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Good afternoon and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It's Friday, February 20th, and I'm Matt Weinkam the executive director of Literary Cleveland.

And I'm pleased to introduce today's forum, which is part of the City Club's authors and Conversation series, presented in partnership with Case Western Reserve University's Baker Institute for the Humanities, as well as Literary Cleveland.

For the next year, Literary Cleveland and all of Ohio will celebrate the life, literature and legacy of Toni Morrison, Lorain, Ohio native and first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

We're delighted to be here at the City Club to highlight Morrison's indispensable contributions to our nation's past, present and future.

Toni Morrison undeniably reshaped American literature through her novels like The Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved Jazz, and Paradise.

Her work confronted slavery, racism and traumas possessed of presence, but she also centered ideas of beauty, motherhood, home and love through black culture and language.

Morrison changed not only what stories were told, but how they were told.

Today's guest is Harvard professor and award winning writer know Namwali Serpell.

She's the author of multiple.

Yeah, give it up.

She's the author of multiple award winning books, and her debut novel, The Old Drift, won the Arthur C Clarke Award for Science Fiction, the Los Angeles Times Art Side Bomb Award for first fiction, and most importantly to us here in Cleveland, an Anisfeld-Wolf Book Award.

Her latest book on Morrison, Namwali argues that Toni Morrison's literary skill often gets overshadowed by her public image.

Instead, Serpell takes readers through her work, focusing on the artistry and technique, the the structure and style and ways of signifying and throwing shade for the first part of the form.

Today, we will be journeying together through a literary analysis of Morrison's work with Namwali demonstrating, as she says, how to read Morrison with the seriousness she deserves.

Those of you here in person can follow along with the excerpt that was provided at Your Seats of Paradise.

After the analysis and before the Q&A, moderator Kortney Morrow, director of the NAACP Book Awards, will lead a conversation on the impact and legacy of Toni Morrison.

A quick reminder for our live stream and radio audience.

If you have a question during the Q&A, you can text it to (330)541-5794, and City Club staff will try to work it into the program.

Now, members and friends of the City Club of Cleveland, please join me in welcoming Kortney Morrow and the Namwali Serpell.

Good afternoon everyone.

Thank you so much for being here and for having me, having us here to talk about the wonderful Toni Morrison.

So we're going to talk about my new book, which just came out this week.

But first we're going to hear some words from Morrison herself.

We're going to read a passage from her novel Paradise, which, as Matthew mentioned, you should all have printed out in front of you.

Then we'll look closely at it together.

We'll dive deep into the language she's using the images, and I'm excited to talk to Kortney as a poet about what Morrison is doing at the level of just the word.

We want to open up what Morrison is doing at the level of form, which is the focus of my book to some context.

Morrison published Paradise in 1997 after she won the Nobel Prize.

She was asked in an interview around then why she had made the novel so difficult, and her response was, quote, that always strikes me.

It makes me breathless to be told that this is difficult.

Writing, but I actually think this novel is very difficult in the best possible way.

It's the third of Morrison's great trilogy, her Philosophy of Love, which is made up of beloved jazz and Paradise.

I think Paradise is one of the most interesting books for us to read in relation to all of Morrison's work, because it is her deepest exploration of spirituality and faith, which, for Morrison, was as much about the complexity of the mind as it was of the heart and the spirit.

One of the characters in Paradise says, God is intelligence itself.

The passage we'll be looking at comes from a description of one of the main characters in the novel, one of the founders of an all black town called Ruby Paradise tells the tale of nine families who journey from the south to Oklahoma to found this all black town, which has only 360 citizens.

360 is one of Morrison's, wonderful ways of, you know, that's the number of degrees in a circle, right?

We already have an image of containment just in the number.

Ruby aims to achieve black racial purity through self segregation.

So no one is allowed to marry anybody outside the race.

Ruby is built 17 miles from an old convent, which was once a gangster's mansion, and that has now become a shelter for wayward women, for women on the run.

These two communities, Ruby and the convent, end up in a conflict, or rather a war, which was actually Morrison's original title for this novel.

I hope we can talk more about the novel as a whole, but I want us to zoom in on this passage where one of the founders of Ruby Deacon or Deke Morgan, is driving through the town of Ruby, and he's worrying about how the youth in the town who have become excited by Black Power, by the counterculture in the 70s, have threatened the stability of this all black community.

