8. Basking in Morrison's Shade with Saeed Jones
PASSAGES: On Morrison
Namwali Serpell and Saeed Jones discuss the concept of 'shade' as a critical praxis within Toni Morrison's literary work. They specifically ana
Key takeaways
- Namwali Serpell argues that 'shade' is a central element in both Toni Morrison's fiction and her literary criticism.
- The speakers analyze Morrison's 1972 New York Times review of Regina Nadelson's book, Who Is Angela Davis?
Main topics
- Toni Morrison's literary criticism
- The art of throwing shade
Notable quotes
I don't have to tell you that you're ugly because you know that you're ugly.
Conclusion
The episode offers a deep exploration of how racialized and queer ling
Transcript preview
Speaker 2 (0:01) And why is she behaving like Harriet Beecher Stowe, another simpatico white girl who felt she was privy to the secret of how black revolutionaries got that way? Speaker 1 (0:23) Hi, this is Namwali speaking to you from home. It feels so good to be back in Harlem, back in New York City, back in my living room, where I can always hear and feel the A train rumbling underneath me, cars going by on St. Nicholas Ave. I always love coming back to this place, especially after traveling. One of my favorite experiences in New York is when I get to Moynihan Hall. previously known as Penn Station. I get on the A train and it stops at 42nd. It stops at 59th. And then there's this long stretch where it goes all the way from 59th to 125th. And in that stretch, the vibe completely shifts. People start chatting. People pull out boom boxes. It's like a scene out of a movie. And then when we finally emerge, I'm in my neighborhood. with my favorite wine shop and my favorite coffee shop and the great tall green trees of St. Nicholas Park which change so beautifully with the seasons. Riding the A train always makes me think of this passage I love in Tar Baby, Morrison's novel from 1981. She describes the subway cars, like blazing jewels, the subway cars burst from the tunnels to the platforms, shining with the recognizable artifacts of childhood. Fantasy, magic, ego, energy, humor, and paint. They had taken it all underground. It's such a great simile, the comparison of graffiti to the whimsy of childhood drawings, the subway cars like these gemstones under the surface of the earth, and then this list, fantasy, magic, ego, energy, humor, and paint. It's like a perfect description of New York City itself. Tonight, I'm going to be taking the A-Train downtown to Liz's Book Bar, which is a coffee shop, bar, bookstore, Black-owned business in Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn. We're doing an event to celebrate the return from our On Morrison tour, and I just know it's going to be so much fun. I'm going to be in conversation with the marvelous Saeed Jones, and we're going to talk about a specific kind of reading, Black femme. queer reading, very much part of the queer history of New York and ball culture in particular. That's the reading we mean when we say reading someone for filth or reading someone down, reading as what we call throwing shade. Saeed actually has this great definition of this kind of reading in an essay he wrote years ago called The Buzzfeed Guide to Dragspeak. He calls it to insult someone ruthlessly without breaking a sweat. This sounds like it could be negative, right, to insult someone ruthlessly, but in the Black community, shade has been perfected into a kind of art form. It takes a lot of close attention to notice someone's flaws, to draw out exactly what you want to insult, and to do so in front of an audience, because shade always happens in front of other people. It is a kind of performance. I argue in On Morrison that the art of shade is all over Toni Morrison's work. It's in her fiction, where characters throw shade at each other, but it's also in her criticism, in her own readings and reviews of other people's works. Toni Morrison was an incredible reader. She often said, that she's a reader before she is a writer. And I think that she's actually a reader in this sense too, a master of shade as a beautiful performance. And that's what we're going to be talking about tonight. And who better to talk about shade with me than Saeed Jones. Speaker 1 (4:21) poet, essayist, author most recently of the memoir How We Fight for Our Lives, and the co-host was Zach Stafford of the podcast Vibe Check. Saeed is a great reader himself. We met at a book festival many years ago in Texas, actually. We were both on a panel discussing Toni Morrison. Whenever Saeed and I get to hang out, I find myself clutching my stomach from laughing so hard. Even though a lot of what we're doing is complaining about everything we find unsatisfying or dissatisfying or troubling or just plain dumb about the world around us. We're reading the world for filth, but always taking such pleasure in the conversation. There's the A train. I'm going to go