In Praise of Toni Morrison’s Difficulty

Namwali Serpell’s new book embraces the uneasy, unexpected, and defiant elements of her life and work.

In her prose poem, “Toni Morrison,” Nikki Giovanni imagines cooking a “Toni Morrison stew.” Among its ingredients are the heightened contradictions that characterize her novels:

An exotic mix of tears and sympathy. Nothing grows except The Bluest eyes and a special shot of Pecola which flies over very quickly because no one can really embrace the fear and hatred. The best thing about The Bluest Eye special is the Marigolds. They didn’t flower but the seeds are there. Drop a few in the bowl and see what grows. Or doesn’t.

An exotic mix of tears and sympathy. Nothing grows except The Bluest eyes and a special shot of Pecola which flies over very quickly because no one can really embrace the fear and hatred. The best thing about The Bluest Eye special is the Marigolds. They didn’t flower but the seeds are there. Drop a few in the bowl and see what grows. Or doesn’t.

Giovanni captures the extremes of emotion that course through Morrison’s best-known works, but also evokes the lightly worn wisdom of Morrison’s voice (“see what grows”). It’s an homage to a master, but one that also gives itself permission to play with a body of work that is often considered “difficult.”

Namwali Serpell’s new study, On Morrison, takes a similar approach. “I believe that she remains woefully misread—even underread—in both literary and political ways,” Serpell writes. Although Morrison’s first several novels were widely praised, criticisms of her work circled uneasily around her themes of enslavement, homicide, and incest. A 1978 review of Song of Solomon in the Times Literary Supplement characterized the novel as “freakish, full of verbal gestures and fabricated horrors.” Others suggested that she needed to move beyond historical settings and Black provincial life, as one New York Times reviewer wrote in 1973: “If she is to maintain the large and serious audience she deserves, she is going to have to address a riskier contemporary reality.” The conceit: Writing too much about Black folks was niche and unrelatable to white Americans.

Although Morrison primarily wrote about Black American women, Serpell notes that “she refused for her work to be reduced solely to her race and her gender, or to be forced to fit the expectations foisted upon it as a result.” Serpell leans into Morrison’s difficulty, noting that, despite the social costs many Black women face for being difficult, Morrison employed it in her art and its success. Serpell gracefully traces the complexity of Morrison’s literary catalog, explaining why you should read her in the first place: “Morrison doesn’t condescend to your level; she challenges you to rise to hers.” Don’t we all want good art friends who make us better?

For Serpell, Morrison’s creative genius lies in the boldness of her work. Beloved and The Bluest Eye do not present their characters or subjects delicately—they insist on graphic portrayals of assault and torture, without softening or stinting. The language is American, the characters are American, and, through their unbearable, inscrutable moments, we must confront the ghosts and darkness of history. Morrison’s work was not meant to be a palatable salve. Instead, surprise and provocation are the ingredients of her fiction.

Crucial to Beloved’s plot is the spontaneity of life and the inevitability of death. The contest between vitality and........

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