He describes how he and his twin brother, Stuart, used to learn about black culture and history from their ancestors, and how he hopes the citizens of Ruby can pass that knowledge on to their children.

So, Kortney, do you mind reading the passage for us?

Can follow along.

Beyond.

To his left, deacon could hear schoolchildren group reciting a poem he learned by rote to except he had had to hear Dunbar's lines only once to memorize them completely and forever.

When he and Stuart had enlisted, there was a lot to learn from how to tie an army tie to how to pack a bag.

And just as they had in Haven Schoolhouse, they had been first to understand everything, remember everything.

But none of it was as good as what they learned at home.

Sitting on the floor in a fire lit room, listening to war stories, to stories of great migrations, those who made it and those who did not, to the failures and triumphs of intelligent men, their fear, their bravery, their confusion to tales of love, deep and permanent.

All there in the one book they owned and black leather covers with gold lettering, the pages thinner than young leaves than petals, the spine frayed into webbing at the top, the corners fingered down to skin, the strong words strange at first, becoming familiar, gaining weight and hypnotic beauty.

The more they heard them made them their own.

As Dick drove north on central, it and the side streets seemed to him as satisfactory as ever.

Quiet white and yellow houses full of industry, and in them were elegant black women at useful tasks, orderly cupboards minus surfeit or miser, leanness, linen laundered and ironed to perfection, good meat seasoned and ready for roasting.

It was a view.

He would be damned if the idleness of the young would disturb.

Thank you.

So when you read this passage, Kortney, what are you drawn to?

What moments or words or images linger for you?

Yeah.

So when I was getting my MFA, my teacher used to instruct me to find heat and passages, and I usually did that for poems.

But I think it also applies here when I'm thinking about where the heat is.

To me, it starts to build.

When Morrison begins to riff, there's this slight rhyme in assonance that happens with this listing of describing this book.

Yes, which is never named as the Bible, but when I read it, that's what I read it as black leather covers with gold lettering.

So even this black leather, gold letter, or pages thinner than pedals, spine frayed, finger down, strong word.

Strange.

So there's this is actually this sentence, gaining weight and hypnotic beauty.

The more they heard them.

I think Morrison actually creates that on the page.

She's describing what she herself has just done.

Yeah.

I also notice this sort of balance between the delicate pages, thinner fraying webbing and the strong, the strength of the words, the heft and I. This contrast is really interesting to me, and I think it helps build this heap.

And another area that I see a lot of heat is in that last line.

It was a view he would be damned if the idleness of the young would disturb.

So Morrison almost builds this mythical, beautiful, ethereal image of this book and then undercuts it with this line that just has this sense of ownership and pride and relentless not letting go.

There's an anger there, right?

So we have this beautiful evocation of what it's like to learn about your past people telling stories together.

And then there's this feeling that the Bible actually holds those same stories.

Right?

So the stories of telling are stories of great migrations, war stories, failures and triumphs, fear, bravery, confusion, tales of love.

That's Exodus, that's Genesis.

That's the song of Songs, right?

So they're telling the stories of their history and they're finding them in this book, right?

They made them their own.

And you have that, as you say, this claim I'm own.

This is what I own.

And that is actually the risk in Morrison.

Any time somebody says that's mine or I own that, you know, that danger is lurking and that heat, we feel from deep, it's a little too much, right?

It's a little too I'll be damned if somebody is going to change that, even if it's the young people in your own community.

I also think these these words in this paragraph that starts as deep drove north on central.

They're actually reveal the values of the character.

Yes.

So words like quiet white and yellow houses, elegant, useful, orderly, perfection.

They help paint the picture of what deep values.

And I find the word in that last sentence idleness.

Really fascinating because I don't.

This to me indicates the sense of sitting back.

And when you actually read the book, the young people in the novel are not sitting back.

They actually they're arguing over semantics of this object, this relic, maybe similar in some ways to the Bible in the sense that it has all this weight and emotion attached to it.

Yeah.

It's an oven that is sitting at the center of the town, and they're debating on the words be or beware and be.

The young people want to change the wording to be, and B is a very active word.

Word.

It's not idle.

Yeah.

So there's also a sense of judgment.

I find in that word idleness because it's if you read closely it's almost not accurate.

Yeah.

