Review of Morrison by Namwale Serpell – a historical assessment of the work of the great novelist | Toni Morrison

I I’ve waited years for this book. But before I tell you what it is, I’d better tell you what it isn’t. On Morrison is not an autobiography. Except for scattered references, there is little here about Chloe Anthony Wofford’s birth and early life in Lorain, Ohio; Educated at Howard and Cornell Universities; Her editorial work at Random House; Or her tremendous success as a novelist. This book is also not for fans who turn to Toni Morrison for inspirational quotes or to score political points.

Instead, On Morrison offers readers who can tell their Soaphead church from their teachers something they’ve long hoped for: a rigorous evaluation of the work. Despite her enormous contribution to American literature, Morrison’s novels are still often read based on what they say about black life, rather than how they say it. Song of Solomon and Jazz are more likely to be found in African American studies curricula than creative writing curricula. In her introduction to On Morrison, Namwali Serpell explains why: “It’s hard to read. It’s hard to teach.”

Serpell, the author of two ambitious novels that span genres, generations, and continents, brings to Morrison’s reading project an understanding of what it means to be difficult, and to be called difficult. She respects Morrison by reading her seriously. Across the book’s 12 essays, she identifies and critiques narrative strategies, puzzles over literal choices, compares formal techniques across novels, and pursues edits and revisions in the archive.

This journey through Morrison’s work begins with The Bluest Eye. To tell the story of Pecola, the little black girl who wishes she had blue eyes, Morrison breaks the narrative into parts, each filtered through the perspective of a different character, forcing the reader to “piece together the innumerable overdetermined forces that have obliterated this little girl.” Pecola suffers horrific abuse at the hands of her father, who eventually rapes and impregnates her. Fragmented narrative “is an effort to create a specific reading experience—not passive pathos or easy demonization, but active reassembly and self-interrogation—through formal structure.”

“Structure is argument,” as Morrison often said. In Recitative, the only short story she has ever published, the narrative is built around five encounters between two women, Roberta and Twila, over several decades. Early on, we learn that one of the women is white and the other is black, but we are never told which is which. Morrison draws readers into a guessing game that demonstrates the arbitrariness of race and its reliance on variation to gain meaning. Serpell reveals startling details in the archives. I didn’t know, for example, that Reciative began as a script treatment for actors Marlo Thomas and Cicely Tyson.

Can the mystery of women’s identity finally be solved? “I personally would never say that,” Serpell promises. Instead, she doggedly traces the shift from treatment to story, finding more interesting nuggets along the way. In June 1982, at the time the film was likely to be rejected, Morrison had just finished reading Nettie Jones’ Fish Tales, which is structured as a series of first-person vignettes that refrain from revealing the characters’ races. A month later, Serpell wrote, “Morrison offered…a radical revision” of her story, this time with “an experiment in removing all racist symbols.” It’s comforting to know that even geniuses draw inspiration from others.

Elsewhere, Serpell identifies humor in Morrison’s work, especially in the Song of Solomon. The novel’s protagonist, Milkman Dead, visits his aunt Pilate Dead, prompting her to quip: “There are only three dead people alive,” to which Milkman responds: “I’m dead! My mother’s dead!” Milkman embarks on an odyssey to learn more about his great-grandfather, who escaped slavery by “flying” back to Africa. By grounding its narrative in folktales, both Greek and African, the novel “reconciles disparate traditions, enhancing the original hybridization of archetypal tales and making them both simultaneous and conflicting in a mid-twentieth-century setting.”

One of the reasons I enjoyed reading Morrison’s book is that I felt guided by a writer who shares my admiration and fear of being honoured. Serpell happens to be African and an immigrant, facts that I think make her fit the centrality of the black experience as well as the alienation of marginal characters. Morrison read widely, learning from African elders such as Kamara Lai (who wrote the introduction to her novel The King’s Radiance), Chinua Achebe and Bessie Head. By contrast, she may have been uninterested in the Native American characters in her earlier novels, something she takes up in Mercy.

At times, Serpell’s tone slips from the “I” of the harshly observant critic to the “we” of the professor guiding students through a thorny text (she teaches at Harvard). Although she’s at pains to criticize the woman she calls “my old man,” she admits that Morrison’s poetry is “not good” and pours well-deserved scorn on a sloppy post-9/11 essay unbefitting of Morrison’s thought.

However, such criticisms only serve to strengthen the integrity of her analysis. With On Morrison, Serpell has been able to deliver a book that works on several levels: as a study of craft, as a critical assessment, and as a tribute to an artist who was difficult in all the right ways.