Namwali Serpell was born in Zambia in 1980, sixteen years after the country, formerly the British colony of Northern Rhodesia, won its independence. Her family moved to Maryland when she was eight, and she later attended Yale and Harvard, and began composing fiction. This spring, Serpell published her first novel, “The Old Drift.” It has garnered ecstatic reviews from critics, allusions to early masterpieces of Salman Rushdie, and a review from Rushdie himself, who described the novel as “a dazzling debut, establishing Namwali Serpell as a writer on the world stage.” At nearly six hundred pages, it is, as Rushdie notes, “an impressive book”: a story of Zambia’s past, present, and future that speaks in many voices and draws on multiple genres, “ranging skillfully between historical and science fiction, shifting gears between political argument, psychological realism and rich fabulism.” It addresses two major historical blights, British colonialism and AIDS, which could be seen as the tragic bookends of the region’s past several centuries.
Serpell teaches literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and, in recent years, has also become a prolific essayist and critic, weighing in about pop culture, fiction, and hot-button cultural debates. We recently spoke by phone. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the complicated origins of her novel, whether she feels pressure to represent Zambia in a certain way to American readers, and what it is like to teach controversial authors to college students in 2019.
Why, for your first novel, did you want to write something so big, so sprawling, so epic and large in scope? Or did it just come to you, and it wasn’t a conscious choice?
When I started the novel, I was in college and was still figuring out how to write and what I wanted to write. And the pieces of the novel that I was writing at that time were self-contained, short-story-type pieces like you would write in any kind of creative-writing workshop. I think the scale of it only became evident to me over time. And I also wrote another first novel, which is in a drawer, and it was not of this scale at all. So I don’t think that there was a conscious decision that the first book would be this big. I think it happened by chance and accident, which is fitting, given that the theme of the book is error.
When you’re writing a book like this, which covers historical events from different eras, are you writing each section as you study it and then moving on?
I wrote it in scattershot fashion, and a lot of the historical elements in the novel came to me later in the process. So, for example, I only learned about the Zambian Space Program, which takes up a few chapters in the middle of the novel, in 2012. I had already written a character who was pregnant and heartbroken, who had been left by her lover, and, when I was mapping the events surrounding the space program and the events of my novel, I realized that Matha Mwamba, the one female space cadet, was pregnant the same year as my character, and I realized that they were the same person, if that makes sense. And so now I knew her story, I knew her background, I knew what had led her to lose faith in the way that she did. It helped me understand why her grandson had always been obsessed with electronics and engineering and spacecrafts, because he had this figure in his grandmother. So I learned about these historical incidents over time, and they wove into the story rather than me seeking out those historical incidents and then creating characters out of that, if that makes sense.
I’m not saying it doesn’t make sense, but say more about what you mean.
This novel, because I’d been writing it for so long, came to feel, at some point, like it was already written, and I was reading it into being. And so discovering this coincidence of time made me understand something about my character, as though it had already happened. So, you know, the real historical figure of Matha Mwamba did not cry away fifty years of her life, did not come to be part of a revolution when she was a grandmother. But, in this weird way, the novel that I was writing and history coincided and helped me understand who the character I had already been writing was.
It sounds kind of mystical-ish. I have a deep urge to refer you to Vladimir Nabokov’s “Pale Fire,” when he talks about the strange way in which a misprint can connect a true world and a false world. It’s hard to explain. I have this character, Sibilla, who is Italian and is covered in hair, and I knew that she would end up in Zambia. And, at some point, in learning about Zambian history, I realized that Italians had come to help build the Kariba Dam, and I also learned that there was a pretty intense Italian presence at the turn of the nineteenth century. And so her relationship to Zambia—why she would have any relationship to Zambia—suddenly made sense to me.
I heard you say that you travel back to Zambia a lot. How important was going back there regularly to being able to write this novel?
There are two different answers to that. One is that my sense of connection to Zambia is indebted to the fact that we went back, when I was fifteen, for a year. Without that year spent at home—my mother was doing research for her dissertation, my father was taking a sabbatical—I don’t think I would have the same kind of relationship with Zambia that I do. My parents also moved back, in 2002, so to go home was to go visit them.