And this is one of those ways that even though we're, this is a narrator telling us the story of Deek, we are still somehow in Deeks mind.

Right.

So it's not Deeks speaking to us directly, saying, I feel this way, but the her word choices, right?

Like idleness.

That's Deeks word, right?

And he is mis applying it.

I think you're right to the young people who want to change the motto that's inscribed over this oven.

Or they want to read it as be the furrow of his brow, meaning God.

And the older generation say, no.

It says, beware the furrow of his brow.

Right?

So do we treat God as an inspiration for our own fierceness, our own action, our own revolutionary power?

Somebody spray paints a black power fist on that oven?

Or do we want to have this older tradition that is much more about taking God as the protector, but also as the the enforcer of the values of industry, quiet respectability.

Right?

That's what Deek is interested in here.

His name is deacon Ray.

I also think the start of the the excerpt is also really fascinating.

There's this distinction I think is providing, which right away he's saying essentially I only had to hear Dunbar's line once, and I knew it forever and ever.

And yeah, there were there was a time where I had a lot to learn, but I, I was the first to learn it.

Me and my brother were the first to learn it, and we learned it forever and perfectly.

He's supposed to have perfect memory, and then it's twin brothers, I think is important, in the same way that there was an older version of this town called Haven.

Now we have Ruby, so we have two towns, right?

This idea of reflecting perfection is really a big part of the way Morrison is constructing our ideas of Ruby.

I also look at some of the words that repeat, and one that I'm noticing is just learned.

You could hear schoolchildren group reciting a poem he'd learn.

And then it goes on to say, when he and Stuart had enlisted, there was a lot to learn, but none of it was as good as what they learned at home.

And sometimes, as a poet, I'm looking for those words that I can just pivot around, and that gives me such a great sense of play.

And I feel this street deck is riding around.

Serves as this like flat surface that he can then go under and infuse all these memories and learn almost becomes a pivot to new memories, which is interesting.

I like this emphasis on learn because what we have here is a book and we have a scene of children learning.

We have the memory of his military education, and we have this kind of, as you say, there's a there's a pivot there.

Where is he, the teacher, or is he the student of this place?

But there's it seems very clear that what is learned must be taught.

The lessons of the past must be conveyed to the future.

While that is, I think, a really worthy goal.

And you can feel there's admiration in the way Morrison describes this.

There's also a little bit of a question of, well, if you're just repeating what you learned and giving it to the next generation, where is the possibility for change or for progress or for something new?

Right to to operate in this world?

Yeah.

I mean, in some ways that is idle.

That is that's the idleness, right?

Yeah.

It's funny because when I first read the sentences, none of it was as good as what they learned at home, sitting on the floor in a fire lit room, listening to war stories, to stories of great migrations, etc.

I really thought that these were stories of their own ancestors, because this novel really does span the course of black history.

In the United States, and also a little Native American history.

Yes.

And I almost felt silly when the line after says all there in the one book they owned then, because what I read was so much more expansive than a book.

Yeah.

That's, that's I think there's a sense that they are telling their own war stories, but they're finding a kind of a resonance or echo in the Bible, which I think is also what we're supposed to do when we read Morrison.

Right.

We find resonance with the stories that she tells.

But I think you're right that the expansion or the sense of range in these stories, war stories, stories of great migrations, failures and triumphs, fear, bravery, confusion, all they're in the one book they owned.

It's like all of this has just gotten contained into this one box, right?

And in this, in a similar way, Deke and his brother have a desire to contain all of black history in these towns, which are just as rigid and orderly.

Right.

The streets, the houses as the pages of the book itself.

That's fascinating.

Yeah.

The, the, this line, the side street seemed to him as satisfactory as ever.

I kept thinking you have to be a particular type of person to find side street satisfactory.

But also I know that person I know but I'm and those streets are named after, the disciples and apostles.

And so the streets also are the Bible.

Right?

That's the grid of the city.

And the grid of that book are the map of Deacon's life.

I think a lot about this last line, idleness and just the main, tension in the novel and to me, this question of how to build towards freedom.

It's the question we're still asking right now.

And I thought about a line I recently read in MLK is Stride Toward Freedom, which was an Anisfeld-Wolf Book Award winner, where he writes something like, the person who believes there's that the path to racial justice is a one lane road is the first to cause the traffic jam.

Wow.

That is perfect.

Yeah.

Perfect line for this.

