I was just beginning to think of myself as a writer when I encountered Toni Morrison’s conversation with Charlie Rose, in which she spoke about the importance of African literature in the early development of her own writing career. She spoke of a visceral response she’d had to *Things Fall Apart*, by Chinua Achebe, and about how when she first read his work, she’d understood from his language that he was not writing towards a white reader. It would have been inconceivable for a Nigerian writer to think, first, of a white reader. In this way, the work of African writers had been central in her own development. In America, she lamented, she often knew to whom Black writers were writing—and it wasn’t her. Morrison’s classic example? *Invisible Man*, by Ralph Ellison. “Invisible to whom?” she countered. *Nevada, *by Imogen Binnie, occupies a similar place in my own literary imagination.…