The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

Morrison is describing a core ethical and aesthetic demand of fiction: the writer’s capacity to move beyond autobiography and tribal familiarity. To “imagine what is not the self” is to enter other consciousnesses without reducing them to stereotypes or mere symbols. The paired tasks—making the strange feel familiar and making the familiar feel strange—name two complementary powers of art: empathy (bridging distance) and defamiliarization (renewing perception of what we take for granted). For Morrison, this is a “test” because it measures whether a writer can transform experience into insight, enlarging readers’ moral and imaginative range rather than simply confirming what they already know.