>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C. >> Mary Jane Deeb: Okay. Good afternoon everybody,
and welcome to the African and Middle East Division. I'm Mary-Jane Deeb,
chief of the division, and I'm happy to see you all
at this very exciting program with Professor Namwali Serpell. This is the first program of 2016 in
the ongoing library series entitled "Conversations with
African Poets and Writers." In October 2011, the African
section of the African and Middle Eastern Division
in partnership with the Poetry and Literature Center, headed by
Rob Casper and the African Society of the National Summit on Africa
then headed by Bernadette Paolo, launched a new program at the
Library of Congress consisting of conversations, interviews with
established and emerging poets, short story writers,
novelists and playwrights of continental and diasporic Africa. Four years later, the
series has become well-known and well-established and has brought
to the library and to our thinkers and leaders as well as to all those
who access the library's webcast around the world, some of
the best writers from Africa. From those who are no longer
with us like Chinua Achebe and Ally [inaudible], [inaudible]
professors of humanities at [inaudible] Universities. [inaudible]. Like Kiera [inaudible]. The boy is loaded of South Africa
to the new generation of writers like [inaudible] from
the [inaudible], Nigerian writer Igoni
Barrett, the poet [inaudible] of the Democratic Republic of
Congo, [inaudible] a Gambian poet. We bring them to you, to our patrons
and to everyone around the world and we want to let you know that
there's a great literary tradition that existed for quite a while but
that is blooming in full force now in the United States, in Europe,
on the continent in Africa and in many other places as well. And today we're delighted to welcome
to our series, Namwali Serpell, the 2015 game prize winner for
African Fiction and English. A bright star in the
firmament of African writers. But before we start the program, I would like to introduce
the new president of our partner organization,
the African Society of the National Summit
on Africa, Patricia Bain, who will address you in a moment. Patricia Bain was named president of
the African Society in January 2016. So officially just two months ago. Prior to assuming this role, she worked for 10 years
at the African Society. She served as a director of programs
where she supervised a staff of 6 and conducted educational programs and activities throughout the United
States and on the ground in Africa that reached thousands of students,
educators, and administrators. In this capacity she also
worked with many domestic and international partners
in devising strategies to heighten awareness and
provide information to millions of individuals worldwide. Mrs. Bain also worked as program
officer for the organization where she successfully
mobilized over 5,000 individuals to participate in programs
spanning many sectors and areas. A native of Uganda, Patricia's
knowledge of international issues, in particular the continent
of Africa resulted in her being selected
as a research fellow for the House Foreign Affairs
Sub-Committee on Africa for the late congressman Donald
Payne who served as chair. In this capacity, she conducted
research, wrote speeches, drafted memoranda, headed
organized hearings and interacted with the public at all levels in representing the
interests of the chairman. Patricia Bain worked at the
Embassy of Uganda in [inaudible] in the Office of Consulate Affairs as a special assistant
to the ambassador. She graduated from the University of
Virginia in May 2001 with a bachelor of arts in international relations. Patricia Bain. [ Applause ] >> Patricia Bain: Thank
you Dr. Deeb. Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. Today I'm thrilled to say that I'm
also here with our CEO and chairman of the board Ambassador
Pamela Bridgewater. Please stand and be recognized. [ Applause ] Together we represent the new
leadership at the African Society, and we are very honored and
pleased to continue this series with the Library of
Congress, the Africa Section, the section of the African
and Middle Eastern Division and the poetry and literature
center of the Library of Congress. Because the African Society's
mission is to educate Americans about Africa, the cultures,
the countries, economies, and the contributions that emanate
from the different countries of the continent of Africa,
and we tell a different story from what you generally
see in the media. African literature
and poetry is vital to communicating a contemporary
and evolving image of Africa. And so, we look for it to hearing
from a vital creative voice in Professor Namwali Serpell. The first Zambian to win the Caine
Prize winner for African writing, and one who shared her prize money with the other four
short-listed writers which I thought was very amazing. [ Applause ] We appreciate your
participation here today, and we also welcome those who will
be seeing this webcast in the future and join the conversation
and get some questions ready. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Robert Casper: Hi everyone. I am Rob Casper, the head of the
Poetry and Literature Center here at the Library of Congress. We're thrilled to be working
with Patricia in her new role. A big congratulations to her. She's been part of the African
