Conjure Women (Atakora) - Discussion Questions

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our talking points to help start a discussion for CONJURE WOMEN … then take off on your own.

1. Afia Atakora has said in an interview with her publisher (Random House) that one of the central takeaways from her novel is that "our past isn't as far back or as well buried as we want to believe." What are the ways that the past haunts the present (and the future) in Conjure Women?

2. (Follow-up to Question 2) Consider how racial issues have continually resurfaced in this country: the shooting unarmed black men, the Black Lives Matter movement, football players kneeling before the flag, or the divisiveness over Confederate statues and flags. To what extent are our own present issues tied to the very theme of a past that never dies in Conjure Women?

3. Atakora refers to Rue as "one lone person in a vast history who does not think of herself as part of history at all, who has no knowledge of the ramifications of the world changing around her." In other words, Rue lives her life, day by day. Do you, in our own life, have a sense of history all around you, of being present in a moment of time in which actions will echo down into the future?

4. Have you read other works in the genre referred to as "slave novels," which creates, as Atakora puts it, "art from a legacy of horror." Atakora wanted her story to move beyond the "legacy of whippings" to consider what the years were like after the war and before the dawn of Jim Crow. Do you think she succeeded? How does her novel differ—or does it?—from others set during the Civil War era, and after?

5. Rue is one of the figures at the center of this story. How does she learn to navigate the post-slavery world? In what way has her mother prepared her for the way the world has changed?

6. Talk about Bean? What does he represent to the community? Why does he so unnerve the townspeople?

7. Describe the relationship, post war, between Rue and Varina? How has their power relation changed? Or has it?

8. Religion figures prominently in Conjure Woman, for both slaves and their masters. How is it that they both adhere to the same religious beliefs? In other woerds, how does Christianity serve the purposes of blacks and whites?

9. What are the "haints," and how do they rule the lives of the townspeople?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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