The other answer is that I needed to do archival research on the space program at the National Archives of Zambia, in Lusaka. And I also conducted a few interviews with friends of my parents, to get a sense of what life was like in the seventies. A lot of the research that I did, though, I did from afar, just from reading books and articles and things online. And, in general, I believe the reason that a lot of writers write in exile from their countries, like James Joyce, for example.
And that reason is?
I think that you need some distance to be able to write about a place. I also think there’s a strong correlation—and again I’m citing Nabokov here—between memory, dream, and the creation of literature.
If you’re born in China or India or South Africa or Italy or France, and you come to the United States, and then you write a novel about the country you were born in, most people who are reading fiction will have some sense of it. With Zambia, I think that is not the case. I think that most Americans don’t know anything about Zambia, and they very likely have not even read a book that takes place in Zambia. Do you feel a different responsibility because of that? Did you feel like you had to explain more?
I would say that, first, this is not a Zambian-American novel. This is a Zambian novel. I wrote a piece for the New York Review of Books called “Glossing Africa,” which was, in a way, engaging with the conversation between Trevor Noah and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie where they talked about the need to gloss African words or concepts or ideas for a Western audience. And they’re on opposite sides about this question. Adichie refuses to explain or gloss and Noah feels that it’s really important to gloss, because, he says, I come from a multilingual society in South Africa, so we’re translating to each other all the time. I feel completely comfortable translating South African culture to the West. It’s fine.
I’m sort of in the middle. I’m a mixed-race Zambian, I’m very nomadic in my family, and my novel is very much about cultural syncretism, about the mixing and mingling of cultures. So I’m of the opinion that, yes, there’s translation to be done, but I don’t feel, in any way, that I pitched this novel to an American audience.
Are there other Zambian writers, or British writers writing about Zambia or Northern Rhodesia, who influenced you in some way? Either as people you look up to or people whom you wanted to write against?
I wasn’t writing against any Zambian writers in particular. I was writing with some engagement with Ellen Banda-Aaku, who wrote a lovely novel called “Patchwork.” And there’s another young Zambian writer named Efemia Chela, who has published some short stories. She has this story called “Lusaka Punk,” which is also speculative—it imagines a punk scene in Lusaka that doesn’t quite exist in the way that she writes it. So there are Zambian writers that I have been thinking with. Both of them portray an urban Lusaka, an urban Zambia, in a way that really spoke to what I was trying to get at in representing a cosmopolitanism in Zambia that I think most people don’t know about.
If I’m writing against anyone—if I’m engaging with anyone in writing back to the canon—it’s pretty explicitly Joseph Conrad, to whom I refer repeatedly in the novel. The last chapter of my novel is basically a rewriting of the opening of “Heart of Darkness.” So there is some engagement with colonial depictions of Africa in the novel. But I would say that most of my influences are positive rather than agonistic.
From the novel, I thought you seemed interested in colonial history in southern Africa specifically, but also in pushing back against, or adding shades of gray to, the idea that colonialism brings progress.
Yeah. One way to think about how I engage with precursors is in terms of signifying, in the African-American sense of taking a trope and repeating it with a difference. For example, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi has a novel called “Kintu,” about Uganda, and she skips the colonial period altogether. And that’s one way to throw writerly shade, right? To go from eighteenth-century Uganda to twenty-first-century Uganda and skip the whole colonial period. It just doesn’t matter to what she’s trying to say. And I love that.
My way of doing this was to take people’s expectations and try to subvert them. So, for example, I have a chapter in the novel that is basically a safari story, but you barely see any animals, and it’s told from the perspective of someone who works at the lodge rather than from the perspective of the tourist on the game drive. Matha crying all the time was very much the trope of Mama Africa crying for her children, but I’m trying to turn it on its head. She’s not crying because of disease or poverty or war; she’s crying because her heart got broken. So I’m very interested in including the things that I’m writing against or engaging with, rather than excluding them altogether.
