Book Club Discussion Questions for Conjure Women by Afia Atakora

Book Club Discussion Questions

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For supplemental discussion material see our Beyond the Book article, The Flying African in the Americas and our BookBrowse Review of Conjure Women.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

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. 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?

Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Random House. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.