Namwali Serpell kicks off the tour for her new book On Morrison at the First Parish Church in Cambridge, MA, in conversation with poet Tracy K. Smith. Together, they read the opening of The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison’s debut novel, and discuss all that the passage emits and erases. They also explore how the cultural treatment of Morrison as a literary icon or monument has obscured a true appreciation of her literary form, an appreciation that comes from turning to the page.
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From the podcast:
Namwali Serpell: The technical first page of The Bluest Eye is: “Here’s the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family.” And then it runs those words together, without punctuation, and then without spaces between them until you get this kind of blur. It feels like, as you say, mechanical, like this machine of ideology, of what whiteness and prosperity and American beauty is supposed to be.
And then, “Quiet as it’s kept,” we get the Black voice coming in, talking about what’s actually happening intimately in real homes, not Dick and Jane homes.
Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, there I hear a little glimmer of the imprint of that white vision with the, “if we said the right words, if we did our magic, everything would be all right,” and then that’s so quickly swept, it’s already been swept, away by the time it arrives. But that feels, a little bit, like it’s taken from the register of Dick and Jane.
NS: Absolutely. I think, again, the novel gives us things that it then obliterates or erases, and I can’t help but think that the kind of cluttering of that American dream primer into this kind of mess—it reminds me of Claudia, the narrator’s desire to dismember dolls, that she would get these blue-eyed dolls and she breaks them apart. But there’s something that she understands to be kind of terrifying about that in her, right?
So I think you’re right. There’s this kind of tension of wanting it to provide structure, respite, some kind of stability, but then this also really violent rejection of it, because it is clear that this is what is demolishing this community.
TKS: Yeah. You talk in the book really compellingly about all of the ways we approach The Bluest Eye wrongly. You know? Like, nobody gets The Bluest Eye.
NS: Yeah. I start by being like, “Nobody knows this book.” I mean, I’m being provocative.
TKS: Definitely.
NS: But I think there’s a way that the book has been reduced, simplified, turned into a certain kind of sloganeering, I might even say, that is completely counter to Morrison’s original aim with the book.
TKS: Mm-hmm.
NS: I learned recently that not only did Holt, her original publisher, send in the book to the Library of Congress with “Toni Morrison”, even though she wanted it to be published under a different name.
TKS: Oh, really?
NS: Yeah. I’m not sure if she would have gone for Chloe Morrison or Chloe Wofford, which is her birth name. Toni is an abbreviation of her baptismal name, Anthony. She converted to Catholicism as a teenager, and that’s when she started to adopt that nickname. When she got to Howard University, people couldn’t pronounce Chloe, and so she went by Toni. Then she married an architect named Morrison, but they were divorced by the time she published this book, and she called the publisher being like, “I don’t want this to be…” And they were like, “It’s too late.”
But the other thing that they did is that they submitted it to the Library of Congress as an adolescent fiction, and Morrison did not believe that this was a book for children. It’s a book about children. It’s also a book about adults. And the notion that this is a book that we should teach in junior high really shocked her when she learned this. The only thing that made her reconcile to that is when she learned that for some young people, the book was giving them a language to express the abuse that they were feeling or experiencing at home.
The other thing that they did is that they submitted it to the Library of Congress as an adolescent fiction, and Morrison did not believe that this was a book for children. It’s a book about children.
That was the only…Because otherwise she was like, “This is a scary book. This is a book for adults,” and very much about the adult forces that have rejected Pecola. It’s a structural argument. We think of it, I think, almost like Catcher in the Rye, or something, like a first-person narrative—it’s a little Black girl and we’re giving voice to the voiceless—and I just feel like that has led to the book’s modernist and its, as I said, really experimental form being neglected or being put to the side.
It’s actually, I think, a harder book than some of her later books. I’m sure some of you have experienced that, not just formally, but also what we’re being confronted with in that second line.
TKS: Yeah. You talk about how, rather than thinking about the themes that Morrison writes about, paying attention to the formal behavior of her works teaches you how to read them.
NS: Yeah.
TKS: I wonder if I can ask you to talk a little bit about the path to that theory about her work. Is it part of your early reading experience with her, or did it come through teaching?
NS: Both. I mean, it came through the fact that kind of the best way to read Toni Morrison is with other people, whether that’s in a classroom or a reading group. And I found being given clues, or keys, or just even the vocabulary to name the various techniques she was using, and also a history of those techniques, was really helpful for me to truly appreciate the profundity and the riches of what was on the page.
But I think I also, to be honest, I was a little bit pissed off, I was a little irritated, with the way that Morrison gets talked about. I think one of the sad things that happens when you achieve monumental status is that the art that you have poured your work into, your labor into, gets turned into a set of banners or a set of, you know, notions, as you say, themes, and sometimes wrongly.
So things get attributed to Morrison that she did not believe or ascribe to. In particular, the idea that she wanted to cancel the white male canon. She was absolutely adamant that she would…she was like, I can’t do without Aeschylus and Shakespeare and all these writers. Why would we want to get rid of them? Right? So things like that, where I felt like the reputation and the misconstrual of all of the things she was trying to do meant that people were no longer actually reading the work anymore.
One of her best friends was Fran Lebowitz. I don’t know if everybody knows that, right? That’s another thing that’s surprising about Toni Morrison. But they would love to talk on the phone all the time, and they cracked each other up all the time, and there was a series of eulogies for Morrison when she passed in 2019, and Fran Lebowitz told The New York Times—this is among kind of a list of people just expressing their grief—she says, “I know it sounds like a crazy thing to say, but I always thought Toni’s writing was underappreciated, because people always looked at it through the prism of her being Black and being a woman. But Toni was a very experimental writer.” See, I would take that “but” out.
TKS: Yeah. Yeah.
NS: I would say she was Black and she was a woman, and perhaps because of that, she was a very experimental writer. “There were a lot of things Toni did through her writing that just went unremarked upon. I do think she was misunderstood and underrated.” That sounds like—so interesting, right? It sounds like a wild thing to say. But what I’ve noticed is that those who love Toni Morrison, who adore Toni Morrison, and those who are a little bit dismissive of Toni Morrison both suffer from the same reputational problem, which is that they don’t actually read her anymore. They don’t actually attend to what’s on the page. You know, one of the things that I really wanted to do in writing the book was think about how Morrison on the page had affected me as a reader, professor, and a writer.
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You can purchase On Morrison here and anywhere books are sold.
Cover art includes “Toni Morrison as Song of Solomon” by John Sokol (1981). “PASSAGES: On Morrison” is a production of the Random House Publishing Group.
