Serpell confronts sudden loss of sibling in novel
Author crafts disquieting portrait of human mind, warped by grief
After Chisha died, she came back to her sisters.
In summer 1999, when 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 in an interview. She asked her sister to stop visiting. It seems Chisha heard her. “It got quieter,” Serpell said.
The revisiting of the sudden trauma that Serpell experienced — what Freudian psychologists refer to as the “repetition compulsion” — inspired the arc of her second novel, “The Furrows,” which The New York Times recently named among the 10 best books of 2022.
The book begins when the main character, Cee, is 12, playing on a beach in Delaware with her 7-yearold brother, Wayne. He begins to drown; when Cee swims out to save him, she ends up passed out on the shore herself. When she comes to, her brother’s body has disappeared.
First, Cee has to repeat her disoriented account of what happened “a thousand, a million times” to her parents, police, therapists. And then Wayne visits Cee in her dreams, forcing her to question yet again what she knows to be true: “‘You’re dead,’ I say. ‘No I’m not!’ you insist. ‘Pinch me!’ ”
Serpell began “The Furrows” in 2008, the year
she completed her doctorate in English and American literature at Harvard and became an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. The following year, her short story “Muzungu” was selected for “The Best American Short Stories,” and agent PJ Mark offered to represent her. They planned to sell “The Furrows” first, Serpell said, but in 2014 they decided to stash it away “because it was not cooked.”
While it was “gathering shadows,” she turned back to the “sprawling” novel she’d started writing in 2001 in her senior year at Yale: a magical-realist epic that would become her 2019 debut, “The Old Drift.”
While the first book braided historical fiction, Greek tragedy and sci-fi in a postmodernist creation story of Zambia, her second, “The Furrows,” was a more “containable,” “modernist” effort, Serpell said, mingling tropes of noir, horror and crime fiction in a disquieting portrait of the human mind warped by grief.
Even for Serpell, it’s hard to pinpoint her novels’ order of birth. At the moment, she has five more percolating in her brain, separate universes slowly taking shape.
“My books come to me as large-scale visions of a whole project,” she said, like “plots of land that I’m gardening.”
In addition to writing fiction, she teaches English at Harvard, where she is a full professor, and writes essays and criticism for both academic journals and the mainstream media.
For Serpell, every hat she wears “is an attempt to go back to the origins of this thing, which is a love for the written word.”
Serpell sees her range as “both a source of great pride but also anxiety,” a potential “liability in an era where branding is really important.” But eclecticism is in her DNA.
Serpell was born in the Zambian capital of Lusaka in 1980, the third of four daughters of
Robert Serpell, a white, British-born psychology professor, and Namposya Nampanya Serpell, a Black Zambian economist who worked for the United Nations.
Following two years in England, where her mother completed her master’s, the family moved back to Lusaka and then to Baltimore in 1989.
There, Namwali Serpell was no longer considered “colored,” as mixed-race people are in Zambia. As she told the Guardian in 2019, “It was very difficult for me to negotiate the binary logic of you’re either Black or you’re white.”
She spent one formative year back in Lusaka, at 15 (without that year, she said, she may not have written “The Old Drift”), but has lived most of her adult life in the coastal United States. These days she divides her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and New
York City. She has wanted to live in New York, she said, since she was 14 and first visited Chisha, who was then an undergraduate at New York University and working as a model.
“It was downtown in the ’90s,” Serpell said. “I was completely in love.”
Chisha’s death “ravaged the family,” she said, in ways that informed the dispersal that takes place in “The Furrows”: Cee’s father starts a new family in Georgia, and her mother, in denial of Wayne’s death for decades, establishes an organization for finding missing children.
Likewise, Serpell’s own mother “never recovered
from my sister’s death,” she said, “and that came up a lot the year she had cancer.” Namposya Nampanya Serpell died in 2016.
When the author returned to the draft of “The Furrows” after five years away from it, she had a new experience of grief — her mother’s death — to contend with.
“When my sister died, it was just a total chaos,” she said, but 17 years later, the family was “at a stage where we understood what needed to be done, in terms of ritual, in terms of closure, in terms of support.”
This time, her dreams were serene.
“I missed her,” she said of her mother, “but there wasn’t this confusion of ‘Is she gone; is she not gone.’ ” She has learned firsthand that “if you disavow your grief, if you pretend that this thing never happened and everything is fine now, it erupts in these kinds of symptomatic ways, in these forms of violence.”
In 2019, Serpell published an essay called “Beauty Tips From My Dead Sister,” written in Chisha’s voice.
“I know you’ve looked in my face and said your goodbyes,” she says. But what could be more real than uncertainty?
“Dream of me. Pinch me. Yes, I’m still here.”