In Salman Rushdie’s memoir, he writes, in the third person, about himself, “Nor would he write his book in cool Forsterian English. India was not cool, it was hot. It was hot and overcrowded and vulgar and loud and it needed a language to match that and he would try to find that language.” I wasn’t sure of what I made of this, because I think there are many different ways to write about a country. But I also understand the idea of coming from a place and feeling like it’s described a certain way—or it’s been represented by people who are not from that place a certain way—and you want to provide something different.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s definitely part of what I’m doing. I teach “Heart of Darkness,” and Conrad is someone whose work I admire. I’m an English professor, so there’s no cancel culture for me that I can actually do and still have a canon to teach. I quote Milton, I quote lots of different people in the novel, and it’s more like what William Empson called “argufying” than it is writing against, if that makes sense. Arguing in order to clarify.
How long have you been teaching for?
I was hired as a literature professor in 2008, and the position technically was an American-literature position, twentieth-century American fiction. I wasn’t an American citizen at the time, and I think only three of the texts in my dissertation were American. My book that came out of that dissertation has novels from Australia and England, as well. So I’ve become more of a global-Anglophone person. I teach a lot of contemporary-lit classes, and recently I’ve been teaching black science fiction. Berkeley gives me a lot of freedom to teach whatever I want, and, as my creative-writing career has picked up momentum in the last decade, they have given me more opportunities to teach creative-writing workshops, as well.
How do you think teaching has changed you as a writer, assuming it has?
I’ve read a whole lot more, obviously, because you have to read a lot of amazing fiction.
You can’t fake it?
I think teaching literature courses makes you feel like you’re in conversation with the great writers that you’re teaching. It makes you feel like there’s a lineage, that I can quote Milton and that I’m engaged with Conrad—I’m not just engaged with the most recent contemporary novel. So there’s some of that, but that’s maybe just delusions of grandeur. I don’t know.
What does your family think of the novel?
My dad read it in galleys and sent me a long WhatsApp, and his response was that he missed the characters already. That’s been very moving to me, that people like my characters, because I think that I tend toward the cerebral, and so making people feel real on the page is a challenge for me.
I think it’s interesting that you think of your fiction that way. That’s not necessarily the way I would describe it. But it’s interesting that that’s your sentiment.
Well, I’ve had a lot of people refer to my work as dense and difficult. Not necessarily this novel, but other work that I’ve written. I took a class with John Crowley, as an undergrad, and he had us do this amazing thing that I now make my students do, which is he had us write a self-evaluation at the end of the semester, where we had to say what we thought our flaws were as a writer and what our gifts were as a writer. I went to talk to him, as I’ve had students come to talk to me since, and it’s a horrible thing that young writers do, but I basically wanted to be blessed. I went to his office hours, and I was, like, “Should I keep going? Am I good enough?” And he looked at me, and he was, like, “I mean, I admitted you into my class, so that’s already a sign that I think that you’re a good writer. But much more important to me, and I think much more important for you moving forward, is that you have the most accurate sense of your flaws as a writer of anybody in the class.” And one of the flaws I had written was that I did not have real feeling, good characters. That’s something I’ve been working on for a very long time. So it was very satisfying to hear that I got there with my dad. And my sister was one of my earliest readers. She read the much longer—if you can imagine—version of this novel, when we went to Hawaii, in 2017.
Must have been a long trip.
[Laughs] Well, we were there for a month. She gave me feedback along the way, and she’s been reading pieces of this for a very long time. I remember, very early on, she gave me a piece of encouragement, in a very typical fashion—which was she read a chapter, and she said, “You know, I’ve read other pieces of this before, and I wasn’t sure, but, reading this, I know this is going to be a great novel.”
Older sister?
Yes, yes, of course. My mom, unfortunately, passed away during the process of me finishing this book. So I don’t know what she would have thought, but I hope she would have liked it.
Have you thought about how her reaction might have been different from your dad’s and sister’s?
