Namwali Serpell’s exploration of climate catastrophe on the Zambesi River

Serpell says:

“When we talk about climate change, we talk about our inability to predict and control what’s coming, to step into the same river twice. We’re out of time, in more than one sense: We’ve fallen out of rhythm with the circulatory relations between sun and rain and earth. We’ve damned ourselves, foreclosed some of the future’s forking paths….But the subjunctive mood – when it comes to rivers, when it comes to time – doesn’t move in only one direction. If we look back, it’s clear: It didn’t have to be this way.”

[See https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/22/magazine/zambia-kariba-dam.html]

Namwali Serpell’s beautiful essay, River of Time, from where the above quote comes from, is an exquisite exploration of colonialism, electricity, and power on and around the Kariba Dam, a dam which holds back the largest reservoir of water in the world at the borderlands of Zambia and Zimbabwe in Africa.  The history of the Kariba Dam in the British conquest, its poor design entrapping the Zambezi river and the consequent dislocation of people from their original places, all are  intimate parts of this larger story. The colonial powers’ need to dominate the landscape and channel economic profits into their own lands, leaving most of the people living around the Zambesi river without electricity, is clearly laid out.

Serpell ends with a poetic tribute to the people whose knowledge of the river was not valued during those times. She asks a vital question: “What would paying attention and respect to their words have made possible?” The Tonga, for example, she argues, “knew the Zambezi. They knew that a river keeps time, not like a clock but like a chronicle. They knew its sediments and grooves, the patterns of the beings dwelling within it and nearby, its might and its tendencies….a river so powerful that it seemed that a god must live inside it…. They knew that you don’t stop a river you move over, through and with it. You follow its paths. You may step into it as often as you wish, but you do not stay.” It speaks of a humble openness to one of the greatest rivers on the planet, the Zambezi, and echoes an urgent and necessary  humility we need to relearn in the present moment.

Serpell is one of the most dazzling new African writers to arrive on the scene over the past few years; her range in publishing articles on fiction, music, and now climate is stunning. She came to a wider attention when Salman Rushdie in March 2019 praised her new novel, The Old Drift, in a leading NYT Book Review article: [see Salman Rushdie Reviews a Sweeping Debut About the Roots of Modern Zambia]

When I spoke to her soon after at a new book party in Berkeley with the Bay Area Book Festival, last April 2019, eons before the current Covid-19 crisis, she said, her eyes shining, that article by Rushdie leapfrogged her visibility to an unimaginable new level. It utterly changed her life. She had a down to earth sensibility to her matched with a rare beauty and humility.

I highly recommend her thick, engrossing novel, The Old Drift. It is a dazzling fictional debut. Engrossing on every page, it moves with ease and felicity through history, colonialism, dam building, and magic realism, science fiction, and she even has animated swarms of bees who act as a greek chorus. Serpell’s prose is lustrous on every page. She even has a character go to my kula dev, or household god’s temple in Tirupati in southern India. She catches each detail so empathetically.

Her work, her sensibility, her many gifts reminds me of two of my favorite Indian writers – Amitav Ghosh and Arundhati Roy – and two of my favorite American writers – Peter Matthiessen and W.S. Merwin. All four give their best intelligence to both fiction and non-fiction, a rare feat in any of our many worlds.