Exclusive Cover Reveal: Namwali Serpell’s “The Furrows”
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In 2019 critics swooned over The Old Drift, Namwali Serpell’s debut; it went on to win the prestigious Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the Windham-Campbell Prize. (Her earlier short story, “The Sack,” had already garnered the Caine Prize for African Writing.) In this exclusive, Oprah Daily reveals the cover for the Zambian American’s intricate, genre-bending new novel, The Furrows, out from Hogarth in September.
Here’s the story: While on a Delaware beach vacation, 12-year-old Cassandra Williams (known as “Cee,” or “C”) is swimming with her adored 7-year-old brother, Wayne, when he suddenly struggles between furrows of waves. He clasps her back as she strokes to shore; she senses he’s dying, either from respiratory failure or a cardiac event. They collapse on the beach, exhausted, with Cee slipping in and out of consciousness. Her brother’s body sprawls a few yards away. Is he still alive? And then he vanishes.
This is The Furrows’ enthralling setup, but Serpell disrupts our expectations, over and over. We meet Cassandra again in her 30s as she’s still grappling with what, exactly, happened; questions without answers—did Wayne really perish on that Delaware beach? Why is she romantically drawn to a flirtatious man, also named Wayne, who keeps showing up in her life? Like the filmmaker David Lynch, Serpell blurs the line between our dreams and our waking lives.
She is also obsessed with the cinematic genius of Alfred Hitchcock. The Furrows embeds allusions to the director’s films like Easter eggs, from Strangers on a Train to Psycho to The Birds to, most conspicuously, Vertigo: “I really do love planting clues.” Now a professor at Harvard, Serpell taught English and American literature at the University of California for over a decade; much of the novel’s action is set in San Francisco. The Furrows is “much less interested in multiplicity and much more interested in repetition,” Serpell observes, drawing a distinction with The Old Drift, “the uncanny coincidences that bring people together.”
The title references a line in Morrison’s Paradise—“‘Beware the furrow in his brow,’ a contested and important sentence,” Serpell notes—while alluding to slave ships plowing furrows across the Atlantic. “I’m not trying to write back to Woolf,” she says. “I’m trying to absorb Woolf, Morrison, and Zora Neale Hurston.”
A sense of the uncanny led her to the book's cover artist, Jerrell Gibbs, a fellow Baltimorean, and his series of paintings with a Black boy staring at the viewer from a variety of settings: repetition with a difference. Gibbs’s titles suggest a kind of musical register. If C note portrays the boy treading water, then B Note poses him in a field of sunflowers, while in F note he stands in a museum gallery, against a vibrant, pointillist canvas. Gibbs himself is no stranger to indeterminacy, the fickleness of fate: “C note derived from a constant feeling of stirring emotions, “ he says. “Reflecting on the year 2020 (and parts of 2021), I realized that there were constant ups and downs. That is life, in a general way, but it felt distinctly different and a little more tumultuous. Like waves, patterns, rough seas, tidal waves…and then…suddenly…still.…” Those ellipses resonate.
For Serpell, Gibbs’s work “is breathtaking. I’ve not met him, I’ve not spoken to him directly, but I watched a YouTube video of him talking about his work in his own language, about repetition, resemblances, memory, wave patterns. What I found really striking was a similar sensibility—which again, I find and am inspired by in Toni Morrison—a sensibility that’s really interested in Black cultural expression, but at the same time, being completely attuned to the larger scale of the world of art. There’s a lot of Matisse in his work, and landscape portraiture, but there’s something indelibly Black about it.”
Which speaks to Serpell’s calling as a novelist: Her lodestars are Morrison, and another favorite, Vladimir Nabokov, an immigrant; “Americans with an asterisk.” What fascinates Serpell about both figures is “the degree to which experiment isn’t just there for fun; it isn’t just there for kicks or for cleverness. It’s very much there to conjure feeling, ethical deliberation. Morrison wants the reader to feel snatched, as she says: thrown and disoriented in the same way that people put onto slave ships felt. When she reads her own work in her essays—Unspeakable Things Unspoken—she talks specifically about wanting to throw the reader into this other space. It’s a bold claim to make. I’m following in this tradition.”
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