Namwali Serpell's THE FURROWS: AN ELEGY

"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 before and afters on either side of the peaks. Time doesn't creep like a worm or fly like an arrow anymore. It interrupts. It turns over. Shocks. Revolutions. Cycles. On TV, online in the prosthetic minds we carry in our hands. It says if something immense or catastrophic is always on the cusp of happening."

Are we, for the rest of our lives, going to be able to distinguish COVID period literature from pre-COVID at a glance, or will the things that we think distinguish it just fade into the background noise of all writing from all times? I suppose we'll have to wait a while to find out but right now I feel like I can spot a pandemic book (or maybe it's a post-Trump thing?) immediately just from the way characters seem to experience time. It's there in Chuck Wendig's Wayward (a sequel to a book specifically about a pandemic that was published just months before what we in 2022 are still referring to as "the" pandemic) and it's perfectly encapsulated in the above passage from Namwali Serpell's novel-length exploration of the experience of grief, The Furrows: An Elegy.

As readers of this blog already know, I really, really loved this author's The Old Drift and consider it a pretty much perfect piece of speculative fiction, so I was getting pretty frantic as I kept checking to see if my public library had acquired her latest yet, only every time to be disappointed until I thought to check and see if they had it on dead tree, and sure enough, it's still right there on the New Arrivals shelf. Bugger me, I was going to have to use my hands and arms to hold it open and turn the pages to read it. It had better be worth it, I sighed as I grabbed it to take home.

Well, it sure was, though the physical pain of reading it is pretty well matched by the emotional damage it has to inflict, because this is the story of a young woman, Cassandra, who's little brother, Wayne, died on her watch when she was 12 and he was seven, and who's family fell apart soon after, the way that families often do on the death of a child. Cassandra's mother, unconvinced by the explanation little Cassandra gave her of what happened and also by the disappearance of Wayne's body, plunges into the forming of a foundation dedicated to finding Wayne and other missing little angels and neglects her even more than she already had (an artist, she had a tendency to disappear into her studio for entire summers, leaving her older child to mind the younger when they ventured out into the world); Cassandra's father soon deserts them altogether to start a new family with a new wife. And Cassandra gets foisted off on her unpleasant grandmother a lot until she is a grown woman adrift in the world and constantly, mysteriously, encountering beautiful young men (there is almost always an element of sexual attraction in these encounters) who she quickly comes to believe are her long lost baby brother, all grown up and ready to tell her all about what has kept them apart all of these years.

I lost someone very, very close to me my first year away from home, quite possibly the closest friend I'd ever had and someone I once thought I would marry, and for decades I had dreams in which he turned up still alive with a story to tell, and encountered people in real life who I could almost believe were him from time to time, so reading The Furrows was a lot like, not so much picking scabs after all this time but digging at scars. I was prepared for this, knowing that grief was the theme of this book, and that Serpell is a stunning writer, but I still had to put this down even more often than I usually do with hardcover books just to catch my breath from the emotional blows it had to deal.

It's also a surreal read, in that we get multiple versions of how and where Cassandra, who at 12 has internalized the idea that "Wayne was a creature for my watching, for my keep" loses her little brother, and that an uncanny "windbreaker man" appears near the end of each narrative. The windbreaker man's constant appearance in these variant narratives is a key reason why Cassandra's mother traps herself in a prison of unbelief when he proves to be as elusive as lost Wayne, every time. Every time, too, that Cassandra meets someone, often under another name, whom she concludes is actually her brother, the circumstances are weird and uncertain -- and if that isn't a perfect encapsulation of how grief and imperfect memory keep on swamping us throughout our lives, I don't know what is.

Adding layers of ambiguity is Cassandra's time with therapists, each of whom has a different understanding of her trouble and a different recommendation for how she deals with it, a series of them guiding her through the processes of remembering (which we now know is rewriting/re-imagining more than it is replaying a perfectly recorded scene) and then simplifying the narrative of her trauma, whittling it down to what the therapists consider its essentials. They all seem more interested in focusing on Cassandra's guilt than in questioning whether it was appropriate for her mother to load her with so much responsibility, for instance.

And that's all just the first half of The Furrows; midway through, we switch narrators and suddenly enter the perspective of the man/men she has been encountering, who has a whole different set of motivations and experiences and ideas about what has been going on between him and Cassandra and her missing brother, and you'll never in a thousand years guess what's actually going on with him. I'll just say this elevates The Furrows from just another lovely and sensitive meditation on loss and survivorship to a full on consideration of and confrontation with most of the other ways that life can hurt us until we cry and won't stop even then.

 

But even that's not enough for Serpell, who, recall, originally dazzled me with a pretty much perfect piece of speculative fiction/African futurism. So of course she's got more than this going on!

"So, this is what time looks like to us. A rope, a line pulled tight. But that’s just the past, the things that already happened, one after the other, in a line. But the future?” Mo drew a fan of lines at the top end of the rope, like it was unraveling. “Threads of possibility. Infinite threads.But you see, when time goes on, they get twisted together into the rope. The coulda-woulda-shouldas get twisted inside of what we did."

The second half of the novel utterly re-contextualizes the first, down to all of Cassandra's different versions of how she lost her little brother, teasing us to the very end with the idea that something supernatural, or at least timey-wimey, is in store for us, all by way of distracting us from the love story that is actually taking place just outside of our field of attention. But Cassandra told us, right at the novel's very beginning, "I don't want to tell you what happened, I want to tell you how it felt." How things feel doesn't always make sense, doesn't always obey linear time or fixed identity, is sometimes kaleidoscopic and sometimes slams us to a halt at an unexpected place. Serpell has captured this pefectly. She's joined the ranks of authors whose work I will snatch up without hesitation, just because it's hers.

Next time I'll be a little better prepared emotionally, though. Yeouch!