Dear Wayne. You were moving along a groove, the one carved into the world for you. The morning was golden. The roads were as gray and smooth as the skin of sea-born creatures. At the crossroads, you were blindsided. You were as if blind and an immense force came at you from one side. As you stepped forward unaware, it came and knocked you out of your furrow and into another, plowed you up and over, put you in another place, elsewhere, where. I don’t want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt.
The Furrows: An Elegy has a high literary experimental structure — nothing is straightforward or what it seems — and as such, I don’t relish being the novel’s first reviewer; I don’t know if I totally “got” this. I will say that as an examination of grief and mourning and memory and reality, I was deeply touched by many scenes. And as an exploration of the African American experience — double consciousness (as defined by W.E.B. Dubois), code-switching, class discrimination and incarceration — I am receptive to whatever Zambian-born, Baltimore-raised author (and Harvard professor of English) Namwali Serpell wants to share. Because this narrative is so slippery and surprising, I am loath to reveal too much about it, but I will say that if the first part seems to get a little repetitive, hang tight: part two switches to a different point-of-view, with a different structure and vibe. Serpell tells us several times here, “I don’t want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt,” and that’s exactly what she has accomplished: The Furrows reveals the lived experience of a person without the actual details of that person’s life being terribly important. Probably genius, and therefore over my head. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
There’s a cinematic sense of anticipation but maybe everyone feels this way nowadays. Life seems both monotonous and constantly interrupted, a punctuated heartmonitor line of events, with maybe some befores and afters on either side of the peaks. Time doesn’t creep like a worm or fly like an arrow anymore. It erupts. It turns over. Shocks. Revolutions. Cycles. On TV, online, in the prosthetic minds we carry in our hands. It’s as if something immense or catastrophic is always on the cusp of happening. Everything feels asymptotically dramatic, on the verge, as if only a disaster could undo that universal first disaster: being born at all. We are all heroes of cataclysm now.
Since it’s in the publisher’s blurb, I’ll confirm that this starts off as the story of twelve year old Cassandra (Cee or C) and how she lost her seven year old brother, Wayne. And whether he’s dead or simply missing, there was definitely a splummeshing, a ssth-ing, a head rolling around in a strange way, an unreasonable way (but this was allowed: this was our every Sunday; our every weekday; our whole summer). With a white mother and a Black father (and consequently two very different grandmothers) and a middle-class upbringing, Cassandra’s doesn’t seem to be primarily an African American story: but, of course, no matter how she sees herself, society reduces her unique experiences to an African American story. In part two, we meet “Will” — raised in foster care, the fast track to prison was his inescapable fate — and along with the twinning effects of double consciousness and code-switching, Will is tormented by a vengeful doppelgänger. From Will’s POV, the language becomes more “street” and while his is a different type of African American experience from Cassandra’s, the details are unverifiable and don’t, ultimately, matter. I don’t want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt.
As with her last novel, The Old Drift, I was consistently charmed by Serpell’s turns of phrase:
• My anger always met Reena like water hitting ice: it either rolled off or froze into her own armor.
• As the afternoon passes, time starts to fold under its own weight like honey.
• I’m in your thrall, those tall letters on either side of the word imprisoning me.
But again, as with her last novel, I found The Furrows to be so well-written as to be distracted by its craftedness; I never forgot that I was reading a book. And on the other hand: I never forgot that Serpell had something that she wanted me to learn, and I was here for that.
I don’t matter, you don’t matter, we’re all just matter, codes, scrambles of signs and symbols, the language the world mumbles to itself, or maybe its consciousness, our eyes and ears and mouths sprouting from it like polyps, here to watch and hear and sense it, to record its events and ruptures, its growing and its rotting, its dismal spin.
I can’t wait to read other reviews of The Furrows — I have no doubt that fans of Serpell’s work will not be disappointed with this novel and they will have plenty to say — and even if I’m not sure I totally “got” this, I can’t give it less than four stars.
Just a note to myself: I remember reading something on Cormac McCarthy's The Road and the reviewer was talking about McCarthy's genius word choices, sharing some quote (which I wish I could now find) about the woods looming high as a cathedral (something like that). And then the writer explained that "cathedral" was such a genius choice because the "tall" letters (t, h, d, and l) loomed like trees among the "low" letters, and I remember thinking: Was that actually intentional? Did McCarthy select individual words for his sentences to that degree of hidden meaning? I was doubtful. But then Namwali Serpell comes along with, "I’m in your thrall, those tall letters on either side of the word imprisoning me," and I was absolutely charmed and delighted by that.