Society as you heard from Mary Jane for 10 years and now it's to help
us shape this series and continue to do amazing work
at that organization. I also want to thank again Mary
Jane [inaudible] African/Middle East Division, as well as the Caine
Prize for African Writing and the Lannan Center for Poetry and
Poetics at Georgetown University, which hosts the Caine
Prize residency. This is the first time the Library
of Congress is officially partnering with the Caine Prize
and the Lannan Center, and we couldn't be
happier about doing so. So let me take this opportunity to
ask you to turn off your cell phones and any other electronic
devices that you have that might interfere
with this event. Second, I want to tell you that
this program is being recorded for webcast and by participating
you give us permission for future use of that recording. Before I get into today's program
and explain it a little bit, let me tell you about the
Poetry and Literature Center. We are home to the Poet Warrior
[inaudible] poetry, and we put on 40 such programs throughout the
year, both here at the library within the district
and around the country. To find out more about this series
and any other literary programs at the Library of Congress, you can visit our website
www.loc.gov/poetry. You can also find out more about the
African and Middle Eastern division and view webcasts in our
conversations with African poets and writers series on
their website, www. /loc/gov/rr/amed. We're delighted to feature
Namwali Serpell today to read from her Caine Prize
winning story "The Sack." Miss Serpell will also participate
in a moderated discussion with AMED area specialist,
Laverne Paige, and we'll leave time after their moderated discussions
for questions from the audience. We have two mics. We'll bring a mic around so
we can record your question. Namwali Serpell's first published
story "Muzungu" was selected for the best American short
stories of 2009 and short-listed for the 2010 Caine Prize
for African writing. She got the second go round. She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation
Writer's Award in 2011, and in 2014, she was selected as one of the
most promising African writers for the Africa 39 Anthology,
a project of the Hay Festival. Her writing has appeared in Tin
House, the Believer, and Plus one, Callaloo, the Guardian
and elsewhere. Serpell is currently working on
a book of essays "Facebooks", and a novel "The Old Drift." She is an associate professor
of English at the University of California Berkley, and her
first book of literary criticism "Seven Mods of Uncertainty"
was published in 2014. And now please join me in welcoming
the 2015 Caine Prize winner, Namwali Serpell. >> Namwali Serpell: Hello. Thank you to everyone for coming and
thank you so much to the organizers. I'm going to read a little bit of
"The Sack" which is the short story that won the Caine Prize,
and then I'm going to read from a different story
that just came out. I think just launching
at this month. "There's a sack." "A sack?" "A sack." Hmm. A sack. Big? Yes. Gray. Like old [inaudible]. Marks on the outside. No shadows. That's how I know it is moving. Something is moving inside it? The whole sack is moving. Down a dirt road with a ditch on the
side with grass and yellow flowers. There are trees above. Is it dark? Yes, but light is coming. It is morning. There's some small
birds talking, moving. The sack is dragging on the ground. There's a man pulling it behind him. Who is this man? I can't see his face. He is tallish. His shirt has stains on the back. No socks. Business man shoes. His hands are wet. Does he see you? I don't know. I'm tired now. Close the curtains. Yes, Wana. Jay left the bedroom
and went to the kitchen. The wooden door was open but the
metal security gate was closed. The sky looked bruised. The insects would be coming soon. They had already begun their
electric clicking in the garden. He thought of the man
in the bedroom, hating him in that tender way he
had cultivated over the years. Jay washed the plates from lunch. He swept. A chicken outside
made a popping sound. Jay sucked his teeth and
went to see what was wrong. The [inaudible] boy was standing
outside the security gate. The boy held the bucket
handle with both hands. The insides of his
elbows splayed taught. His legs were streaked
white and gray. "How do you expect me to know
you are here if you are quiet?" Jay asked as he opened the gate. The boy shrugged, a smile
dancing upwards and then receding into the settled indifference
of his face. Jay told the boy to
take off his pata pata's and reach for the bucket. Groaning with its weight, Jay heaved
the unwielding thing into the sink. He could just make out the
shape of the bream flush against the inside of the bucket. It's thin, protruding. Jay felt the water shift as
the fish turned uneasily. "A big one today, eh?" Jay turned and smiled. The boy still stood by the door. His hands clasped in front of him. His legs were reflected in a conclave floor
making him seem taller. "Do you want something to eat?" The boy accented with
a diagonal nod. "You should eat the fish you catch. It is the only way to
survive," Jay said. I told him about the first dream, but I did not tell
him about the second. In the second dream,
I am inside the sack. The cloth of it is pressing
right down on my eyes. I turn one way, then the other. All I can see is gray cloth. There is no pain, but I can feel
