Politics and poetics of (de)colonization in Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift (2019)

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the politics and poetics of (de)colonization that Namwali Serpell puts in place in her debut novel The Old Drift. It argues that she first of all addresses problematic (post)colonial representations particularly by explicitly referring to and debunking colonialist Percy M. Clark’s The Autobiography of an Old Drifter. Moreover, she allows for what Jacques Rancière has called a “re-configuration” of the “distribution of the sensible” by staging what Sara Ahmed has named “willful” characters who tackle the legacy of Scottish explorer David Livingstone, but who also live a historic moment for the Zambian nation, that of its decolonization/independence. Finally, it analyses the issues of Eurocentrism and Serpell’s willingness to decolonize the imaginary and the mind by focusing on alternative sources of historical knowledge: this enables both the characters and the readers to “wake up from the spell of Eurocentrism” in order to favour a form of “pluriversality”.

KEYWORDS:

• (De)colonization
• willfulness
• politics
• poetics
• history
• pluriversality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Clark (1875–1937) settled in Rhodesia at the beginning of the 20th century. While in Bulawayo, he met Cecil Rhodes. As he explains in his autobiography, he was also a photographer, and he opened the first souvenir shop at Victoria Falls in 1903.

2. A more thorough comparative study of Clark’s autobiography and Serpell’s chapter would be worth carrying out. This article was influenced by Guignery’s (2018) article.

3. According to Genette, hypertextuality is “any relationship uniting a text B (which I call the hypertext) to an earlier text A (I shall, of course, call it the hypotext), upon which it is grafted in a manner that is not that of commentary” (1997, 4).

4. In her short story “Zo’ona”, Serpell explains the meaning of this word: “The word wasn’t even a word, more of an exclamation. Zo’ona. What you say when someone speaks the truth. A kind of amen” (2016, 289).

5. In this passage, the interruption of the hegemonic use of the English language through the use of some words in the Bemba language, written in italics, is noticeable. According to Mbembe, “[c]olonialism rimes with mono-lingualism” and it leads to “colonial alienation” (2020, 69).

6. The Captain of the Portuguese garrison of Sofala, Viçente Pegado, who came across Great Zimbabwe in 1531, described a “fortress built of stones of marvellous size, and there appears to be no mortar joining them. [ … ] This edifice is almost surrounded by hills, upon which are others resembling it in the fashioning of stone and the absence of mortar” (quoted in Koutonin 2016, n.p.).

7. As shown by Mwandayi (2011), “[r]eaching the site of Great Zimbabwe on the eve of colonisation, European explorers were stunned by the immense ruins. It was almost impossible for them to believe how the black African ancestors of the people they were about to colonize and exploit could have had such skill and knowledge to build such an out of this world beauty” (38). In the eyes of European explorers, Africans could not have built this site as it would have shown they were gifted and as capable as any other “race” to build impressive architectural sites.

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Cédric Courtois

Cédric Courtois is Senior Lecturer in Anglophone studies at the University of Lille, France. He specialises in Nigerian literature, which was the focus of his PhD dissertation on contemporary Nigerian rewritings of the Bildungsroman. He has published various articles and book chapters on mobility studies, refugee literature, LGBTQIA+ studies, among other topics. His recent publications include “Visibilizing ‘Those Who Have No Part’: LGBTQIA+ Representation in Contemporary Nigerian Fiction in English” (2022) for Études anglaises; “‘Into the Mutation’: Osahon Ize-Iyamu’s ‘More Sea than Tar’ as Climate Fiction” (2021) for Commonwealth Essays and Studies; “Bernardine Evaristo’s ‘Black’ British Amazons: Aesthetics and Politics in Girl, Woman, Other” (2021) for Études britanniques contemporaines.