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I have waited years for this book. But before I tell you what it is, I had better tell you what it is not. On Morrison is not a biography. Except for scattered references, there is little here about Chloe Anthony Wofford’s birth and early life in Lorain, Ohio; her education at Howard and Cornell universities; her editorial work at Random House; or her phenomenal success as a novelist. Nor is this book 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 Schoolteacher something they have long hoped for: a rigorous appraisal of the work. Despite her enormous contribution to American letters, Morrison’s novels are still too often read for what they have to say about black life, rather than how they say it. Song of Solomon and Jazz are more likely to be found on African American studies syllabi than creative writing ones. In her introduction to On Morrison, Namwali Serpell identifies the reason: “She is difficult to read. She is difficult to teach.”
Serpell, the author of two ambitious novels that straddle genres, generations and continents, brings to the project of reading Morrison an understanding of what it means to be difficult, and to be called difficult. She does Morrison the respect of reading her seriously. Across the book’s 12 essays, she identifies and critiques narrative strategies, puzzles over craft choices, compares formal techniques across novels, and chases edits and revisions in the archives.
This journey through Morrison’s oeuvre begins with The Bluest Eye. To tell the story of Pecola, the little black girl who wishes she had blue eyes, Morrison broke the narrative into parts, each filtered through a different character’s perspective, forcing the reader to “piece together the myriad overdetermined forces that have obliterated this young girl”. Pecola suffers horrifying abuse at the hands of her father, who eventually rapes and impregnates her. The fragmented narrative “is an effort to create a specific reading experience – not passive pity or easy demonising, but active reassembly and self-interrogation – through a formal structure”.
“The structure is the argument”, as Morrison often said. In Recitatif, the only short story she ever published, the narrative is built around five encounters between two women, Roberta and Twyla, over several decades. Early on, we learn that one of the women is white and the other black, but we are never told which is which. Morrison draws readers into a guessing game that demonstrates the arbitrariness of race and its dependence on contrast for it to acquire meaning. Serpell uncovers startling details in the archives. I did not know, for example, that Recitatif started out as a screenplay treatment for actors Marlo Thomas and Cicely Tyson.
Can the mystery of the women’s identity finally be solved, then? “Personally, I’ll never tell,” Serpell promises. Instead, she doggedly traces the transformation from treatment to story, finding more intriguing nuggets along the way. In June 1982, about the time the film was likely turned down, Morrison had just finished reading Nettie Jones’s Fish Tales, which is structured as a series of first-person vignettes that refrains from revealing characters’ races. A month later, Serpell writes, “Morrison submitted … a radical revision” of her story, this time with “an experiment in the removal of all racial codes”. It’s comforting to know that even geniuses take inspiration from others.
Elsewhere, Serpell identifies the humour in Morrison’s work, especially in Song of Solomon. The protagonist, Milkman Dead, visits his paternal aunt Pilate Dead, prompting her to quip: “Ain’t but three Deads alive,” and Milkman to respond: “I’m a Dead! My mother’s a Dead!” Milkman embarks on an Odyssean quest to find out more about his great-grandfather, who escaped slavery by “flying” back to Africa. By grounding its narrative in folktales, Greek and African, the novel “syncretizes disparate traditions, both reinforcing the originary hybridity of archetypal tales and making them coincide and conflict in its mid-20th-century milieu”.
One reason On Morrison was such a joy to read is that I felt guided by a writer who shares both my admiration and my fear of lionising. Serpell happens to be African and an immigrant, facts that I think attune her to the centrality of the black experience as well as the estrangement of peripheral characters. Morrison read widely, learning from African elders such as Camara Laye (for whose novel The Radiance of the King she wrote an introduction), Chinua Achebe and Bessie Head. By contrast, she could be incurious about Native American characters in her earlier novels, an oversight she addressed in A Mercy.
At times Serpell’s tone slips from the ruthlessly observant “I” of the critic into the “we” of the professor guiding students through a thorny text (she teaches at Harvard). Though she agonises over panning the woman she calls “my elder”, she admits Morrison’s poetry is “not good” and pours deserved scorn on a messy post-9/11 essay that is unworthy of Morrison’s intellect.
Yet such criticisms only reinforce the integrity of her analysis. With On Morrison, Serpell has managed to deliver a book that works on many levels: as a study of craft, as a critical appraisal, and as a tribute to an artist who was difficult in all the right ways.