the ground against my bones. I am curled up. I hear the sound of the sack
sweeping like a slow broom. I've been paying him long enough. Paying down his debt that he
should treat me like a real B'wana. He does his duties; yes,
but he lacks deference. His politics would not admit this, but I have known this man
since we were children. I know what the color of my skin
means to someone of our generation. His eyes have changed. I think he is going to kill me. I think that is what these
dreams are telling me. Nala, I cannot remember your hands. Thank you. [ Applause ] I'm just going to read a little bit
from this -- this is a new story. So when I won the Caine Prize,
the writer Tracey Chevalier, infamous for writing "Girl
with the Pearl Earring" wrote to me having read an
interview I had given with "The Economist" in London. They asked me, "What
literary character do you must identify with?" So I listed a bunch of them
because I tend to be multi-voiced and identify with many people. One of the characters
I said was Jane Eyre who I said was my spiritual twin. So she wrote to me and she
said, "Oh, you must write for this collection
of stories inspired by Jane Eyre called
"Reader I married him." And it's all female writers;
British and American Canadian. There's a woman from Istanbul, and
I wrote a story about a wedding. I'll just read the beginning of it. It's called "Double Men." A friendship that fails
to negotiate dogs and chickens is doomed to wither. Even a friendship that has weathered
decades of hardship and tedium. Mama Lota and Nangela had
raised their children together, performed birth and
death rites in tandem, carried loads light
and heavy as one. Now that there were no men
left in their households, they depended on each other,
hooked to their everday's, the tasks attending
to body and home, and a small field they grew enough
greens, beans, potatoes, cassava, yams, ground nuts, and maize to feed
themselves; and kept the surplus in Mama Lota's storehouse. They gave the damaged
but edible leftovers to widows even less
fortunate than they. Mama Lota bought the dogs because the storehouse
had been robbed again. This time she had caught
them in the act. She burst through the
door with furious shouts for [inaudible] her barely
fair-haired, uncovered, light spoken erratically from
the lantern she held aloft. The boys fled crawling from her
hail storm except for one boy who Mama Lota speculated later
to N'angela must have been raised by a bitter woman who beat
him too hard and too often. His lackeys scurried
pitifully around him, but this boy alone stood lengthening
up like a thread of smoke. His fist wrapped around a
stone Mama Lota had thrown. He spat and threw it back. It struck her above her left eye,
knocked her over, knocked her out, and turned her eyebrow into
a red smear that healed later into a purple crust which everyone
said made sense since her husband, long deceased, had been a pastor. Those thieving boys had broken
in through the one small window in the storehouse across
from the locked entrance. When Mama Lota toppled
across the threshold, they ran away through the
door she burst through, ran right over her body. Their pockets and hands full
of all they planned to sell. And just for the sake of
it, they stole the lantern that had tumbled from her hand. This was why Mama Lota
had sent her nephew to purchase the Doberman Pinchers. Not because of the stolen
food, nor the requited stone, nor even the wound it had opened. It was this pettiness of taking her
lamp which her husband had received as a boy from a Muzungu hunter
he had fetched game for, and which he had polished
every night of their marriage whistling
pleasantly through the gap in his front teeth. Mama Lota liked to
remember him this way. Nearby, his mouth and
hands occupied. And now the glass and metal
thing that reminded her of a lost person, it too, was gone. They can't even use it Mama Lota
complained in her high soft voice as she poured N'angela a
cup of tea a few days later. "Where will they find a paraffin? [inaudible] those boys." N'angela replied in her
trembly baritone glancing at the bandage over
her friend's eye. They were in Mama Lota's
kitchen sitting on a pair of rickety chairs inherited from the
church when Pastor [inaudible] died. The women watched the steam
untangle above their teacups, shaking their heads at the
old familiar nightmare, able-bodied males with
nothing to lose. A ferocious noise scrapped
through the window. A snarling, snatching sound. N'angela started. The dogs were quarreling. "What is it good to have
these Doberman around?" She shuddered. "They're like demons." "The Doberman breed is
good for protection. I picked the angriest ones,"
Mama Lota smiled and frowned. "I'm not going to suffer for some
stupid child who throws stones at his elders and just takes." She stuck her teeth. "I don't know." N'angela shook her head. "I think they're eating
our chickens." The Doberman's were
indeed rapacious. They had rather sensibly begun to supplement the leftovers Mama
Lota gave them with mice and birds and snakes, and yes,
the occasional chicken from the coop behind the storehouse. The fonder they became of her, the more little broken corpses
would the two young dogs lay at Mama Lota's feet. She'd picked the carrying gifts
off her steps with a grimace and scold the grinning beasts. Foolish monkeys. She'd frown and then smile
