AUTHOR
READING GROUP GUIDE AND CONVERSATION
7. Take a moment to revisit the novel’s epigraph, from Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. “People do not die for us immediately . . . they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive.” Talk about why the author might have chosen this particular passage from Proust—about how the dead remain immortal in our hearts—and its thematic relevance to The Furrows.
1. The subtitle of The Furrows is “An Elegy.” The word elegy, from the Greek, means “a poem of serious reflection, typically a lament for the dead.” Why do you think the author chose to define her novel in such a way? And what effect did it have on you, the reader?
4. Namwali Serpell uses inventive, even dreamy prose to bring the world of The Furrows to life. How, if at all, did the author’s writing style contribute to your reading experience? What literary devices did she employ—and to what effect?
5. C describes meeting a man who shares her brother’s name as some sort of “deep atavistic déjà vu.” What does she mean to suggest about this brand-new yet bone-deep familiarity with this other Wayne? How does this notion of déjà vu apply to the story that Will tells from prison?
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
2. “You were alone out there,” the narrator says of her lost brother, “and the world took you back in, reclaimed you into its endless folding.” Discuss the ways in which the novel tells the story of not only Wayne’s loss but his reemergence throughout the course of C’s life.
3. In telling her story, C says to the reader: “I don’t want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt.” What did she mean by that? What did you feel while reading C’s story? Does a storyteller need concrete facts to convey narrative truth? Why or why not?
6. How does the author’s use of repetition—the “endless folding” as noted in question #2—contribute to our overall understanding of what is real in the world of this novel versus what is perceived as personal truth?
8. If you had the chance to ask Namwali Serpell one question about The Furrows—about her inspiration, the writing process, or the plot—what might it be?
PhotographyKinesJordan©
Fairly quickly in The Furrows, a couple of things are clear: this is a story about what happens in the wake of tragedy, and it’s also a story that makes use of an intentional structure of repetition. Were those two things connected for you?
Grief is a catastrophe—and a puzzle. It’s unruly. It has no sense of timing, no sense of proportion. It doesn’t happen in stages; it mixes them up at ran dom and can contain them all at once. It’s a seismic event, with profound and unpredictable reverberations, or even re-eruptions. In a strange way, a person you love doesn’t die just once; they die every time you realize that they’re dead. I used to have a recurrent dream about my late sister, Chisha, to whom the novel is dedicated: she would appear and try to convince me that she was still alive. “Pinch me,” she’d say. “See? I was just . . . away. I’m back now.” Whenever I woke up, it was like she’d died all over again. The Furrows tries to conjure this ongoing, uncanny experience of loss, but also the intense, end less yearning we have to undo it.
The second half of the book also plays with repetition, following a pretty dramatic tonal shift. In Part II of the novel, we switch to the perspectives of the mysterious man that C meets, and of another man who calls himself Will. I wanted to riff on that wry compliment black men like to give each other: “I’m just trying to be you.” This kind of repetition—the double, the other, the shadow—is a way to give the reader the unnerving feeling of never being sure who you can trust in a world where black people are treated as interchangeable and disposable. To be black is both to be yourself and to be a surrogate for others, to be under surveillance and invisible, to crave recognition but to be con stantly mistaken for someone or for something you aren’t. As one character says of prison, “It’s like you dead, and now you gotta spend the rest of your days as a ghost to the life you was sposed to be livin.”
A CONVERSATION WITH
NAMWALI SERPELL
The novel begins: “I don’t want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt.” A biracial woman named Cassandra (Cee or C for short) goes on to explain how, one day when she was twelve, she was taking care of her little brother Wayne on the beach. Suddenly, he was gone. She believes that she felt him die but there is nobody to confirm her belief. And their mother can’t let go of the idea that her boy is still alive; obsessed with finding him, she starts a foundation for missing chil dren. As an adult, C meets a man. He’s light-skinned and lanky and has a wid ow’s peak, just like her brother. He seems to recognize her, too. What’s his name? “Wayne,” he says, and the world explodes. We then return to the day Cassandra lost her little brother, but this time, it happens when they’re walking to school. . . . We see this loss and this reunion play out again and again, in different ways. I use repetition to make readers feel the rhythm of mourning, the waves of grief that follow in the wake of loss.
A CONVERSATION WITH NAMWALI SERPELL
As you noted, the two parts of the novel juxtapose two entirely different genres. What did you set out to do with this division? Were you influenced by any writers in particular?