Yeah.

And it also conjured up something for me the other night.

The poet, who has a poem called A fable and there's seven prisoners.

Prisoners, all African-American prisoners who are stuck in a prison and each believe they know the way out.

And they are adamant that this is the only way.

And they spend all their time debating which is the way out, that they remain stuck.

And those things I think we're we're on my mind as I was wrestling with this book, and I think this passage kind of pull that out of me.

Yeah, I think that's a perfect kind of metaphor for the question of containment, which Morrison was really interested in her.

One of her, I think, her first children's book that she co-wrote with her son was called The Big Box.

And it's essentially a story about incarceration.

It's about children who get locked in this big box, and they're asking about their own freedom.

They're asking, how do you know what my freedom is?

So this tension between the younger generation seeking freedom and the older generation seeking freedom is something she's always been interested in.

And I think it it manifests in this novel, interestingly, both as a conflict between this very orderly vision of a Paradise, an all black utopia in Ruby versus the convent, which is this unruly female space.

And we know it's not racially pure because as Morrison begins this novel, she says, they shoot the white girl first.

So we know there's at least one white girl living.

So there's a kind of war between these two versions of Paradise that's very much being set up here.

But I think what's interesting is within the Paradise that is Ruby, there is also this conflict between the older generation and the younger generation.

I think I'm this might be a good moment for me to read how I interpret this passage in my book.

You'll see that I echo some of the things that we've said here in this rich conversation.

Morrison implies that the utopian ideal of a self segregated, self sustaining, self-contained black community requires a commitment to controlling time.

Ruby is run by Stewart and Morgan, twins who possess perfect memory of the past and even prophetic wisdom about the future.

Their vision of black respectability is initially inspired by 19 Negro ladies they once saw when they were teenagers, the memory of which is pastel colored and eternal.

As an adult, he drives through Ruby, surveying this place of everlasting purity that he and his brother have tried to reproduce.

He passes by quiet white and yellow houses full of industry, with elegant black women at useful tasks.

They're linen and laundered and ironed to perfection.

Versions of the word perfect appear 30 times in this novel.

Here it connotes familiarity, permanence, satisfaction, completion, but also a kind of flattening.

Deke overhears schoolchildren group reciting a poem he'd learned by rote to accept he'd had to hear the lines only once, to memorize them completely and forever, and recalls sitting on the floor in a fire lit room.

And I go on to read the passage that we've just looked at together.

I then say war stories, migration stories, stories of love.

All these epic tales are held in the pages of the Bible.

The history of this community seems reflected, ordained, but also bound by that black book, which figuratively encompasses the whole world.

Animal.

We have spine, webbing, skin, vegetable.

We have pages like leaves and petals and even mineral.

We have gold lettering.

The book gains weight as the townspeople repeat its stories and lay claim to them, as suggested by these passages about time being distilled, measured, given, taken, and contained.

This all black utopia is operating with the very strict geometry.

This is a religious ethos structured by symmetry and a movement toward an end point toward the heavens.

But with these images of containment, especially in a book like the Bible, Morrison draws attention to a troubling static quality to utopia.

The perfection of Paradise appears to pose a problem it cannot incorporate change.

They can't.

So normally I want to open up the conversation a little bit to talk about on Morrison, which I want to do just some context setting, because the book just came out this week.

So we are incredibly lucky to have normally here in Ohio and, it's an honor to be here.

So if you haven't picked up your copy, you need to, but let me just preface by saying this book is a stunning insertion into literary criticism.

Thank you.

It is an overview of Toni Morrison's entire body of work, from the novels that you know very well to lesser known works like her poetry and plays.

And I want to read just a little bit from the first chapter you write the ultimate source of Morrison's fame.

Difficulty was not, I would submit, her intersectional identity, her prickly personality, or her contrarian politics.

It was this commitment to plumbing the depths of black esthetics, misunderstood, understudied, very complicated, very sophisticated, and very difficult.

In her writing.

This is what I have set out to explore in on Morrison.

With that jazzy, twofold goal in mind.

To be as demanding and sophisticated as I want to be, and at the same time accessible.

And I want to emphasize that because I think this book is going to be an incredible companion text for readers who have been reluctant or scared or afraid or not sure how to enter this majestic figure.