patting them on their warm, flat, black foreheads as they wagged the
knots where their tails had been. But they were not foolish. That was a sentimental view to
take about such vicious creatures. N'angela discovered how
vicious the very next morning. >> Laverne Paige: My name is Laverne
Paige, and I'm in the African and Middle Eastern Division. I would like to introduce
you again to our speaker and tell you a few personal
things about her, such as the fact that she's originally from
Lusaka, Zambia in Southern Africa where her family still lives. And her father is the professor
of psychology at the University of Zambia, and we have several
of his works here at the Library of Congress in our collections. Her mother is an economist and
has worked for a while with UNDP, the United Nations
Development Program. Professor Serpell moved to
Baltimore when she was 9, and she was educated here in the US. She received her B.A. from Yale
and her Ph.D. from Harvard, and she's lived in
California since 2008 where she is an associate professor
of English at the University of California Berkley
which we've been told. Her research work is in
contemporary fiction and film. Her work concerns the relationship
between aesthetic reception, affect, and ethics, and we've been told
also that she's currently working on a book of essays and a novel. I'm very interested in the
Baltimore part of her story. She grew up there. She started writing quite early. And so, I'm just wondering, when
exactly first started writing and why did you turn to fiction? >> Namwali Serpell:
Thank you so much. I'm going do the questions. So my family moved to Baltimore
in 1989 and it's from around then, and there's a little red notebook
that my parents found recently and sent to me, and it has my
name very carefully written on the inside; and it
has ideas for stories. Some of them I think I thought
were going to be actual novels but they've yet to risen. But they had titles like
"Gymnastics and Horses Don't Rhyme" which was a story about a girl
who had a mother and a step-mother and each of them likes
the other's horse. So the mother liked horses and
the stepmother likes gymnastics and the little girl tries to
figure out how to please them both and eventually does an
acrobatic routine on a horse. I think that was because I
had not encountered divorce until I came to America. I knew about divorce because
my father was divorced, but the idea that you had these
two families that you would go back and forth, that was new to me. There was a story about
a murder mystery where the witness said they'd seen
something from the side of the road and the police officer says, "No. That's not possible because in this
country we drive on the other side of the road," because it
was a British witness. So again, there were all of
these moments where I was trying to understand my new context;
and so, in some way I feel like immigration itself was the
inspiration for me to start writing. I mean there's lots of
other funny little stories. One was called "Weird Science"
about reading other people's minds. I think you could get to
that point where you're just about to become an
adolescent and you realize that there are other people. And so, in that transitional stage
is when I really started writing. >> Laverne Paige: Okay. I'm, again, still interested
in Baltimore. You early life here. Did you read your stories
in your schoolroom? Did you share them
with other children? >> Namwali Serpell: Well,
my mom was really excited. There was a story that
I started writing about the invention of the alphabet. That was a school assignment. You had to write a story. I had a bunch of people sitting
in a room and someone said, "Aah" that's our A's,
and then a B flew by. The [inaudible] before the
horse I think a little bit. So she was very excited about that. And so, that's definitely a
story that I read in school. But I was very interested
in math and English. So the hard sciences and the
very, very human/humanities. So my parents are both
social scientists; psychology and economics, but I always
gravitated to the edges. And I actually ended
up going to a math and science magnet
program in high school. And some of you may
know the school actually because it featured very prominently on an NPR radio show
called "Cereal." So there's a school called
Woodlawn High School -- yes, some of you are nodding. So I went to that school. I was in that magnet program then. I didn't quite overlap with the
main figures in that radio show. So I started on at
Yale doing biochemistry because I was interested in
the sciences and then switched to English pretty rapidly. But much to my mother's dismay. I grew up in the suburbs
of Baltimore so we didn't live in the inner city. We lived in a prominently
Jewish neighborhood actually so we were the only brown
people in the neighborhood. But the school I went to, the
magnet school which we would drive to everyday was predominantly
brown; brown and black. The magnet program inside
the school was mostly white and there was me inside
the magnet program. So it was like I was the chocolate
chip in the whipped cream. The racial politics of Baltimore
were very striking for my family. I'm mixed race. My father is British/White. He's British of origin. He's a Zambian citizen and has
lived there most of his life. And my mother is Zambian. And in Zambia, some of you may