I’m interested in using different genres to shape the reader’s experience. Picture an impressionist painting, sunlit, pastel toned, dappled with green, maybe a family picnic in the grass. Now imagine someone holding a flame to the back of it until it begins to melt, to curl inward, edged with black and flame. This is how I want the shift from the first half to the second half of The Furrows to feel.
What does the title mean, and why is the subtitle “An Elegy?”
Part I explores how loss can tear a family apart and is influenced in important ways by Virginia Woolf’s novels. It’s an exploration of the beautiful and sublime as they collide. Part II is influenced by crime fiction tinged with the Gothic, and is inspired by an important originator of both, Edgar Allan Poe. (He also wrote the first doppelgänger story published in English, “William Wilson.”) My genre play in The Furrows is also influenced by Elena Ferrante and Toni Morrison, who both infuse their novels with the deviance, violence, and darkness of the Gothic and noir.
In many ways, the novel’s repetitions are indebted to film and television. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Christopher Nolan’s Memento, Jordan Peele’s Us, Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You, and Natasha Lyonne’s Russian Doll, repetition is a way to explore human psychology, including its darker distortions. I also wanted to play with the intensities and pleasures of disorientation, the eeriness of a narrative stutter, an imagistic reflection. The repetitions in The Furrows are meant to unsettle you, to take you again and again to the edge of something—and to make you ride that edge.
Titles continue to gather meaning after I’ve chosen them. “The furrows” initially appear as a figure for waves in the sea, the great “grooves in the water” that rise up on either side of young Wayne when a storm picks up while he’s out swim ming. They reappear as long parallel shadows across a surface, which can resemble legs, trees, logs, or bars—and all imply a space in which you’re trapped. Partly I was thinking about a line from Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 about time being grooved like a vinyl record: “Trembling, unfurrowed, she slipped sidewise, screeching back across grooves of years.” I was drawn to how loss can make you slip sideways into another existence, another time, another self—as when you’re beside yourself with grief—how it can send you into a delirium that makes you invent a story to survive. Later, I remembered the image of the furrows in Sir Thomas Gray’s poem “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” which is about the unsung dead, the poor men and women who work the land, whose “furrows break” the earth, and whose graves now “heave the turf”—fitting for a novel about the class divisions within the black community. Gray’s poem also invokes my subtitle: an elegy. An elegy is a poem for the dead but the word originally just described a meter, which is to say a rhythm. The Furrows is structured to enact the sometimes harmonic, sometimes off-kilter rhythms of mourning. And for a time, the elegy was used as a form for erotic poetry—The Furrows, too, is a lament but also a dark and troubled love song.
A CONVERSATION WITH NAMWALI SERPELL
Morrison’s first gift to me is blackness. When she first encountered African literature, she had a revelation—you could write from blackness. It makes things both incredibly simple and incredibly complex if you say, as Morrison says, “when I say people, I mean black people.” This doesn’t mean you don’t think or write about other people, just that you have a different center of gravity. In The Furrows, that center is a missing black boy. We have entire shelves of the library devoted to stories about missing or dead white girls. I make Wayne that blameless, that vulnerable, that precious. I want readers to feel that loss as catastrophic, as irremediable, without any needling thoughts about “thugs” or “angels” interfering. The loss is immediate and brutal. There is no attempt to humanize this black boy first—to humanize a human is a redundancy. When we meet the black men that he could have become in the second half of the novel, I want that innocence and that devastation to hover.
You mentioned Toni Morrison’s influence, and you’ve written about Morrison before, saying “I, too, yearn for that specific, human, black, female freedom: to feel at ease to be difficult.” How does this play into The Furrows?
This requires that the reader undergo many different experiences, some of them quite negative: nostalgia, fear, pleasure, anxiety, shock, discomfort, recognition, confusion, desire, grief, disgust, sublimity. This is another of Morrison’s gifts to me: difficulty. She once said: “I would like my work to do two things: be as demanding and sophisticated as I want it to be, and at the same time be accessible in a sort of emotional way to lots of people, just like jazz. That’s a hard task. But that’s what I want to do.” The point of literature isn’t just the ease of distraction or of satisfaction—this is to treat it as a product we consume. Literature is a social form. And what we call difficulty is, among other things, the wild energy sparked when authors and readers dance or wrestle together as we cocreate it together.
HOGARTH