Namwali Serpell Distills the Disorienting Experience of Grief in ‘The Furrows’ – Shondaland.com

When loss and grief mark you at a young age, how does it shape every aspect of your life, from your family to your understanding of truth and memory? These questions are central to Cassandra, the main character in Namwali Serpells sophomore novel, The Furrows.

When Cassandra is 12, her younger brother, 7-year-old Wayne, dies while in her care, taken by the sea with no body recovered. The death ruins Cassandras parents marriage. Her father finds a sense of solace in his new family, while her mother becomes obsessed with finding her missing child, even starting an organization dedicated to the cause. This disorienting and fracturing trauma causes Cassandra to become unmoored, which only intensifies into adulthood when she meets Wayne, who she believes could be her long-lost brother.

The talented author, whos also a Harvard English professor, made waves with her previous novel, The Old Drift, which won a slew of awards and landed on many best-of lists. By contrast, The Furrows is less sprawling and more intimate, examining grief and death while playing with time, dreams, parallel realities, and notions of the truth. Serpell also touches on race in America, incarceration, conflicting ideas of love, and the doppelganger effect.

Shondaland spoke with Serpell about the disorientation of grief; truth and lies; sexuality and desire; and the nature of storytelling and loss.

SARAH NEILSON: How did this story come into being? Was there a seed that led to this novel and these characters?

NAMWALI SERPELL: Yes, more clearly than for other novels that Ive written. I had a dream in 2008 or so, and in the dream I was out in the water swimming, and I was with a young boy. Probably my imagination was picturing my nephew Chedza, who was about 5 in 2008, and a storm picked up, and he was struggling out there in the water, and I was trying to swim him to shore. I woke up with a real sense of panic but also with an uncanny feeling that reminded me of dreams that Id had about my late sister, who died in 1999, and about whom I had a recurrent set of dreams in which she would try to convince me that she hadnt in fact died, but as the post-epigraph to my novel details, she would try to convince me that in fact she had just gone away on a long trip.

Proust presents this as a natural tendency of humans we dont really believe that someone has died; its very hard for us to fathom what death actually means. And that feeling of panic and love, but also this deep sense of grief and of loss that I would feel whenever I woke up from a dream like that and remembered that my sister was in fact gone and she hadnt just taken a trip somewhere there was something about the way I felt when I woke up from the dream about my nephew that reminded me of that. Trying to coordinate these two feelings of familial love and desire to protect with the minds flailing and grappling with the question of loss was really the emotional seed out of which The Furrows grew.

The Furrows

The Furrows

SN: Death is portrayed in the book as a dynamic and ongoing experience, especially for the people who are left behind. But Wayne has his own life in the book in unexpected ways. How did you approach rendering Waynes death and life, and the ghosts who live in the bodies of the people you might not even expect?

NS: The second half of the novel really starts to play with this notion of haunting and doubling and doppelgangers in a more explicitly genre sense, and there I was really riffing on Edgar Allan Poes story William Wilson. The family in the doppelganger story of Jordan Peeles Us is also named the Wilsons, so hes obviously thinking about this as well, the way that theres some kind of uncanny relationship between the notion of the double or the doppelganger, the notion of haunting, or being haunted by a version of yourself, that seems particular to Black experience. And one of the ways that I think about this is that the double consciousness that W.E.B. Du Bois speaks about manifests as a doppelganger in my novel as well. I was interested in how these two men in the second half of the novel, Wayne and the man who calls himself Will, whos talking to us from prison, are engaging in this question of haunting as it pertains to Black experience. In Cassandras perspective, theres a way in which her baby brother Wayne keeps appearing to her in different figures, whether its a sandy boy that sometimes appears in the shadows to her, or whether its in her memories and dreams of her little brother, and then perhaps more unsettlingly, the way that he seems to appear in this man who approaches her when shes an adult, and the staging of a scene of recognition that has to do with feeling that theres some familiar spirit in this man who happens to have her brothers name becomes a knotty moral and emotional question for her as the novel proceeds.