And for educators who are ready to push back, who want to insert this into their classrooms but just don't know how, they now have a guide, because this book goes to chapter by chapter, really focusing on different texts, and I just can't wait to see what is going to happen, the reverberations.

But I want to hone in on this concept of black esthetics, because when I talk about this book being an insertion into literary criticism, I think you do an exceptional job of.

Really explaining to people what the black esthetic is and how Morrison usually.

So can you just speak a little to that?

Yes.

Thank you so much.

As a very generous words.

I'm glad that you said companion.

I, I think I've heard people call it a primer, and that sounds to me a little bit too much like that rote learning that we were just expressing some skepticism about.

But a companion is somebody with you, right?

As Morrison famously says, the friend of my mind.

Right.

A friend and a guide in a sense, but not necessarily.

A stern lecturer on the stage, right, who's trying to make you learn the specific things that she believes about a text.

Morrison's texts have so many different possible interpretations that really the best way to think about teaching her is through, a kind of conversation.

Morrison often expressed frustration with the way her work was read by literary critics during her lifetime.

At the beginning, she was very frustrated by what she saw as a kind of sociological tendency to read the books as representative of the black community.

One of my favorite things that she does is she has this little thought experiment.

She's like, imagine if I did this with a white authored book.

I was like, well, this isn't an accurate portrayal of the white community.

And she like, laughs.

She's like, that's a it's a ridiculous question.

So why is it applied to us all the time?

Reading the work of Black authors isn't just about black subject matter, it's about trying to access the riches of black form.

For her specifically, black language was so key and she is also taking from black cultural traditions that she picked up in her kitchen, sitting, listening to her mother and her grandmother tell stories about the tar baby, for example, or listening to her father and her uncles and her brothers joke back and forth and play the dozens, right?

Signifying these are things that are very familiar to people in a black community as, oh, this is just what we do.

This is just how we have fun.

But for her, she was like, no, this is art, and I want to put this in my work.

Not everybody was able to recognize that that's what she was doing.

So she said, I yearn for a critic who can read me in the terms that I am familiar with, who know what I mean when I say chorus, when I say ancestor, when I say community, when I say signify right.

And I don't presume to be the person that knows everything that Morrison meant when she was doing certain things in her works.

But I have knowledge on both sides of the equation.

I'm a professor like she was a professor.

I've studied modernism the way that she did when I did her master's thesis at Cornell on Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner.

But I also, as an African woman, but also as an immigrant into Baltimore, as an eight and a half year old, I have picked up a lot of knowledge about black cultural traditions that were really important to Morrison.

So being able to integrate those two things in my classroom felt like a really exciting way to introduce students to the work.

You know, you you mentioned just the different types of tools that Morrison uses.

And there's a line in your text that says in beloved, Morrison does not take possession of the master's tools, but she bends them, breaks them, and then uses them to reshape the house.

And I really loved reading this this section about beloved, partially because beloved was the Anisfeld-Wolf Book Award winner five years before Morrison won the Nobel.

She won the Anisfeld Wolf Book Award, and this was the same year that 48 black writers wrote to The New York Times in protest of the fact that Morrison had not been critically received and, you know, remained a finalist for the National Book Award.

And, I've been thinking a lot about this idea of canon.

Which you write a lot about in here.

This idea of, and it's filled with book awards, building an alternative alternative canon.

And I've been thinking about the utility of an alternative canon.

And what does it mean?

Does it mean that we are pushing away from the classics, or does it mean we're hopping back and forth and building a conversation?

And what this chapter illuminated to me was that we have to push against this idea of empathy of the Anisfeld-Wolf Book Awards canon being a tool for empathy, because it doesn't stop there.

And I wondered if you could just speak a little, a little to this idea of, the limits of empathy and how Morrison pushed past that.

I wanted to say something first about her relationship to Canon's, her.

Lecture that she turned into an essay, called Unspeakable Things Unspoken.

She says in the essay I originally titled this Cannon Fodder, meaning because she has a long kind of exploration of the canon and the canon wars that were raging around her, in the 80s there.

And she's thinking about her own work, but a lot of it is, is thinking about how do we talk about trying to change the canon or create an alternative canon.

And I think what's really interesting is that Morrison often gets associated with what we now call cancel culture canceling.

We got to cancel all those terrible white racist authors like Edgar Allan Poe or, Mark Twain, who has the N-word all over Huckleberry Finn.

