how the personal, the political, and the literary, these three forms of difficulty, had mapped onto my own life in my own interactions with family, with friends, with colleagues, with students, with fellow students, so that’s how that kind of came together.
Rumpus: In your book and in our conversation, it seems that you are suggesting that women should relish their difficult personalities because these traits teach others to take them seriously, and as a result, these women can develop a deep sense of autonomy and create their own pathways.
Serpell: There’s this Black woman composer by the name of Mary Lou Williams, for whom Morrison wrote the keynote address at the opening of a center dedicated to her at Duke University. Morrison had never met Mary Lou personally, but she asked somebody who knew Mary Lou what she was like, and he said, “difficult.” Morrison asked the man, “Do you mean difficult to get along with, or was her music difficult?” He said, “Yes, all of that.” This pleased Morrison because it meant that Mary Lou was taken seriously, and Morrison insisted on being taken seriously. It is not just about accepting that you’re difficult, but also relishing being difficult as a way of being taken seriously. This takes a lot of courage in a world that is looking to put you down. I think being taken seriously is maybe the ultimate goal for Black women.
Rumpus: You are celebrating Morrison as a writer, thinker, humorist, and literary genius. You are also celebrating her as a voracious reader who read inside, outside, and around the canon, and used her skills as a reader to build her writing career.
Serpell: Reading is the basis for Morrison’s entire literary philosophy.
When she talks about writing, she says, “Writing to me is a slow and advanced form of reading.” When she was interviewed early on about The Bluest Eye, she said, “I wrote that book because I wanted to read it.” An interviewer once asked her, “What made you think that you could be a writer?” Morrison said, “I thought that I could be a good writer because I’m a very good reader.” She’s very clear on that. In fact, Morrison’s first publication is a textbook about reading [College Reading Skills by Chloe A. Morrison (1966)]. Most people don’t know that because she co-wrote it, but it’s a textbook about reading closely, reading with the grain of your writer to try and help them achieve the best version of their work. Everything that she’s doing in her work revolves around reading. For her to go from being an excellent reader to being a writer is one continuous path.
Rumpus: As a writer, editor, and professor, Morrison has pushed for us to read critically, closely, and engage with the text as a living document, and in doing this, we become inextricably linked with the characters and the narrative.
Namwali Serpell: She saw the readers as a chorus, like the chorus in a Greek play, where the audience is part of the ensemble. She gives the example of when you’re in an audience in a musical performance—you’re shouting, clapping, and stomping your feet—and she sees reading as a fully loaded group activity. Even though there were a lot of people who looked down their noses at Oprah’s Book Club, I actually think Morrison was very happy to engage in those events because it meant that she was with a community of readers, many of whom were Black women, which otherwise she would not have contact with at the very fancy universities where she was teaching. There were not many Black women in her classrooms, but they were at the book clubs, and they were all there to talk and engage.
Rumpus: Before reading your very insightful essays about Morrison’s writing, I never made the connections that there are many different kinds of irony in the literature, and how Black writers in general, but Morrison specifically roots irony in language to convey
Serpell: One of the things that she’s doing is putting on the page formal devices that she roots in Black culture, but that haven’t necessarily been fully incorporated into Black literature. She really perceives irony as something that’s coming out of the blues tradition. The blues irony is a kind of co-presence of dark and light, or pain and pleasure, and this aesthetics is very important in all of her work. This sense that what you read isn’t, or what the characters say isn’t necessarily exactly what they mean, and sometimes they mean the opposite. That is very key to how she writes, and that’s one of the reasons why we have to read her closely, because we can’t take everything she’s saying literally, because there’s always another meaning lying behind it.
Rumpus: It seems that Morrison was using her adroitness to craft a Black literary aesthetic, and this will give us the language to understand the Black writers and literature produced by Black writers and to talk about their work without centering the white canon. Can you talk about the literary device of negation and how she used this device throughout her writing?