know that in African countries, there's a category
for mixed race people. Sometimes it's called colored. Sometimes it's called mixed. I grew up in Lusaka in a
very international context. We lived by the university. I had friends who were Indian. I had friends who were Zambian. I had friends who were white. It was just a very diverse community
and I was born into this family in which race was kind of taken for
granted as something inconsequential when it came to how
you were treated. And when we came to the states
there was immediately an imperative to choose. You had to choose. Are you black or are you white? "Why do you talk that way,"
and that sort of thing. So there was a lot
of pressure to fit into the binary logic in the states. It's so nice to have a president
who is Halfrican as we'd like to say and is also American
because it's like, "Oh okay, this is recognizable now." This experience is now
something people talk about. "Americanah" by Chimamanda
Ngozi Adiche. That's one of the recent novels
from Africa that I quite like. And I really wish that had
been around when we moved. That that kind of story about
an African moving to America. [inaudible] we need their names
as another version of that, where it's an immigration story. >> Patricia Paige: I see. Let's flip to the other coast. You're an associate professor of
English in the English department at Berkley, and I'm
wondering if you can talk about how African literature
fits into that department. >> Namwali Serpell: Oh, that's
an interesting question. So I was hired ironically
as an Americanist because I'm not even a US citizen. But most of the novels in my
dissertation happened to be by Americans, and the ones
that were not promptly cut. Because when I went from an academic
job market all of the good jobs, all of the jobs worth pursuing
were Americanists jobs. So Berkley is very open-minded. So as soon as I got there they said
you can teach whatever you want and it's fine. And most of what I taught
has been post 2000 fiction. I've taught a lot of
contemporary fiction and I've only just started
teaching African literature, and I've taught it in the context
of a class on black science fiction, which was a diasporic class so we
looked at texts from the states, texts from the Caribbean,
texts from Africa. So in the context of my own
teaching, I mostly taught British and American fiction because
that was what I was hired to do, but I've recently been branching
out into African fiction. >> Patricia Paige: Okay. Did you say black science fiction? >> Namwali Serpell: I did. I said black science fiction. >> Patricia Paige: This is the 10th
anniversary Octavia Butler died about ten years ago. >> Namwali Serpell: Is that right. I didn't know. I know they're making -- they're
finally making a TV show out of her, "Parable of the Sowers," the
series which has been around and it's an amazing work. I taught several of her
short stories in that class. I like her books. >> Laverne Paige: Thank you. Let' see. I have so many
questions here and so little time. Okay. If you could tell us
about your current projects. Your book of essays and novels. I'm curious also about the style
of writing that you've described where you write in verse. And so, with the novel, that's
a big burst or how you do this. So I'm just wondering how
this affects your writing of longer pieces? >> Namwali Serpell: Sure. So the book of essays that I'm
working on is the second work of fellowship that I'm expected
to write for my job at Berkley. My first book was called
"Seven Modes of Uncertainty." That's about the reading
experience of encountering text like Tony Morrison's "Love it"
or Lolita or "By the [inaudible]" or " The Crying of Lot 49" by
Thomas Pynchon showed these novels that confront you with kind of
deep puzzlement as to what happened or why it happened, and at the
same time crosses that uncertainty of knowledge with an
ethical problem. So in "Beloved" obviously
slavery and infanticide, and in "Lolita" pedophilia. So you're confronted with not
knowing exactly where you stand, and you're given this really kind
of intractable ethical problem. And I was interested in whether
this is actually useful for us, reading these kinds of texts
in thinking about how to be as a person and in terms of ethics. So I don't believe that reading
books makes us better people but I do think that books can serve
functionally as ethical philosophy. They can teach you how to think
about how to be a good person. So that was my first book. My second book takes up a particular
issue in ethical philosophy which is the face to face encounter,
which is A) an idea about how to interact with humans that is
very old from ancient philosophy, you know, it's in the
bible has been taken up by a Jewish philosopher most
recently Emmanuel [inaudible]. What I'm interested in is -- well,
what happens when you look at kind of weird faces, the animal
face, the mixed race face, that the passing face,
is it white or black? I look at faces that have been
damaged and then repaired. So it's a series of chapters about
faces and the most recent chapter that I wrote is about emoji's
because I was interested in a language made of faces. So I just gave a talk about that. The novel is called "The Old Drift" and it's the great Zambian novel you
didn't know you were waiting for. And I'd published parts of
that novel over the years. So while I was getting my Ph.D.