And Morrison was like, no, no, no, no, no.

She's like, we can talk about the way they use racial language.

But she said, I am not going to do away with these great works of literature.

She calls Huck Finn an amazing, troubling book.

She says the efforts to censor it are putting a Band-Aid over a gaping wound.

It makes much more sense to talk about that wound than to try to paper it over.

And so I think it's really important to to understand.

For Morrison, she was part of the canon, but it wasn't like a kind of, I am asserting myself, as a, I'm putting myself up for, as a candidate to be included in the canon.

Right.

That third word in diversity, equity, inclusion.

It was like I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not to quote Dubois, I she writes a play called Desdemona, and she's asked, do you feel daunted writing back to Shakespeare?

And she's like, no.

And I think that is the kind of attitude that I find.

So bracing but also breathtaking.

It's a it's a, it's a redefinition of greatness.

Right.

So it's, you know, this idea that we have to only teach certain texts is something I think she would push against.

But it's it's not about replacing.

And it's a, it's, it's about adding, having more having more conversations and having more engagements.

With the, the canon, I think because Morrison she studied at Howard an HBCU, I she was she wanted to study the black characters in Shakespeare at Howard when she was a student, and she was discouraged from doing that by her professors who are teaching at a historically black college.

It's a very interesting thing to think about.

And then, you know, cut to decades later, she writes a whole play that's writing about the white character in Othello.

It's a wonderful, I think, anecdote about Morrison's relationship to, to Canon City.

But I think there's a because she's studied these great works of literature, she studied classics, and she studied Greek literature as well, like the Greek, plays.

And I think there's a lot of references to Greek theater in her work as well.

I think there's a sense for her that there isn't only one way that art can affect community.

We have a very common place notion that literature is to is there, in order to produce empathy in the reader for the characters in the book.

And because Morrison wrote about black people, she said, when I think of people, I think of black people.

That's just my that's my default.

There's a sense that, oh, she wrote these books in order that we empathize with Pecola Breedlove or empathize with, in, beloved.

But actually, for Morrison, it's much closer to a much older understanding of what literature does, which is not trying to produce identifications or relatability that then make you treat people in your life better, but rather it's to expose the conflicts and contradictions and complexities in order to raise questions that then the community debates.

Right.

So it's actually a communal form for her.

That's much more like what Greek tragedy was for the Greek tragedy.

Tragedies were performed in the city, and the citizens came and they watched these horrible things happen on stage.

And then they talked about it.

That for her, I think was much more the mode.

And she links it back to the role of the African folktale, which does the same thing.

It doesn't give you the moral of the story doesn't say, oh, this, this character was a good person, even if they did something bad.

And you should feel okay about that.

The whole point is, I'm going to stage for you something very complex and intractable even.

And then I'm going to turn to you and say, well, what do you think?

Right.

That's a very different model than the empathy model.

I think that also helps describe maybe how some people in the room have felt when they finish a Morrison novel, which is just what?

Exactly how am I supposed to feel?

What is right, what is wrong?

And there's a mix of emotions, and it's a delightful feeling, because I think there's a quote in this book that says the goal isn't to click the door shut, it's to essentially open it wide open.

Yeah.

And I love that.

I love the idea that a book is a tool for dialog.

I'm going to ask one more question and then we're going to get into audience Q&A.

But one thing that I feel hasn't been talked about yet about this book is that you also leave these trail of gems of how Morrison has impacted you, not as a literary scholar or an educator, but as an author yourself, as a fiction writer.

So if you don't know.

And while Namwali Serpell did win the Anisfeld-Wolf Book Award for The Old Drift, which won in 2020, and it tells the story of Zambia across three generations of families.

And it's this epic novel.

And I am hoping you can just speak right now to how Morrison has influenced you as a fiction writer.

Thank you so much for that question.

I mean, there's there's ways that influence work without you even knowing it.

And there's some spooky things that I realized as I was doing the research for this book.

One example is that Morrison wrote a play called Dreaming Emmett, and there isn't that much, information about what inspired her to write the play.

Most of what we now know is in the archives.

There was a rumor for a while that the play had been destroyed.

It turns out we actually do have copies of various drafts of the play in the archives, and in an interview, one interview that she gave around that time, she said that she was inspired by, something that happened to which is sitting in an airport, and she saw, a young black boy kind of like, playing, just like the way he was walking, the way he was moving just felt like, filled with joy and this kind of rambunctious energy.

