#The Old Drift

[rhetoricandlogic]

‘The Old Drift’ Is a Dazzling Debut Spanning Four Generations

By Dwight Garner

March 25, 2019

Namwali Serpell’s audacious first novel, “The Old Drift,” is narrated in small part by a swarm of mosquitoes — “thin troubadours, the bare ruinous choir” — who declare themselves “man’s greatest nemesis.”

They’re a pipsqueak chorus, a thrumming collective intelligence, a comic and subversive hive mind. They are here to puncture, if you will, humanity’s pretensions.

“The Old Drift” is an intimate, brainy, gleaming epic, set mostly in what is now Zambia, the landlocked country in southern Africa. It closely tracks the fortunes of three families (black, white, brown) across four generations.

The plot pivots gracefully — this is a supremely confident literary performance — from accounts of the region’s early white colonizers and despoilers through the worst years of the AIDS crisis. It pushes into the near future, proposing a world in which flocking bug-size microdrones are a) fantastically cool and b) put to chilling totalitarian purposes.

Serpell’s mosquitoes observe the dozens of wriggling humans in this novel, and they are distinctly unimpressed. We were here before you, they imply. We will be here long after you are gone. In the meantime, thanks for the drinks.

The reader who picks up “The Old Drift” is likely to be more than simply impressed. This is a dazzling book, as ambitious as any first novel published this decade. It made the skin on the back of my neck prickle.

Serpell seems to want to stuff the entire world into her novel — biology, race, subjugation, revolutionary politics, technology — but it retains a human scale. It is filled with love stories, greedy sex (“my heart twerks for you,” one character comments), pot smoke, comedy, inopportune menstruation, car crashes, tennis, and the scorching pleasure and pain of long hours in hair salons.

Serpell is a Zambian writer; she was born in that country and moved to the United States with her family when she was nine. She teaches literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

There’s a vein of magical realism in her work — one woman cries almost literal rivers, another has hair that covers nearly her entire body and that grows several feet a day — that will spark warranted comparisons to novels such as Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” and Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

Serpell does not try to charm her readers to death. Her men and women are not cute (except, sometimes, to each other), and they are not caricatures. Even the most virulent racists in “The Old Drift” aren’t one-dimensional.

Serpell is a pitiless and often very funny observer of people and of society. She describes polo as “that strange game that seems like a drunken bet about golf and horse riding.” A man on a leather sofa is commended for “expertly unlocking that complex apparatus — a clothed woman.”

She offers this definition of “history”: “the word the English used for the record of every time a white man encountered something he had never seen and promptly claimed it as his own, often renaming it for good measure.”

Here she is on a young white woman in Zambia: “She seemed both weak and imperious, helpless yet haughty. In a word: British.”

This is a matrilineal epic. It is packed with grandmothers, mothers, daughters. They are hardly placed on pedestals or lit by false, ennobling, autumnal light. They’re all struggling. Some drop out of school, steal or dabble with skin-whitening creams. Some open businesses, others turn to prostitution. Still others turn to protest. Nearly all are hoping to find love and, in the interim, to avoid being raped.

This book is intensely concerned with women’s bodies. Dissertations will surely be written about the multiple meanings of hair in this novel. We’ve learned too much from male writers about what it’s like to walk the planet guided and plagued by one’s reproductive apparatus. This novel, with wit and sensitivity, flips and revises that familiar script.

One young woman gets her period on her wedding day. Her friends, her family, the many guests — they’re all here. “All she wanted,” Serpell writes, “was to be at home in bed, curled in a ball, alone and quietly bleeding.”

Serpell is keenly interested in olfactory information. She lingers on people and places and scent. In one scene, a blind woman smells eucalyptus and knows she is nearly home. In another, a mother dislikes her daughter’s “new teenagery smell,” described as “a melony-lemony-biscuity scent that Adriana found both puerile and daunting.”

The plot of “The Old Drift” is not simple to unpack. The book begins, at the start of the 20th century, at a colonial settlement on the banks of the Zambezi River called the Old Drift. A dam is being constructed that will change many lives, a dam that some will wish to bring down.

The first women we meet, beginning around 1940, are: Sibilla, a white girl so unusually hirsute that at one point later in life she will be referred to as “an NGO for hair”; Agnes, a “pale, mad” and blind British girl who marries a black professor and engineer; and Matha, a bright girl whose prospects collapse after she becomes pregnant. She is this novel’s copious weeper, “the heartbreak queen of Kalingalinga.”

We get to know their daughters. One operates “Hi-Fly Haircuttery & Designs Ltd” (and perhaps a shadier business); another is a stewardess who once had artistic ambitions. One of these daughters has a long affair with a doctor who is working on a vaccine for H.I.V.