SN: Staying on the relationship between the adult Wayne and Cassandra (who are not related), one of the things I liked a lot about the book is that Wayne is always saving Cassandra, or at least trying to, during all these disasters. It felt to me like he was saving her at the end of the world, and that really paralleled her trying to save her brother at the end of the world as they knew it. Can you talk about that part of the story and how you came up with that thread?

NS: I dont know if it was intended on my part, that reversal that you just described, but Ill take it its beautiful, and it makes a lot of sense insofar as the adult Wayne presents to Cassandra a kind of solution to a problem that she has not really properly worked out for herself. He seems to save her from the condition that shes in, which is shes trapped in a cycle of bad mourning, in the psychoanalytic sense a compulsive melancholy where she keeps repeating and reiterating this loss for herself, but she cant seem to actually heal from it or feel any closure about it, and he seems like the missing piece to that. So, it makes a lot of sense that she, having lost Wayne and having not been able to save him, that the older man would then save her from that condition.

We discover relatively quickly into the plot that this man is not in fact her long-lost brother, but one of the things that I wanted to capture about these reunion scenes, these false reunions, is the way that it would feel like a climax of life, a drawing together of all youve been longing for coming to you in this moment. But the moment that she recognizes him, or so she feels, the world erupts around them. Part of what I was trying to get at there its something that [Toni] Morrison talks about in her description of what shes trying to do in Tar Baby, which is to register in the external world the intense tragedy and violence thats happening in the world of the characters on the island. So, theres all this internal family violence happening in that novel, but she has these images of the trees screaming and the birds registering this disaster. Its like when we see the prophetic omens before a plague strikes in biblical type of stories. So, it was a way for me to register in the body of the world that Im depicting what I think is a fundamental wrongness about Cassandras desire to replace her brother with this man, to fill the hole inside her heart with romantic love for this person, whos basically a perfect stranger to her, and whom she really doesnt try to know in his full self. The reader gets to know him, but Cassandra really doesnt, and I wanted to speak to the futility of that. Our desire to get out of grief can sometimes overwhelm us to the point where we no longer think of other people as people but rather as solutions to our own emotional problems. So, the catastrophes, in some ways, are ways to register the wrongness of that in Cassandra.

The author photographed in her home in 2019.

SN: Can you dig a little bit more into the role of sex and desire in the book and how it intersects with grief and trauma?

NS: I had an interview with a wonderful Australian writer recently, and she said, As I was reading, I was like, oh, no, Namwali; dont go there. Oh, shes going there. To stage a sexual encounter immediately following what seems to be a characters recognition of someone as her brother is obviously quite perverse and dark in a way of thinking about sexuality. And I think theres several different angles from which one can understand this. Theres a long literary tradition of thinking about these kinds of transgressive sexual relationships, and youll find it in The Bluest Eye and Lolita, The Sound and the Fury these intimations of incest hover over texts, I think, as ways of thinking about how Eros [a Greek word from which erotism is derived] can really derange our moral and our emotional lives. At the same time, I think this goes back even further to much, much older literature. What interests me is the way that family love and romantic love present to us two conflicting versions of love. In the case of Cassandra, she has an irresolvable dilemma for herself. If she accepts that this man is her brother, then she cannot have him as her lover. But if she accepts him as her lover, then she loses her brother altogether; she loses all hope of ever reuniting with her brother. Of course, this whole time shes been maintaining that her brother is dead, but what the recognition reveals to us, and also I think to her, is how much she actually hopes that in fact he did not die.

So, theres this way in which drawing together these two kinds of love presented an impasse for Cassandra that I thought would be really interesting to work through. Whats interesting to me is that its not really a factor for the adult Wayne at all because he knows that its not his sister, and hes quite disgusted when it even comes up later in the novel, that this would even be a shadow that would be cast over their relationship in any kind of way. And so, it becomes entirely internal to Cassandras own tortured relationship to family love and to her deep loneliness.

