The Furrows: An Elergy by Namwali Serpell

The novel The Furrows was inspired by the death of Namwali Serpell’s sister and the reality that:

…people do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. [Marcel Proust]

Lauren Christensen explains in The New York Times article: A Sibling Disappears and The Mystery Repeats Itself:

In the summer of 1999, when the author Namwali Serpell was 18, her 22-year-old sister, Chisha, died unexpectedly of a drug overdose. For years afterward, she appeared in Serpell’s dreams to tell her she wasn’t really gone. Their eldest sister, Zewe, underwent waking spells in which she would hear or even see Chisha temporarily.

Every time Serpell woke up, she’d relive the loss all over again. “Finally I had a kind of confrontation in one of the dreams,” she said on an afternoon in August, at the dining table of her Harlem apartment. She asked her sister to stop visiting. It seems Chisha heard her.

“It got quieter,” Serpell said.

This revisiting of the sudden trauma that Namwali Serpell experienced—what Freudian psychologists refer to as the “repetition compulsion”—motivated her to create a similar scenario in “The Furrows,” out from Hogarth on Sept. 27, 2022.

The Furrows begins with the memory of a drowning. With her mom and dad practicing a laissez-faire approach to parenting, Cassandra Williams (Cee, or C for short) has gone to beach alone with her brother. She is twelve; he is seven. This, Cee tells us, is allowed.

Every morning, after breakfast and cartoons, my brother and I would leave our father to edit his articles and our mother to dab at her paintings. Wayne and I would change into our still-damp swimsuits and I would pack us Capri Suns and Lunchables from the fridge. We would walk along the roads, cutting through a gap between the fancier houses to reach the beach. My mother had told us that the gap was called No Man’s Land, which Wayne misheard and took to mean it belonged to a man named Norman. We’d sneak quietly through Norman’s Land, then tromp over the boardwalk, our flipflops knocking against it, and find our favorite spot on the shore, which was marked by clumps of sea grass. [p. 4]

What happens next is a sibling’s worst nightmare. Wayne dies on Cee’s watch. Or she thinks he dies. The author offers the following from Cee’s perspective:

He was joyful and swimming and then he wasn’t. I ran in. I swam to him. I reached him and we grappled some until he managed to get on my back and wrap his arms around my neck. I held his knuckles in my hand. I turned and swam us to shore. He dragged me back. Halfway to the beach, his small heavy head began to beat against my shoulder in an unreasonable way. That was the word I thought: unreasonable. A word our father would say. I knew to hold my breath and dive through the waves like our mother had taught us. But what about Wayne? Did he remember to dive, and hold his breath? There was no breath in me to ask or remind him. [p. 6]

The Furrows refer to the “furrows” of the waves in which Wayne disappears. As Cee remembers:

You swam into the furrows. At first you didn’t know it because you were under the surface and you faced down as you swam, staring at the vault of the sea below. Then you felt the sky darken above you, a shadow passing, and when you came up to breathe, you were suddenly inside them, the great grooves in the water, the furrows. On either side of you, those whirring sheets of water, the foam along their edges sharpening like teeth. On either side of you, the furrows chewing, cleaving deeper. They ate you up. You were alone out there and the world took you back in, reclaimed you into its endless folding. [p. 6]

I believe the author’s choices for the direction of her novel are brilliant. Readers are thrown into Cee’s world of profound psychological disturbance in the aftermath of this tragedy. This is a world where time and memory are distorted and where there is no body found to mourn.

Tope Folarin writes in The Atlantic article A World Where Death Isn’t the End:

Perhaps the most painful moment following the death of a loved one is the split second after you reflexively pick up your phone to give them a call, or the instant after you tuck away an anecdote to share the next time you see them. These are the moments when the finality of death—previously ephemeral, almost unbelievable—finally registers.

For most people, anyway. Some, though, find themselves suspended between here and there, between the unthinking action and the devastating realization that follows. You might even spend years of your life treading back and forth between these two poles.

Tope Folarin continues:

The book [The Furrows] traverses many genres and points of view, but it is primarily concerned with exploring one of the most enduring human impulses: the inability to accept death as the last word on a loved one’s life; the desire to hold on, to imagine, to desperately dream that the end is not the end.

In The Furrows, Namwali Serpell code-switches with ease, an ultimately crucial skill in a story that abounds with fluctuating realities. The book swerves from a realistic chronicle that bears all the markers of a grief tale to one that seems infused with magic, from standard-English dialogue to a pitch-perfect rendering of African American Vernacular English. The author also references and builds upon pop culture’s alternate-reality obsession, and the narrative vertigo that these stories induce in us. When I began reading the novel, I knew that Wayne had drowned in the ocean—but the power of Serpell’s storytelling was such that as the narrative progressed, I stopped being so sure.

Namwali Serpell has titled her book An Elegy which typically means a poem of serious reflection, typically a lament for the dead, a funeral poem or song, burial hymn, lament, dirge, or requiem. In Greek and Roman literature, it is represented by a poem written in elegiac couplets, as notably by Catullus and Propertius. But nothing in The Furrows is typical and the author “refashions the genre of the elegy, charging it with as much eros as pathos.” She keeps us completely off balance by mixing real with surreal and combining them with mystery, romance, and noir to name a few.

As I read this novel, and it seemed like every minute of that reading, I found myself repeating over and over the prayer: Please, Dear Lord, when I die, let me return to this earth with the writing chops of Namwali Serpell!! This genius writer has produced a story that is genre-bending, eloquent, and brave.

I cherish it!

Additional writing by Namwali Serpell may be found at her website.

Check Amazon for more on this book I love.