Namwali Serpell: “I almost always find my errors productive.”
Miscellaneous Files is a series of virtual studio visits that uses screenshots from writers’ digital devices to understand their practice. Conceived by Mary Wang, each interview provides an intimate look into the artistic process.
Namwali Serpell’s novel The Old Drift begins with a chorus of mosquitoes. They help narrate the epic tale of three families in Zambia, where Serpell was born. A colony of the flying little buggers buzzes between chapters, gasping and delighting at the silliness of the story’s human characters, spreading hive-mind wisdom along with infectious disease. “To err is human,” the mosquitoes exclaim. “Obey the law of the flaw.”
True to their claim, the mosquitoes’ first line in the novel contains an intentional misspelling of a Nyanja word, one of the many languages spoken in Zambia and in the novel. The logic of the productive mistake also guided Serpell herself, she explained when we spoke on the phone in December last year. Serpell, who also works as a literary critic and academic—she now teaches at UC Berkeley—has a rigorous creative practice packed with accidents, errors, and other forms of “unselfconscious creation.” It has yielded a nearly 600-page saga, which spans an entire century and three different genres: magical realism, social realism, and science fiction.
The story opens in a colonial settlement in the early twentieth century, in a territory of what was then called North-Western Rhodesia, where newly arrived Europeans and some locals attempt to approximate a society on the banks of the Zambezi river. Serpell began the narrative of her country here because, as the mosquitoes tell us in the novel, “This is the story of a nation—not a kingdom or a people—so it begins, of course, with a white man.”
It’s also where the three multi-cultural families who populate the novel embark on their entanglement with politics, history, and each other. They migrate across continents; they raise their children in foreign lands; they live through revolutions and epidemics. But, tragically and hilariously, none of their foresight is a match for that of the mosquitoes—who seem set to outlive them all.
Reading The Old Drift often felt to me like the act of writing, each sentence caressing me for attention. True to the spirit of its winged narrators, the book’s abundant, tentacled lines seduced me into reading them over and over, just to feel them tickle my senses once more.
1. “It’s just this beautifully accidental combination of things.”
: You sent me such a treasure trove of materials, a Google Drive folder more abundant than what we can fit here! I got a sense from reading that you’d have a wonderful archive. What’s the