SN: Theres a repeating line in the book that reads, I dont want to tell you what happened; I want to tell you how it felt. Throughout the book, time is written about as an ocean, a storm, a carousel, a rope its furrowed and nonlinear, and there are parallel existences happening. Can you talk about that intersection of nonlinear time, memory, and feeling?

NS: If you search the word plot on Wikipedia or Google, youll find all this advice for writers about conflict and resolution, about climax and denouement. It gives us an illusion that we tell stories from beginning to end. But almost always, even if events happen from beginning to end, the order of telling is not the same as the order of happening, and theres a really good question as to why that is. Very few stories start from the beginning and move toward the end, and so thats a wonderful tool for writers because it means that we can manipulate time. We are time travelers just by virtue of how we write. One of the exceptional things that I think modernism, as a movement in the early 20th century, brought to us is just how much variety you can have when it comes to our playing with time, and in this novel, I felt very interested in experimenting with the order of telling in order to capture what Cassandra characterizes as wanting to tell you how it felt rather than exactly what happened.

I think one of the reasons we play with time in the stories we tell, and one of the reasons audiences like that, is because it allows for suspense; it allows for information to be revealed to us late. We can start in the middle of things, right when things are getting exciting, and then flash back to how we got here in the first place, and theres this dynamism to that way of telling. For me, it seemed like this is a really amazing opportunity to try to enact through the readers experience what grief feels like, and one of the things that I think grief intensifies is the way that time feels. We always say that time flies, or it creeps, or it stretches, or an hour can feel like three hours; a day can feel like it goes by in a minute. The way we experience time has very little relation to its orderly movement through seconds and minutes and hours. So, being able to play with temporality in that way was really helpful to try to embody, or have the reader feel in their body, the way that time might move when youre mourning, but also the way that time moves differently when youre dreaming and when youre remembering. As the novel progresses, I tried to give a sense of how time feels now in the contemporary moment because this is a novel thats very much about how time feels in the United States in the twenty-teens, and the ways in which our relationship to feelings, our relationships to other people, is really filtered through a larger zeitgeist, as we like to say, of how the world is doing time.

SN: I wonder if we can extend that a little bit into ideas of truth, because I found it really interesting that in Cassandras family, the word lie was really taboo. Why did it feel important for you to make that part of the story, and can you elaborate a little bit about notions of truth and lies that you were thinking about when you were writing?

NS: Something I think about the modern era, especially this particular time, from the 2000s to the twenty-teens, is the extent to which we have a context collapse, information collapse. The great digital shift in how we consume media has made our grasp on what is true and what is not true quite tenuous. Of course, the novel takes place before Trumps election, when a lot of these questions and issues came to the fore. But I think we often perceive that as a kind of existential crisis in how we can know whether or not something is true. I actually think one of the greater losses is that the instability of what is true and what is not true has led us to this always happens when theres a panic, when theres a crisis is that we tend to fix those categories much more strongly. Truth and lie become much more fixed. When actually what we know, and what literature knows, and what art of all kinds knows is that within the category of truth, theres a whole spectrum of what we understand truth to be. Theres empirical fact, theres emotional truth, theres phenomenological truth, which is how you experience something, even if it doesnt actually correspond to what happened, and theres also truth that changes our understanding of the world changes, but the world also changes. And then within lies, theres a huge spectrum theres white lies, manipulative lies; theres lying to yourself, self-deception. We lose a lot of complexity when we fix these notions of truth and lie, and my novel is really working at the edges of what we can know to be true. Theres very little in the novel that we can know to be true except that this boy is gone. Thats all we know, and everything else comes down to how we handle that, how we respond to that, whether we believe one thing or another about that.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Sarah Neilson is a freelance writer. They can be found on Twitter @sarahmariewrote.

Get Shondaland directly in your inbox: SUBSCRIBE TODAY

More:

Namwali Serpell Distills the Disorienting Experience of Grief in 'The Furrows' - Shondaland.com