My mom was the only person in my family who could have fact-checked pretty much every part of this book. Maybe not the microdrones, but even the H.I.V-vaccine stuff, because she worked in H.I.V./AIDS-policy research for a very long time. And she knows the Zambian cultural tidbits and the language stuff. I had to do a lot of that fact-checking on my own, because there was no editor that I could send it to who has working knowledge of Nyanja and Bemba and Tonga and all that stuff. So I think she would have liked some parts of it, which she had read before, and I think others she would have been annoyed with.
What would she have been annoyed with?
Well, I know, for one, that she didn’t like the title, because she told me. She was, like, “It sounds old.” I was, like, “Well, it has the word ‘old’ in it.” I think she would have found the magical-realist stuff irritating. She was a very fact-oriented person.
How do you describe yourself? Novelist, professor, fiction writer, essayist?
No, no, I’m hard to pin down. My next contracted book is about why I love-hate “American Psycho.”
This is a nonfiction book?
Yes, a nonfiction book, but it’s in the form of a first-person academic satire. On Twitter, my quote is from Toni Morrison, and I feel like that’s the only way to really describe it, which is I read books, I teach books, I write books, I think about books. It’s one job. I’m a book person.
I have a lineage in my head of people like Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Zadie Smith, who do nonfiction essays and fiction. The one thing I don’t do, and I will probably never do, is write poetry. So there’s that. I’ve crossed one thing off the list.
You mentioned cancel culture earlier. I wonder if teaching at a college campus in 2019 has changed the way you think about this issue.
I’ve not had too many students at Berkeley get offended by something that has been said or taught in a class. I’ve had students request permission not to read a book. I don’t put trigger warnings on my syllabus, but I do, in my course descriptions, say there will be texts in this class that have violence and sex, etc. If you don’t feel comfortable with that, you probably shouldn’t take the class. If anything, being at Berkeley has helped me open up my mind to questions about gender identity and sexuality, in that I have taught trans students, which I never had when I was a graduate student at Harvard, for example. So I have more openness to understanding these questions of identity at a place like Berkeley, because we’re so diverse in class, race, and gender. Not as much in race as we used to be, but still.
So it’s not so much with teaching, but I think what’s really important to me when I’m teaching a text that might trigger a student or might have, like, racist, sexist content is to frame it, to contextualize it, rather than not teach it at all. I don’t believe in not teaching Joseph Conrad. I believe in teaching Joseph Conrad and Chinua Achebe’s essay about Joseph Conrad, if that makes sense. You have to give a sense of what is at stake there. You can’t teach it blindly. But I think to not teach it altogether is maybe not the best direction.
I’ve noticed that some of my Goodreads reviews have been very offended by Percy’s section and the racial epithets. One person said they actually threw the book in the trash because of Percy’s use of the N-word and also the K-word, kaffir. [This is an offensive term that refers to black Africans.] Not realizing, I’m assuming, that Percy was a real historical figure and that that section of the novel is derived almost entirely from his autobiography. [Percy Clark was a British photographer who travelled to southern Africa around the turn of the twentieth century.] But also maybe just because they were unwilling to experience racist language in a book. That’s a little bit more extreme than I would feel—obviously, since I put it in the book. So that, to me, seems like the wrong response to the presence of racism and sexism and homophobia and transphobia in our society—to pretend it’s not there.
I became obsessed with V. S. Naipaul, especially his work on India, and I always tell people, “If you’re going to read one or two things about India, don’t just read Naipaul.” But if you read Naipaul on India, and all the responses it engendered, and all the debate that ensued, that’s actually an incredible way of learning about colonialism, even if the text you start with is problematic in all these ways.
I mean, who is pure? This is the thing: Who can I teach that can’t be cancelled? There’s no one. Even James Baldwin sometimes had issues with his own sexuality. So it makes no sense to me to seek purity, but that doesn’t preclude us from calling people out. From criticizing the writers who put their work out there. No one gets to publish without any critique or engagement, but cancellation is just a really bizarre response to the fact of this in our world.