and while I was getting tenure at Berkley, I was also
writing fiction. And so, I've published
I think four pieces of this novel as short stories. So "The Sack" is in fact, the
last chapter of this novel. So this is how I work in bursts. In that, I don't go in order. So I can go kind of across a text,
and I've had this novel in my head since I was 21 so I've been
developing it over time and working on other stories as well
and working on other novels, but because "The Sack"
is part of the novel, the momentum from winning
the prize allowed us to -- me and my agent to sell the novel
so it's going to come out in 2018 with [inaudible] which
I'm very pleased about. So I'm hard at work on it right now. >> Laverne Paige: The Zambian novel. I understand that you
travel annually to Zambia. So could you tell us something
about the literary scene in Zambia? Do you feel connected there? Would you consider teaching there? And how does this compare to your
connection with American writers? >> Namwali Serpell:
That's a good question. So my parents moved back in 2002
and since then I go back every year; for a while every other
year because I was broke. Now I go back much more frequently. Last year I was there four times. I'm going back on Thursday, actually because the Caine Prize
Workshop this year. So every year after the prize,
the year after the prize is given, the four and the five short-listed
writers go to a country in Africa and you have a ten day workshop
with local students and with writers from around the continent. And so, the last time when I was
nominated we went to Cameroon and this time we're going to
Zambia which is wonderful for me. So I've had a lot of contact with
the Pen Club, the Pen Society. I can't remember exactly how they go
by but in [inaudible] which is made up of young writers and they meet
every other week at the [inaudible] and they talk about
their work in progress. I've recently became
aware of a new outfit, the Lusaka Book Club,
which is just wonderful. So they organized an event for me in
September, a reading for me at home, and it was just wonderful. And it's just people in the
community who are interested in reading and so we had a breakfast
and they asked me all sorts of questions about my story. Then the University of Zambia. So my dad has been involved
there for a long time. He's been teaching at
the department there. He was vice-chancellor
there for a minute. So I had some contact with the
literature department there. But I'll be very frank with you. When it comes to teaching
there, I considered it when I was a graduate student
when I was home for one summer, I spent a lot of time at
the literature department, and I felt that I couldn't
thrive there because of the in-built sexism. That's a problem in English
departments across the world. But there, it felt particularly
pervasive to me; and so, I just felt like that
wasn't an option for me. But to teach there in terms
of teaching a workshop, I did a workshop at the
American International School. I've done a little workshop with some primary school
kids when I was home last. That kind of teaching I might do, but at the university
level, I'm not quite sure. >> Laverne Paige: Afterwards I'll
ask you more about the book club. >> Namwali Serpell: Yeah. Sure. >> Laverne Paige: That's
very interesting to me. I'm wondering about African writers. Your favorites. You seem to read all
over the place, and so, also your favorite American writers. >> Namwali Serpell: Yeah. So I'll give you an old writer that
I love and a new writer that I love. So when I was quite young I
was introduced to the work of Betsey [inaudible] who
is Botswanan born but lived in South Africa then
went back to Botswana. She wrote a book called
[inaudible] and that was very, very powerful for me
as a young woman. Most recently, Binyavanga Wainaina
who won the Caine Prize early on and used his prize
money to start Kwani which is a Kenyan publishing
house but also magazine. His kind of semi-fictional
least beautifully memoir, "One Day I Will Write
About This Place" is one of my favorite new
texts coming out today. As for American novelists, Tony
Morrison and Vladimir Nabokov who I mentioned earlier are kind of
my auntie and uncle I think of them. Uncle Vlad. I talk about Auntie Tony. What I admire about both of them is
they seemed to both have been born with a completely self-sufficient
sense of their worth as writers and as people. Just completely confident, and it's
rare, and it's quite beautiful. Some people I think perceive it
as arrogance, but I think it comes with such a healthy dose
of humor in both of them. People don't often comment on how
funny Tony Morrison's novels are, but they are quite funny. Even Beloved has jokes. >> Laverne Paige: Please
point them out. >> Namwali Serpell: I will. I will. There's an amazing
scene at the end of "Beloved" between Stamp Paid and Paul D.
