" ... I realized that there might have been a method in making Wayne present, or a mercy. Because at home, the world was tilted now and Wayne's absence in our lives had become the drain toward which everything ran."
An eerie and beautifully composed meditation on grief, "The Furrows" rushes headlong at issues of race, split identities, homelessness, family, classism, and more potential incest than a "House of Dragons" episode.
Namwali Serpell builds a fever dream powered by unreliable narrators and shifting perspectives, full of apocalyptic imagery and alternate realities.
"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."
The end result is an elegy whose impact is somewhat mitigated by the confusion it intentionally sows. The second part of "The Furrows" could become difficult to follow for some readers, with unidentified narrators, multiple people with the same name, and diverging truths.
I'm still not positive I fully understood what Serpell was trying to convey in parts.
"Here's the thing: It isn't just that what has been done can be undone. It's also that an undoing can reconstitute. Dead matter can gather itself together."
"This is the incomplete, repeated shape of it: sail into the brim of life, sink back into the cave of death, again and again."
Serpell unquestionably demonstrates mastery in her examination of the fallout of a tragic loss. For some, the importance of that achievement could be overshadowed by the disorientation -- intended or not -- that pervades most of the latter part of "The Furrows."
"Watching him now, I was in awe of his unbotheredness. He had left us in the pit of death and gone on to conquer life. He had left behind our terrible itching urgency."
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