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.
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 annihilation is constantly in motion as the central characters—Sethe, her daughter Denver, and their friend Paul D—steer through the aftermath of slavery. One of the novel’s most tortured characters is Sethe, a mother who takes her child’s life so the child will not be enslaved, and finds herself haunted by the child’s ghost, Beloved. Years after chattel slavery has ended, Sethe is frolicking with the ghost while sitting in her home. During the dance, Sethe stutters when she sees Beloved’s wound—a slash that marks where she slit her deceased child’s throat.
But once Sethe had seen the scar, the tip of which Denver had been looking at whenever Beloved undressed—the little curved shadow of a smile in the kootchy-kootchy-coo place under her chin—once Sethe saw it, fingered it and closed her eyes for a long time, the two of them cut Denver out of the games.
The horror is not merely infanticide or probing the scars of your child’s ghost, but an institution so horrific that a mother would rather kill her child than see her child live as a slave. Yet the prose’s beauty lies in its ability to give Beloved specificity, character, and something resembling a life of her own.
Morrison’s second novel, Sula, is a defiant celebration of difficulty. After escaping a small Ohio town to pursue an education and live in a big city, Sula asserts her freedom, declaring to her grandmother that she doesn’t want to have children, “I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.” Sula is considered treacherous for breaking through the small town’s veneer of civility, in part because she collects lovers rather than surrendering to matrimony. She is wilted, wise, and nobody’s lady.
Sula is not only a clinical dissection of early twentieth-century Ohio but also a novel about how we can’t live without the people we revile. As Serpell observes:
Sula is clearly a type, but she is the type of person who exceeds typology. She’s the kind of woman about whom you start to say, “She’s the kind of woman …” even though you know that any words that follow will twist like winter leaves before they hit the air, will fall to the ground, dry and dead wrong. She is that oxymoron we call a real character.
Sula is an unfettered mercenary who has sex with her best friend’s husband, a betrayal that sets her undoing in motion. And yet, the husbands who committed adultery did not face retribution. Men can be forgiven; libertine women cannot. The town needs to loathe Sula: As Morrison writes, their “conviction of Sula’s evil changed them in unaccountable yet mysterious ways. Once the source of their personal misfortune was identified, they had leave to protect and love one another.” When she is gone, they don’t know quite what to do. Her death (spoiler alert) leaves people missing someone to hate. Her downfall wasn’t enough; people needed a living scapegoat to make them feel better.
On Morrison also reminds us why she was so popular—Toni Morrison could craft lively dialogue. For Serpell, Song of Solomon is full of black humor in the ordinary, colloquial, and vernacular. Milkman Dead (real name Macon Dead II) was given that name because his mother breastfed him until he was 4. His Aunt Pilate Dead doesn’t miss a beat, cracking a joke about their name, “Ain’t but three Deads alive,” and Milkman inadvertently retorts, “I’m a Dead! My mother’s a Dead.”
Serpell insists that Morrison invests in asking important questions: Why do Black people laugh? She draws a connection between the history (and present-day forms) of dark humor among Black folks, their fascination with “ya mama” jokes (which beckon to my middle school days), and their purpose. Gallows humor isn’t merely entertaining or therapeutic; it is a dress rehearsal for the oppressed, a way to withstand the constant insults or racial violence that mount over a lifetime. There is a philosophical layer to Serpell’s criticism, one that might leave the reader wondering: “What kind of a Dead do you want to be?”
Any literary biography has its limits. Serpell explains that some gaps in her book stem from extraordinary events. In 1993, a fire at Morrison’s home in upstate New York destroyed many of her notes and early drafts of her novels, including those for Song of Solomon. Serpell witnessed the damage, which was memorialized and displayed in a Princeton University exhibition on her life. “Framed documents on the walls had burnt edges, lending a romantic air to misfortune.” As grave as it was for Morrison to lose her notes, she still witnessed her memorialization well before her death. She lived to see Princeton University’s Department of African American Studies renamed Morrison Hall and unabashedly commented, “I am not humbled.” May we all possess this confidence.
There are times in On Morrison when I wanted more clarity about Morrison’s motivation for writing in the first place. After the success of her first three novels, Morrison notes that her motivation to publish had a lot to do with her misery—recently divorced, with two small children and a new job. In the emotional chaos, she had her “back against the wall” and used the time when her children were asleep to write, rather than socializing with friends. (As a writer who happens to be a mother to a toddler, I can relate, as both sleep and my social circle are shrinking.)
In an interview with Thames TV in 1988, discussing her process for writing The Bluest Eye, Morrison made a distinction between being an author and a writer:
Some writers really prefer to be authors. Those are people who write because that’s what they do or someone has asked them. They have a contract. I really call myself a writer because I only write when I can’t not do it, when I am so compelled to do it. And part of it is, what I presume will be—since I am a very good reader and a fastidious reader and a careful reader; I am picky about what I like—I would try to write the kind of book that I really want to read.
Even in her recounting of a period of solitude and loneliness, she seemed to exude a cool confidence that emanates from her alto voice and from a deep understanding of the strong desire to trust her imagination. Morrison demonstrates that it is not enough to write in a familiar or beautiful language to convey betrayal or regret; one must work intimately with an editor, quarrel with them, and know how to work through a book’s structure by reworking and rewriting the text.
Like Serpell, I was assigned Beloved in high school and learned to appreciate its African American vernacular in my English literature class—not because I was unfamiliar with it but because I was sensitive to how non-Black people might react when they heard us speak. Would they mock us for our verse, or would they take up the language as their own? Well aware of a more contemporary Southern variation with Afro-Caribbean inflections that my friends and younger relatives in Miami spoke, I found Morrison’s tone familiar. Yet I hesitated to engage with Morrison at first. I felt self-conscious about a Black author airing the trials of Black folk: domestic violence, mutilation, or slapstick humor.
It wasn’t until I moved to New York City and lived in Harlem that I could shed my adolescent misgivings, work through my insecurities, and appreciate what Morrison was doing in her literature. She revealed how she and many Black people loved and “luxuriated in language” through banter and shade. Even when others failed to comprehend, we could relish our many forms of speech. Serpell manages to ground Morrison within that framework, as an American writer who could move between satire and tragedy, implication and precision. By the time I moved to New York City in my mid-twenties, I plunged into the comforts of Black American literature: Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Octavia Butler held me firm when everything else felt hostile. Serpell was a bit more productive in her engagement with Morrison: She read and studied Morrison to find a way of being “as demanding and sophisticated as I want to be, and at the same time accessible.”
In the fall of 2025, after a friend’s book reading in Berlin, a group of us gathered outside an Italian pizzeria to celebrate this friend’s achievements. One Trinidadian artist in the group made a firm assertion, “No one could touch Toni Morrison.” Although he had never lived in the United States, he said Morrison was like a cousin. That was when I knew Morrison’s words did precisely what Serpell highlights: “Morrison was an Afrodiasporic writer who deliberately braided African, Caribbean, Latin American, and black American influences in her work,” with a quiet, understated beauty that translated beyond the American context. The artist’s enthusiasm is a testament to Morrison being, and continuing to be, a global literary baddie, whose cool observation remains an inspiration.
The poet Traci K. Smith once said, “Not only has Toni Morrison changed literature for the world, she has also changed the world for literature. Across her body of work, she’s given readers access to the complex and captivating inner lives of a wealth of black characters.” In other words, Morrison could be deemed “difficult,” yet, as Serpell shows, she produced an aesthetic oeuvre that more than justified its difficulty. She had no reason to feign humility.
