Namwali Serpell & Jacinda Townsend: A Conversation

Jacinda Townsend is the author of Saint Monkey, which won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize. She is an Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Mother Country: A Novel (Graywolf Press) introduces us to Shannon, an African American woman who is saddled with student loans, medical debt, and the sudden news of her infertility after a car accident. She follows her boyfriend to Morocco in search of relief, and in the cobblestoned medina of Marrakech, finds a toddler in a pink jacket whose face mirrors her own. With the help of her boyfriend and a bribed official, Shannon makes the fateful decision to adopt and raise the girl in Louisville, Kentucky. But the child already has a mother – Souria, an undocumented Mauritanian woman who was trafficked as a teen and managed to escape to Morocco to build a new life. Her separation from her family across a desert and Shannon’s alienation from her mother under the same roof stage cycles of intergenerational trauma and healing. Linked by the girl who has been a daughter to them both, these unforgettable protagonists move toward their inevitable reckoning.

Namwali Serpell was born in Lusaka, Zambia, and lives in New York. She is the author of the novel The Old Drift, the book of essays Stranger Faces, and her work of literary criticism, Seven Modes of Uncertainty. In The Furrows: A Novel (Hogarth), Cassandra Williams is 12; her little brother, Wayne, is 7. One day, when they’re alone together, there is an accident, and Wayne is lost forever. His body is never recovered. The missing boy splits the family with doubt. Their father leaves. But their mother can’t give up hope and launches an organization dedicated to missing children. As Cassandra grows older, she sees her brother everywhere: in bistros, airplane aisles, and subway cars. Then one day, in another accident, Cassandra meets a man mysterious and familiar, who is also searching for someone and his own place in the world. His name is Wayne. The Furrows captures the experience of grief, the way the past breaks over the present like waves in the sea. It’s a bold exploration of memory and mourning that twists unexpectedly into a story of mistaken identity, double consciousness, and the wishful – and sometimes willful – longing for reunion with those we’ve lost.