and they're laughing about Setha. And they're like, "You can't
leave her alone with anybody." It's really funny. I think to have that kind
of self-possession combined with a sense of humor is
something to aspire to. >> Laverne Paige: Okay. Well, with time constraints, I should probably ask this last
question which we always ask. What do you think is the
future for African writers, both from the diaspora
and from the continent? What steps need to be taken
to bring more recognition from the international community? >> Namwali Serpell: I think a lot of
young African writers are aspiring to move beyond a kind of
binary thinking which is that you either write from within
the continent about African things which are recognizable to the
west, or you write this kind of immigrant narrative
that's on the other side. And so, this never
the twain shall meet. There's a kind of idea of
authencity and literary nest that don't always coincide in
the ways that we want them to. So I think being around
to talk about our work without becoming cultural
commentators or sociologists of where we're from is a big
push among young African writers, and I think on the other
hand, being allowed to write about whatever we want
is also really important. That kind of freedom to
express an African sensibility without necessarily African
troubles like child poverty or HIV, Aids or whatever it may be, is a
freedom I think all of us aspire to. So for this workshop that's coming
up, I've been having conversations with some of the other
short-listed writers about, "Well, what are we supposed to write?" Because it's going to be in
the Caine Prize anthology. Does it have to be a
story set in Africa? Because I've written
stories set in the states. I have ideas for novels
that are set in the states that don't necessarily
involve African characters. Sometimes they involve
African American characters. Sometimes white characters. And so, my friend,
she said she's going to write an African fairy tale,
a mini African Harry Potter. And I'm thinking about writing
something more experimental and more kind of oriented toward
an international perspective, so a series of interactions
between characters that are mostly over the Internet. So I think that's the future I
think, just the freedom to write about whatever you want and to have
African just be part of what you do but not necessarily constrained
by -- I think it's died. Not necessarily constrained by what people think African
means if that makes sense. >> Laverne Paige: We have
a lot to look forward to. That's all I can say
with your writing. And as for the -- we anticipated
having the anthology here but we don't. However, you can read the sack. It can be downloaded from the -- >> Namwali Serpell: From
the Caine Prize website. >> Laverne Paige: --
Caine Prize website, so you still have access to that. And I think now if
you have questions -- how much time do we have? About 15 minutes. Okay. So questions? >> Speaker 1: Thank you
very much professor. I was interested in your thing that
you interracially had been a theme and an inspiration for
you in your writing. In the context of [inaudible]
on immigration. Do you think that might be a
future topic for [inaudible]. >> Namwali Serpell: That's
an interesting question. So what's funny about me saying
that immigration was the spark is that I actually don't have any
immigration stories technically unless you count Time
Travel as an immigration. I have a story in which someone
who is raised in the west in the future time travels back
and geographically travels back to Africa, but obviously
that's much more speculative than addressing contemporary
issues of immigration. So I have not yet written my
Americana or my we need new names, and I'm not sure that I will. I kind of -- I very much enjoy
kind of having Africaness appear in my American fiction
in an indirect way; almost in a stylistic
way and vice versa. That said, my novel, "The Old
Drift" involves immigration but it involves telling the story of how people came from
the west to Zambia. So "The Old Drift" is the
title of it and it's named for an early colonial
settlement near what become known as Victoria Falls. We call it [inaudible] which
means the smoke that thunders. So before -- so just 20 years after David Livingston discovered
Victoria Falls, the British came over from what was then
Southern Rhodesia and came up. And they went across the
Zambezi and they went across on what's called a drift. So it's a calm place in the water
that you can drift things across, and they made a settlement
called the Old Drift. They also come to what
they call black fever which is actually malaria. So there's a little graveyard there
called the Old Drift Cemetery. And so, I'm interested in
those kinds of migrations or immigrations into Zambia. So I have people coming from India. People coming from England
and people coming from Italy. And as a way of understanding
the international kind of context in which I grew up
in the 70s, late 80s. So I'm interested in immigration
to Africa which is kind of reversal of the normal way of
thinking about it. But in terms of immigration
to America, that's still unchartered
territory for me. >> Laverne Paige: Those of us who
downloaded "The Sack" and read it, now that we know it's the
last chapter [inaudible]. Actually I love it. Is the whole book comprised
of chapters that have been published separately
as short stories, or was it designed to each chapter[inaudible]
stand alone? >> Namwali Serpell: So
it's not a big collection of like inter-linked stories. It's not a collection
of short stories. So my first published story
was "Muzungu" which I wrote in the context of writing
this novel. It was a chapter of the novel. I sent it to Callaloo with another
chapter, and they choose this one, and it was part of an issue that was