And she said, you know, for some reason, I just imagine, like, what if that life was stopped short by a bullet and that the transit police had recently shot a young black man.

And that was also part of the inspiration for the play.

So she decided to revisit the story of Emmett Till.

When I read that interview, I felt this sort of spooky feeling.

Like I said, because there is a scene in my second novel, The Furrows, where, a young black man is in an airport and he gets shot and it's it just felt like we were speaking to each other across time in this beautiful way.

The more direct influences, of course, have to do with particular lines.

In the opening of The Bluest Eye, she tells the whole story on the first page, and then she ends.

And, there's really nothing more to say except why, and because why is difficult to handle.

We must take refuge in how.

And the opening of my novel, The Furrows, is.

I don't want to tell you what happened.

I want to tell you how it felt.

Right.

So it's it's it's a kind of echo of that same thought, which is, I can tell you, the actual events here, but actually what's important is how they happened and why they happened.

So there's the I think there are all sorts of ways that I draw these direct lines in tar baby nature is kind of speaks and, is active, is animated in this really powerful way.

And she says it's almost like a chorus.

It's the way that when you're a child, you feel like the trees are watching you.

And my novel, The Old Drift, has a swarm of mosquitoes that are narrating what's happening to the characters.

So this idea that nature can speak back was very influential in that way as well.

But I would say more than these specific moments of resonance, Morrison gave me the courage of my convictions, in trying to write experimental black literature without worrying about explaining or comforting or placating the reader.

She has this short story called recitative, where she doesn't identify the racial identities of the two main characters, but we know one of them is black, one of them's white.

We just never find out which one is which.

And that refusal to tell you this character is black or this character is white.

I did in a short story called, company, and the editor was really annoyed.

The editor was like, I assumed these characters were white.

And I was like, I don't know why, because I didn't I didn't say anything.

And she was like, well, I need you to identify them somehow.

And instead I just identified the other characters, you know, because I was like, I it feels to me like, a kind of imposition that I no longer have to do that kind of explanation.

I don't have to hold your hand because Toni Morrison didn't write.

So.

And I think that's been the biggest influence for me is the courage.

We're about to begin the audience Q&A.

For those just joining the live stream and radio audience, I'm Kortney Morrow, program director of the Anisfeld-Wolf Book Awards, and moderator for today's conversation.

I'm joined by Namwali Serpell, author of On Morrison, who is here with us today as a part of a yearlong celebration in partnership with Literary Cleveland to celebrate the life and contributions of award winning Ohioan Toni Morrison.

We welcome questions from everyone City Club members, guests, students and those joining via our live stream at City club.org or live radio broadcast at 89.7 WKSU Ideastream Public Media.

If you'd like to text a question, please text it to (330)541-5794.

That's (330)541-5794, and city club staff will try to work it into the program.

May we have the first question, please?

Hi.

Good afternoon.

We have a text question.

If you've never read Morrison, which book would you recommend starting with?

You might have a different answer than I do, Kortney, but I would say Sula.

It's her second novel, and usually people think you should start with someone's first novel, but The Bluest Eye is one of her most radically experimental texts.

It's also depicts extremely difficult things to read.

Sula also does that, but it eases you in, which is actually something Morrison regretted.

She said later in her career that she wished she hadn't provided this lobby into this world, but it stayed so it's helpful for people who get guided into the world of the bottom, a town that she invents close to medallion, Ohio, a community, a black community there.

And it's also just an incredibly moving book.

It's a book that speaks to love, and particularly the love that we bear for our friends.

Sula.

And now it's just a remarkable book.

It's the one of her essays.

She describes it as hermetic, which just means kind of closed.

But I think what she actually means is crystalline.

It is a it is like a poem of a book, and it's just it's gorgeous.

I have a question.

I read my first Toni Morrison book, I believe, at age eight.

Oh, yeah, I started young.

So this is my question.

And this is for the young man who will pick up one of Toni Morrison books.

Yes.

As a young black man reading Toni Morrison, I found myself wrestling with how black men are portrayed in her novels sometimes tender, sometimes wounded, sometimes complicit in harm.

How should black male readers reconcile the images of black male masculinity in her work with the dominant stereotypes we've inherited from both white society and patriarchal expectations?

