Zambian American novelist Namwali Serpell on death, dreams and the haunting nature of grief
CBC Radio | Posted: October 21, 2022 8:23 PM | Last Updated: October 24, 2022
"I don't want to tell you what happened. I want to tell you how it felt."
That's the opening line of Namwali Serpell's new novel, The Furrows: An Elegy. It tells the story of one family's struggle with love and loss in the wake of a tragic accident. The novel is dedicated to Serpell's late sister, Chisha, who died from a drug overdose when Serpell was just 18. The Furrows explores the incomprehensibility of death and the reverberations of grief.
Born in Lusaka, Zambia in 1980, Serpell moved to the U.S. with her family when she was eight years old. She studied English literature at Yale, where she began writing her first novel, The Old Drift. A multigenerational epic set in Zambia, it won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction. Serpell went on to win the US $165,000 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize and become a professor at Harvard, where she currently teaches.
Serpell spoke to Eleanor Wachtel from her home in Cambridge, Mass.
Haunting dreams
"I've dreamt about being in the water and trying to save a little boy, who I know now was very likely my nephew. He was around seven at that time. There was something very tender, panicked, desperate and loving about that dream.
"When I woke up from it, I found myself thinking about dreams that I've had about my late sister, dreams where I would be in a similar kind of situation with her.
Dreams are one way that the mind has of processing the immense fear that we have around those we love, which is that we might lose them.
"There would be this pressing question, always in my mind, about whether she was, in fact, alive again. Her liveness, her vividness, the sense that she was visiting me in my dreams was very strong. That feeling of panic and tenderness that accompanied my awakening from the dream about my nephew felt very resonant with dreams I had about her.
"Dreams are one way that the mind has of processing the immense fear that we have around those we love — which is that we might lose them.
Lasting impressions
"It was as though she were visiting. It was as though she had simply gone on a trip somewhere. She would often say in the dream, 'I've just been traveling and I'm back now.' The relief that would wash over me, the sense of reunion that would wash over me, was then always accompanied by this terrible wrenching away.
This particular experience of being haunted by those we've lost, being visited by those we've lost, dreaming about them as though they are still in some parallel universe, still with us, feels like a very common thread across different cultures.
"This particular experience of being haunted by those we've lost, being visited by those we've lost, dreaming about them as though they are still in some parallel universe, still with us, feels like a common thread across different cultures, across different experiences of people I've talked to.
"But also it's very much present in the literary tradition that has really fed me and nourished me, going all the way back to The Odyssey and Odysseus, visiting the shades in the underworld."
Anger and grief
"This novel and my first novel, The Old Drift, they're very different, on the face of it. The Old Drift is a multi-generational saga spanning over a century. It tells the story of my country, Zambia. It tracks three families over three generations and their spiraling relations with each other. Whereas The Furrows is much more focused on a small family and is set in the U.S.
"I was interested in 'ambiguous loss' in particular — when you don't get to see a body and must reconcile yourself to the fact that someone has passed. It can produce in people a great sense of guilt — a feeling of longing and perverse self-abasement.This is particularly so when you don't get to see a body and must reconcile yourself to the fact that someone has passed. It can also create between family members a real sense of anger."
"One of the main similarities between the two books is that in both cases I spend a lot of time thinking about that specific combination of grief and anger."
Nomadic qualities
"I've spent more of my life in America than I have in Zambia. I feel very much like a person of both of those countries, or of those two worlds.
"But also because I'm an artist, a writer, I feel like I'm in neither of those worlds. I am of neither of those worlds. Many artists are exiles, but a lot of them are self-exiled. They choose to wander away from where they're from in order to write about those places and those experiences.
For now, I think the nomadic quality of my personality means that I feel quite free to roam.
I don't actually know if I will stay in America, anymore than I know if I'll go back to Zambia. I may end up in Europe somewhere or in the Caribbean or South America.
"There's a kind of openness, which, let me be clear, is also a great privilege, to be able to travel around the world. I may end up settling down more for work reasons and for family reasons.
"But for now, I think the nomadic quality of my personality means that I feel quite free to roam."
Namwali Serpell's comments have been edited for length and clarity.