About a potential vaccine, we get shrewd snippets of dialogue like this one: “‘Beta version,’ Naila scoffed. ‘They should just say black version. They’re testing it on us.’”

The third generation goes on to work on microdrones, on further AIDS research and on political protest, seeking redress for the wrongs of history. One character also works on the vexing future of wearable technology — digital beadlike chips, implanted into the skin, that with the help of permanent tattoos of conductive ink turn one’s hands into approximations of smartphones.

“Government is controlling us,” one character says near the end of the novel. “And the worst part is — we chose this. We held our hands out to them and said PLEASE BEAD US!”

Serpell carefully husbands her resources. She unspools her intricate and overlapping stories calmly. Small narrative hunches pay off big later, like cherries coming up on a slot machine.

Yet she’s such a generous writer. The people and the ideas in “The Old Drift,” like dervishes, are set whirling. When that whirling stops, you can hear the mosquitoes again. They’re still out there.

They sound like tiny drones. They sound like dread.

[ahkylous]

baby’s first wanted poster vs old man’s millionth one

it’s kinda hard to believe i’m able to redraw old stuff and see considerable improvement, cause this post was less than a year old and i’ve improved that much!!!?!

[im-here-homie]

So ur telling me garroth. Patched Laurance's wounds. When he went blind. So ur telling me.

[onebarofsoap]

girls who have issues

[somestorythoughts]

And what do we leave you in kind recompense? A salivary trace, a gum to stop your blood clotting. It’s harmless but forgein, and your body is foolish, so it attacks itself in dismay. Out gratuituous gift becomes a curse in effect: it sparks a histamine frenzy. This is the curse ot keeping too close, of binding and holding and steeping. To stay is to spoil: to settle, to stagnate; to protect, to become an ouroboros. Blood’s thicker than water, too thick by far - it clots and it scabs and it turns on itself in a heartbeat.  Trust our biology, it teaches you better. If you grip too tight, you’ll lose the fight. If you stay in one place, you’ll fester and waste. When young ones grow full, they must drift from the pool, lest it turn to a watery grave.

[overstimulated-autism-creature]

Placebo Meme

[pastelpaperplanes]

Art Dump!

Dwatchet and some Earthspark inspired stuff ✨

[keferon]

Day one of me trying to make better Drift figure than Hasbro ',:)

Okay okay so. I found this (checks the box) Gundam Aerial Model Kit? Look at this thing. It is basically already Drift. It has really similar type of figure and even finals:D I still need to find a way to make his massive shoulder plates though.

[0oxxo]

[porphyria-egl]

All the shots of Gothic Lolita fashion in Fast and Furious Tokyo Drift (2006)

[vintage-tigre]

[tinybro]

jason growing up in camp halfblood is just extremely funny to think about, like. camp halfblood is so much less organized than new rome and the responsible adult supervision is limited to pretty much just chiron. there are some older teen campers but demigods on the greek side don't tend to live very long, and a lot of campers only stay for the summer anyway.

now please consider whatever chaotic kids happen to be around at any given time collectively raising a toddler that can fly

[rehide]

the thing about hide is that he never once expressed visible hurt abt kaneki not telling him he's a ghoul. it was never a topic of discussion between them, not even in re when it's a much safer conversation to have. he never (at least openly) feels betrayed about it, and still uses his every action to get closer to kaneki and the ghoul world despite how cut off he's been from kaneki's life. and i'm sure hide was smart enough to realize that kaneki's avoidance was always about protecting him, but it's hard to imagine that he wasn't at least a little hurt at some point that kaneki wouldn't tell him. and then a couple hundred chapters later kaneki's stumbling over his words in a sewer and hide's telling him how he's always known, while offering up his own life for his.

[dreamscape0001]

[violetaquadelight]

When your Ex-bf meet your new bf 💅💅

[somestorythoughts]

Mosquitos-Moskeetoze

And who are we? Thin troubadours, the bare ruinous choir, a chorus of gossipy mites. Uncanny the singing that comes from certain husks. Neither gods nor ghosts nor spirits, we’re the effect of an elementary prinicple: with enough time, a swarm will evolve a conscience. Thus we’ve woven a wordly wily web, contrived a hive mind, if you will. Spindle bodies strung in a net of spacetime. Interested. Humming along.

O Error! It seems, while extolling your virtues, we have made some mistake sof our own. For one, we’re not sure we are who we said...Are we truely man’s enemy, Anopheles gambiae, or the microdrones Jacob designed? The problem is that we’ll still never know because...we’ve joined up with the local mosquitos. We get along fine, but can’t tell us apart in this loose net of nodes in the air.