catch it now so we can head to Liz's book bar. See you there. Speaker 2 (5:22) Please join me in welcoming Namali Serpell Speaker 1 (5:25) and Sayu Jones. Speaker 1 (5:31) Welcome, everyone. Thank you so much for being here. This is such a wonderful celebration. The next one last night. It's summer, finally. We've been having these events, which are kind of like living, traveling literary salons, right? Where we gather together and we read a passage from one of Toni Morrison's works. And then we dive. into that passage and do the kind of close reading that I, as a professor, do with my students all the time, paying attention to the language, to the words, to the style, to the rhetorical devices. It's been really amazing because even though, you know, I spent many years teaching Toni Morrison, thinking about Toni Morrison, writing about Toni Morrison, and writing this book, Even still, every conversation I have with someone, there's something new. There's something new to be discovered. And I feel like it's brought me closer to the page even than I already thought I was. I love Speaker 2 (6:37) the concept of this. I love the community coming together and reading a text. It's very beautiful in this time of violently enforced... unreality, you know? And so like coming together and saying, we're going to, we're going to do this work together. Yeah. And just Speaker 1 (6:54) see what it is that she did that makes her this masterful stylist of the English language. Right. I just feel that we're losing a lot of sense that language isn't just a vehicle for messages or slogans or arguments that it is actually a living, breathing medium and that you can really, Perfected Speaker 2 (7:18) yes, Speaker 1 (7:18) and Toni Morrison was the perfecter of it Our conversations have focused mostly on passages from Morrison's novels, but today we have an exciting opportunity Which is to look at Morrison as a reader herself Because she was also a literary critic she wrote book reviews. She wrote essays about other people's novels and she wrote works of literary criticism, Playing in the Dark being the primary one that many of us know, but also several of the pieces in The Source of Self-Regard are analyses of Beowulf, of Mark Twain, of Speaker 2 (7:56) Nathaniel Hawthorne, Willa Cather, right? Speaker 1 (7:59) So what I'm interested in is thinking about the early moment of Morrison as a reader. We're going to look at an article that she published in the New York Times in 1972. That's just two years after The Bluest Eye. So Toni Morrison hasn't really been established as Toni Morrison just yet. But she's writing essays, she's writing articles, and she writes this review of an unauthorized biography of Angela Davis, which is called Who is Angela Davis? A woman named Regina Nadelson wrote and published this book without consulting Davis or anyone really close to her. Morrison, you may know, was a book editor at Random House. She was in the process of working with Angela Davis, who was writing her own memoir at the time. which would come out in 1974, right? So it's in process, right? And Angela Davis is her friend, right? They're very close. They're very close. She's coming to Morrison's house. They're going on walks together, and she's working through, okay, I'm going to write this memoir. Yeah, Speaker 2 (9:12) and you can read more about that in Dana Williams' book, Tony at Random, about her work as an editor. And Speaker 1 (9:18) you also have to understand, Angela Davis at this point, like, she's just... emerging as the revolutionary that we know now, but there's a lot of hate coming at her. There's a lot of intrigue about her. And then she's trying to craft her own story. This is who I am, Angela Davis, an autobiography, this unauthorized biography, who is Angela Davis gets published in the New York times. Right. As you can imagine, Morrison had some thoughts. Speaker 1 (9:48) So you should all have a printout of the beginning of those thoughts. And we're going to be looking at this at the level of aesthetic form. And Saeed is going to do us the honor of reading for us the first long paragraph of Toni Morrison's review of Regina Nadelson's unauthorized biography, Who is Angela Davis? Speaker 2 (10:11) On the other hand, who is Regina Nadelsohn? And why is she behaving like Harriet Beecher Stowe, another simpatico white girl who felt she was privy to the secret of how black revolutionaries got that way, how Liza could get to the point of actually crossing the ice, or how Angela Davis got to the point of actually joining the Communist Party was quite naturally that white intelligence informed them both. And since Harriet was prey to the scientific racism of her day, she attributed Liza's feistiness to the genetic transference of information via white blood. But Regina lives in the 20th century and is an enlightened racist who knows about cultural determinism, which is to say, Angela got