Since girlhood, Namwali Serpell has been reading the books of Toni Morrison, teaching them for 17 years at the university level—mostly at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Harvard University—and wrestling with their meanings.

On a recent winter evening in Paris, snow refracting the street lights, Serpell signed into a video call to answer questions about her newest book, On Morrison (Hogarth, Feb. 17), a work of criticism that engages all 11 Morrison novels and her short story, “Recitatif.” Serpell groups these under the heading “On Difficulty” and concludes with a short section called “On Monuments,” exploring what Morrison thought of monuments and what readers have made of her.

A Zambian American writer whose own novels, The Old Drift and The Furrows, have enjoyed a strong critical reception, Serpell, 46, makes clear that she never met Toni Morrison. She prefers it that way. Serpell has said, “I would much rather play in the shade with her words and ideas than stand dazzled by the Klieg light of her celebrity.” She argues that Morrison’s closest literary peer was Vladimir Nabokov, calling both aristocratic artists who wrote novels that “brim with cruelty.”

Serpell beckons her own readers to consider the freedom that Morrison “so beautifully embodied: to feel at ease to be difficult. It is in that spirit that I invite you to dance with us.”

Here is an excerpt, edited and condensed for clarity, of Serpell in conversation. Unlike many books and magazines today, On Morrison refers to lowercase “black Americans” and “black culture” (“I don’t like to capitalize the word black: I find it very tokenistic and superficial,” Serpell says), and we’ve followed that style in her answers.

You write that you want to show “how to read Morrison with the seriousness she deserves.” Say more.

To engage with art in a rigorous way can be an act of love. I try to apply some of Morrison’s own ambivalence about criticism to her own work. I do think it’s a really important way to think deeply about criticism in a time when things tend to fall into thumbs up/ thumbs down. There is a lot of talk in English departments about our shared methods of close reading. And a lot of that has to do with attention. In a world where so much is trying to steal and monetize our attention, slow, close reading is maybe one way we can push back.

So you try to stick exclusively to the text?

I was really struck by how resistant she was to biography herself. She felt her life wasn’t interesting. She actually cancelled a contract for a memoir. She really felt the work was what mattered. I tried to zoom in on the art that came from her position of being the daughter of black Americans growing up in this working-class town in Ohio. We tend to write her off as simply representing black culture, but I actually think what she was doing was exploring and innovating and recreating a black aesthetics tradition. And I think she completely remade the form of the novel.

That is a big claim. With The Bluest Eye?

Yes, I think so: With this debut novel, coming out in 1970. Morrison is taking up modernist techniques—very likely as the only black woman then to write a master’s thesis on Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner—and she is applying these techniques to a subject who had never taken center stage, a little black girl. It’s hard to think of a single novel before [it] that centered on a little black girl. And then the novel is interested in everything around her. Pecola Breedlove is actually a narrative void, and Morrison is producing a kind of fragmented narrative, such as the primer in the front as she runs words together and puts them in all caps. She is trying to render on the page black speech, how black music works. And yet she often said that magnificent book did not satisfy her.

Morrison tried to take back the rights to The Bluest Eye. Why?

This was a book that she felt was not edited. She herself was an editor, and she believed powerfully in the role of the editor, that the editorial relationship was sacrosanct. And because The Bluest Eye was not edited to her satisfaction, she felt that she would have done it differently, she would have done it better. The book was her firstborn child who had been abused and massively disrespected.

Did it take some courage to write that Morrison stunk as a poet?

[Laughs.] I am going to get in trouble for that. I think she would have agreed with me. I recently found an interview in which she said she was not a poet, even though she admired and edited poets like June Jordan. She experimented with poetry, with opera, and often failed, but for her failure was no reason to stop. I think she was really interested in failure as productive. She talked about it being “a productive and fructifying pain.”

And in researching The Black Book, her 1974 collage book of African American history, Morrison finds a 19th-century Cincinnati newspaper story about Margaret Garner, which seeds her masterpiece Beloved.

Morrison was responsible in large part for this massive shift in literary studies and black studies of recovering the enslaved past. Through Beloved, and all the research for the novel, and the writing of that novel, she found a way to tear the veil of what had actually happened and that nobody talked about.

And then she writes A Mercy, where she’s reconsidering everything about what it means to recover the past. You have this beautifully fragmented story telling you all these things you didn’t know and reversing your expectations. A Mercy denies you transparent access to that past. She says, No, no, no, not so fast. History is always opaque to us. We can try to gather those fragments, but there is something that is theirs, that belongs to those people, that we don’t just get to reclaim and sell off. Know what I mean? That I find just remarkable.

Would you say that nothing Morrison writes is detached from ethics and, therefore, politics?

There is no sort of a beach read in Morrison [chuckles]. For her, ethics and politics are not just things you can bracket. People like to claim that literature can be apolitical, and she thought that just ridiculous. Even Tolstoy is writing about whiteness, even if he doesn’t say so. For her, writing was a form of philosophy. She felt it was very serious business. Love was serious business. Happiness was serious business. Not just the things that are dark and miserable. How we live our lives is very serious business. The role of literature is to structure different arguments about these serious issues so we can think about them, converse about them, and not be distracted from them.

 Given the political winds, have you modified what you teach in the classroom?

I have tried to stand my ground. I taught Lolita and Beloved in the most recent version of the American novel course that I teach. Self-censorship is the most self-defeating thing I can imagine. We have seen how it has been turned around and weaponized against the people that we are in solidarity with. In my own work, I have felt not only inspired but justified by Morrison in writing about intensely painful things without flinching. I find her so inspiring not only in the work but also in terms of the integrity, the way her political beliefs informed what she chose to write and how she chose to write.

Karen R. Long is a writer in Cleveland, Ohio.