And in your view, how does Morrison's refusal to write from the white gaze or from a traditional male gaze, reshape what black Max salinity looks like on the page?

Thank you for that question.

So this is a question that was posed to Morrison often.

And in response she wrote Song of Solomon, which is a book about a black man and is about black men and black masculinity.

Milkman dad goes on a journey from his pampered childhood in a middle class black family, where he has picked up the values of his father, and he goes south to find his inheritance, where he discovers the values of his aunt pilot.

And her novel is very much about trying to integrate these multiple sides into becoming a man.

It is a story of a boy who becomes a man, and it is filled with scenes of men taking pleasure in being men.

They go hunting, they are in the barbershop, they're arguing.

And most importantly, I think in that novel, they're signifying.

They are laughing.

They are talking about each other.

They're saying all kinds of things.

But to the end of representing all the things that they have gone through, right?

And not just, what they have done, but what they have experienced and trying to evoke a kind of pleasure in that she said this, that this book was an attempt to capture the qualities of her father.

Her book, song after song Solomon Tar Baby also spends a lot of time with Sun Green, with a black man who's trying to figure out how to be in relation to his class position, but also how to relate his growing up in an all black community in, in Florida, to his new life in New York City.

Her novel home is following a black veteran who of the Korean War.

So I think when, you know, when Morrison was asked, why don't you write about white people?

She says, I have you just haven't noticed.

And it's true.

You can look in her novels.

She actually does write about.

And I would say the same thing to you, that actually she has written about men beautifully, powerfully, and in all their complexity.

Paul de and beloved is an incredible character, incredible portrait of a man.

So I think, as I say, this book really is an attempt to get us to go back to the books.

And so I hope that this will inspire a return to those novels that I've just mentioned.

That's what I think the young black man can do right now is read those books.

If, migration is one of her themes.

Yes.

Do you think her work might be relevant to a person who is immersed in today's controversies about immigration?

That's a very good question.

I think Morrison's interest in migration can be seen in her depiction of the Great Migration, right, of black Southerners to the North in the early 20th century, in jazz, where she's describing people who grew up, a couple who grew up in the South, coming to New York City for the first time and the sense of excitement, the sense of, thrill is very much about moving from the rural to the urban, from a kind of different, older, slower time to that fast paced city.

But it's also there crossing the Jim Crow line.

There, crossing into a freedom that they haven't had before.

And the restrictions that black people underwent in the South are not so different from the restrictions that immigrants face when they come to this country.

Right?

The refusal to allow people to vote for example.

Right.

That's that's something that happened to black people, too.

So, yeah, I think there's absolutely relevance in the sense of when you when you're in a place where you're denied certain rights of citizenship and you were trying to get to a place where you will have those freedoms, those rights, something you can see, across all of her work, Morrison was very interested in international politics as well.

Her essays and the source of self-regard will give you analogies between the black experience and the experience of immigrants across, across the world.

She's very interested in others and how we treat others as they come into our communities.

She has a book called The Origin of Others.

So I think absolutely, there's there's relevance there.

as a painter, have you seen the perfect portrait of Toni Morrison?

And if not, I'm curious about what both you and Toni would think it's elements would include, and it may not even be her face based on that.

The descriptions that you've shared with us today.

There's a beautiful drawing by Carol Walker that graced the cover of The New Yorker when Morrison passed.

I think that's a really wonderful picture.

There's also, a painting of pilot, her character from Song of Solomon, and even though it's a picture of the character, it feels like it could be a portrait of Morrison.

It's she's wearing a kind of Afrocentric cloth, and she's got this dark skin and she's got her earring, and there's just there's a boldness to it and a strength to it.

Have you seen other portraits that I would just say after reading your book, what I realize is the best portrait is to me, her her own works, her body of work that she left for all of us.

And, yeah, you helped illuminate that for me.

So thank you.

Our deep, deep gratitude to Namwali Serpell and Kortney Monroe for this wonderful conversation today.

Thank you so much.

I'm Dan Moulthrop chief executive here at the City Club.

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Our forum today is presented in partnership with Case Western Reserve University's Baker Nord Institute for the Humanities and Literary Cleveland.

It's also part of our authors and Conversation series, which is presented with support from Cuyahoga Arts and Culture and Cuyahoga County Public Library.

Have a wonderful weekend.

We're adjourned.

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