HOW IT FELT
“I DON’T want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt.” So begins Namwali Serpell’s second novel, The Furrows: An Elegy—a powerful exploration of grief, memory, and loss that becomes part of a larger story of Black identity and double consciousness—forthcoming from Hogarth Books in late September. Told in two sections with vastly different narrative styles and structures, it begins with the apparent drowning of Wayne, a seven-year-old boy, near Bethany Beach, Delaware. His body is never found; he is missing. The only “evidence” is the story his sister, Cassandra, tells of what happened while they were swimming and he was lost in the waves: “those whirring sheets of water, the foam along their edges sharpening like teeth…the furrows chewing, cleaving deeper.”
Although Serpell calls autobiographical links to her new novel “so oblique that it’s hard to map things directly,” there are connections. The genesis of The Furrows dates back nearly twenty years to when her sister Chisha, to whom the novel is dedicated, died of a drug overdose. “What I took from that experience,” Serpell says, “had to do with the grieving process—my refusal to accept her death psychologically and this sense of seeing her everywhere.” In 2019 she published “Beauty Tips From My Dead Sister” in BuzzFeed because, as she tweeted, “I think about her every day and this essay explains some of the reasons why.” With her sister’s voice still in her head, Serpell imagines her advice: “Yes, I’m here every night in your dreams, but, yes, I’m dead. And yes, it’s okay that I’m gone. Once the rage of sadness leaves your body, let me go, touch my cheek, hold my hand.”
Serpell began writing in 2008, completing a full draft six years later, before finishing what would become her debut novel, (Hogarth Books, 2019). Her practice is, she says, unusual: “I have five novels in my head right now, six with . I work on them when the notion strikes or I have time and space to immerse in just one of them. If a piece at the same time she was publishing short stories and pieces of , an epic novel that she felt required her to have a firm grasp of Zambian history and politics. Although writing “the great Zambian novel,” as numerous websites and magazines called her debut, was in her words “mostly a joke,” she felt the pressure of that expectation.