Serpell: I talk about the aesthetics of negation specifically in The Bluest Eye because Morrison is writing under the sign of erasure, and I think she does this for several reasons: to not just tell the stories that haven’t been told, but to remind you that those stories weren’t told for a reason, that they were suppressed, that they were destroyed, that they were hidden, that literacy was denied to Black people. How do you write language when language itself was denied to you, and how do you register for people the history of that denial? I think the way to do that is to have this doubleness on the page where you present something, but you always have a kind of sign or shimmer around it that reminds you of its previous negation or of its ongoing negation. In The Bluest Eye, there’s a narrative void essentially at the center of her novel when it comes to speaking about Pecola’s brokenness. This is a narrative void essentially at the center of her novel. How do you write around something that has been destroyed in a way that evokes that, but at the same time doesn’t succumb to it? I think you have to have this doubleness of the negated words or experience, and you have to do that through irony.
Rumpus: As you were speaking, I started to recall a profound idea in your book where you mentioned that Morrison was always breaking the form of the novel, and she wanted the reader to participate in reassemblage.
Serpell: Yes, Morrison said there have to be gaps and spaces in the work for the reader to step into the story. Morrison has to actually leave all the ambiguity and all the difficulties we complain about in reading her work, so that readers can step in and fill in those spaces. She wants readers to be there among the characters and connect those dots. Wolfgang Iser, who was a German literary theorist and critic, says that writers can’t present every single thing on the page, so they present knowledge that the reader has to infer certain things. In fact, a lot of modernist writers are like this, including Faulkner, who was all about the absence of language so that readers have to figure out what it is he’s talking about. Morrison is not just being willfully obscure, but she finds real purpose in this type of technique. She’s actually drawing the reader in, to look closer, to understand, to puzzle out what’s missing. She’s involving the reader in the work, rather than the reader just passively receiving a complete picture.
Rumpus: Both you and Toni Morrison have just revolutionized my reading and intellectual quotient. I need to read and engage with the text through a modernist perspective, and ask more critical questions when I’m reading. What does this writer want me to figure out with the absence of language?
Serpell: That’s encouraging! I think some media forms encourage passivity and passive reception, but I don’t think that’s true for all media forms. When we say we are going to veg out and watch a show, it means to have part of our brain turned off. It can be nice to veg out, it can be soothing, but Morrison is not interested in soothing. She’s not interested in giving us works of literature that simply satisfy our kind of craving for event, story, and character. She really wants this to be an experience that engages you, even your body. There’s a lot of Morrison’s work that’s interested in raising the hairs on the back of your neck, or making you shocked, or making you laugh. She’s trying to pull you in entirely.
Leslie-Ann Murray: You describe Morrison’s refusal to simplify trauma—how The Bluest Eye asks us to sit with the unbearable complexity of Pecola’s longing for affection even in the aftermath of abuse, and with Morrison’s insistence on contextualizing, rather than excusing, Cholly’s violence.
Serpell: Even though being raped was a horrific trauma to her body, Pecola doesn’t go for help after her father rapes her the first time or the second time because she craves love. She craves human touch. In the absence of language, Morrison is trying to get at something very taboo and very difficult for us to face, which is that the victims of abuse are often pulled into feeling guilty about the abuse they experience because there is something naturally affectionate, let’s say, in their feeling for their abuser, who’s often a member of their family. So when we, as children, are hugged or kissed by our parents, we are happy, and this craving for physical touch is very natural. Pecola has never been touched affectionately until this happens to her, so I think Morrison is refusing to simply separate the feelings of the abuse and the feelings of the victim of the abuser, the same way that she refuses to villainize Cholly, even though he rapes his child and abuses his wife. Morrison spends a chapter and some explaining to us how Cholly got to that point. He was subjected to horrific levels of oppression and sexualized oppression, too. Morrison did not present his backstory as a justification of his abuse of his family, but wants us to consider why it is people abuse and why the victims don’t always hate or report the people who abuse them. Because often these people who have abused them are their family members, whom they love.
Rumpus: Thank you for that explanation. I understand this perspective, but it’s difficult to digest because, as a reader and an advocate against child sexual abuse and domestic violence, I want to have a didactic formula in how we respond to perpetrators of violence. To construct a narrative in which we imagine their own victimhood is brave and goes against the grain of our conscience.