called "New Writing From Africa." They then nominated it for the
Caine Prize for short stories, and so then it got labeled a
short story and then it was in the best American short stories. And in fact, when I first
received the email saying I was in this collection, I said, "Well, my story is neither
American nor a short story." And they wrote back like, "No, no. It's okay." So that's happened a
couple of other times. "The Sack" as well. I sent to the Africa 39 Anthology
unlabeled and they wrote me and they said, "Is this a short? Should we write a story or say
it's a short coming novel?" And I said, "You know, I don't know
what the title of the novel is going to be so just publish
it as "The Sack," and then it was again
nominated as a story. I have actually written
short stories. It's not just that I keep
writing this generic line, but I've written a short story
called "The Book of Faces" which is the take on
Facebook and the Book of Job that's a self-contained
short story, and I've written a short
story called "Bottoms up" which is a sci-fi story as well. So I do write short stories,
but these just happen to be self-contained
chapters of the novel. >> Speaker 3: Thank you professor. It's lovely to be here. [inaudible]. >> Namwali Serpell:
Thanks for coming. >> Speaker 3: I actually
grew up near Yale, and I'm wondering what are
your experiences at Yale and how do they compare to
your experience at Berkley? [inaudible]. >> Namwali Serpell: Yeah. They were very, very different. So I went -- my parents encouraged
me to go to an ivy league school. I was very much under the impression
that it was just for rich people, and I went there to visit and I
really enjoyed it, and I thought, "This is just an amazing
opportunity," for which I only just
completed paying -- [ Laughter ] -- Paying off my student loans. And you know it was wonderful. It was very different
from Baltimore. I didn't really understand the
socio-economic politics at Yale. And I didn't know that people were
actually rich until I graduated, and I discovered that my
roommate's pearls were real. I thought they had to be fake. That sort of thing. But the FM center was a big
part of my kind of acculturation into learning about what it is
to be black and an ivy leaguer. And I started a poetry
circle there where it's like a poetry performance
monthly extravaganza. And I called it Black Coffee. I was very influenced by Love Jones. I don't know if any of
you know that movie. I said on the poster,
"Black-oriented but not black limited"
so it was open but it was Afro-centric in spirit. And we had a really fun time. Sometimes we had students from
Harvard come visit for the weekend and we gave performances,
and I sang. I wasn't much of a
[inaudible] but I liked to sing. I lived in New Haven for a
summer and I liked it a lot. I really love that city. I think the racial politics
at Berkley are quite different because of the overturning
of a proposition, I think, a few years before I got there. We can no longer use race as a
determining factor in who we admit and our population of black students
has accordingly dropped a lot. So it's something like 2%. So it's a very different campus from
what I experienced even at Yale. So the diversity on campus
is much more comprised of Asian American students and Latino/Latina Chicano/Chicana
students. So I've learned a lot
about those cultures and in teaching my classes that's
been a very interesting aspect is seeing these kind of forms
of cultural solidarity across the student population. >> Laverne Paige: What? Okay. One more question. [ Inaudible comment ] >> Speaker 4: Thanks
again for your talk. It was a great presentation. I have a multipart
question if that's okay. One, is there anything you took away
[inaudible] Baltimore [inaudible]? And two, do you have any claims
or aspirations to make one of your stories into a movie or a
play or some other kind of art form? >> Namwali Serpell: You know,
when I was a teenager I used to go to Fellow's Point a lot, and
there was a pizza place there. I don't know if it's still
there that had a pineapple pizza that me and my mom used to eat. So I know it's not very Baltimore, but that's just the
truth of my memory. We haven't been back in a long time. My sister passed away there and
I think that marked that space as a space of mourning
for my family. So we drifted around the D.C. area
since then and I have a lot of love for D.C. and for Baltimore, but sometimes it's more
of like a sad space. I think about the Nina
Simone song or her -- I think it's just her rendition
of the song about Baltimore. She says, "Baltimore ain't
it hard just to live?" And there's something about
that space that still for me, rings that bell in my heart. And I have a novel
that I've finished but who knows what's
going to happen to it? Which is set in the states and
is a noir so it has elements of crime fiction, and I
think that would be -- it has all these really
dramatic explosive moments like a bomb going off in an
airport and the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge
collapsing and stuff like that. So that will be fun to film. The Old Drift is about three
generations of three families, and the grandmothers all have these
kind of mythical elements to them. So one of them is born covered with
hair, and one of them is covered with eyes, and one of
them cries all the time; and I always think they would
be really wonderful to make into a graphic novel because
they're so kind of weird. It would be really fun to draw. >> Robert Casper: Well
thanks for that. Thanks Laverne. Thanks Nawali. Thanks for coming out. Look for Namwali Serpell's books
to come and please come back to our events both our
[inaudible] writers and events here in the African Relations Division. Thanks so much. >> Namwali Serpell: Thank you. >> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress. Visit us at Loc.gov.