Serpell: The fact that she did this in her first novel as a Black woman in 1970 took levels of bravery. It should be noted that in all of Pecola’s rape scenes, Morrison is writing back to a specific scene in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in which a man rapes his daughter. I don’t talk about this as much, but there are obvious ways in which The Bluest Eye is writing back to Richard Wright’s Native Son, specifically the family scene of the poverty-stricken Black family, engaging in all kinds of horrific neglect and abuse very publicly in their home. What she does is she actually tries to get into the effect of that abuse and trauma on the young Black girl, not just the Black male who has all these distorted, dark, dangerous things happening to him, and he’s perpetuating them within his own family space. Morrison spends very little time inside Pecola’s mind, but when she does, what we witness is not going to be a simple story. It’s Pecola talking to the other Pecola; she’s split in two, and her dialogue with herself is full of conflict and contradiction. Morrison is not going to shy from that because her understanding is that that complexity, that contradiction, is a way of taking that little Black girl seriously and not just turning her into a single note victim.
Rumpus: I know it’s a silly thing to say, but after reading your essays about Morrison’s writing, I’m like, “Why should I write?” This genius has done it all and has said it all. How do you approach and love your own writing when Toni Morrison is your muse?
Serpell: When you’re teaching literature, you’re constantly in the business of translating artistic genius to students, and so, grappling with that genius and trying to explain it without explaining it away, trying to give a sense of the interpretive possibilities, it sort of gives you a sense of how much rich possibility there is in Shakespeare, or in Melville, or in Ralph Ellison, or what have you. And so this makes it a little less daunting when facing the monument of Morrison. I’m already serving in that capacity as a kind of tour guide or translator for my students, and this makes it easier to write and to write about her work.
Rumpus: In the last few years, there have been many books published about Toni Morrison’s writing and her work as an editor, including your own book. What are we seeking as a culture in reading about Morrison’s archives and in her editorial and writing contributions?
Serpell: I think there are three Morrison: Chloe Wofford, which is the name she was born with, and she kept that very private, and she always kind of pushed away the idea of a biography. I think that side of her, a lot of people crave because she lived life gallantly, and they wanted to be part of that intimacy. The second side is Toni Morrison, the trademark of Toni Morrison, the monument, which I talk about in my conclusion. In this Toni Morrison, we are looking for testaments to Black cultural excellence. This is someone who has won the Nobel Prize; she’s well-respected, a household name, somebody whom our first Black president thought was the most incredible writer ever to exist. She was a public intellectual and was saying things about race, culture, and politics that nobody else was saying. She was our leading Black intellectual. What we miss is Toni Morrison in the Middle, which is Toni Morrison, the writer. I’m quoting from one of her besties, Fran Liebowitz, who said, “Upon her passing, I know it’s strange to say this about Toni Morrison, Nobel laureate, but I believe that we don’t pay enough attention to her art, that she was actually quite an experimental writer.” I don’t think we have reckoned with what she was doing on the page because we’re very busy wanting her to give us Black joy and wanting her to stand for Black excellence. We’re ignoring what she was as an artist. She was pleased to be taught in law schools and in sociology classes, but she was like, “Why don’t people teach me in English departments?” She really craved that, and she craved that critics would understand how she was using Black forms in her work in particular. And so for me, that felt like that’s a responsibility because, like Morrison, I’m obsessed with reading, language, and form.
Rumpus: Let’s say you are curating a Morrison’s starter kit? What book should they read first?
Serpell: You don’t necessarily need to read Morrison in order, but if we are doing a starter kit, I would actually have people start with Sula. The Bluest Eye is more difficult; it’s more modernist, more challenging, and more experimental. Morrison called Sula hermetic because it’s a tight piece of work, and she said that in Song of Solomon, she let herself ramble, but Sula has the precision of a poem, almost. It’s so perfect, and it also has qualities that allow people inside the novel. Morrison regretted having this of a passageway—vestibule to get into the book because she said it was a kind of capitulation to introduce people into this world. She was like, “I think I really did that for a white audience, and she should have started the book with Shadrack and National Suicide Day.” So I always recommend people start with Sula.
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