Back to Blog
The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell5/22/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() To me, blackness is just part of what the family is.” It’s a third term … So when I came to the States and I was asked, ‘Well, what are you?’, it was very difficult for me to negotiate the binary logic of you’re either black or you’re white.”Ī mixed-race identity rooted in Zambia may be a world away from one forged in the US, but when forced to decide, she chose to identify as black, “partly because I’m perceived as black”, but also because “the idea I could look at my mother and say to her that I’m not black makes no sense. “Obviously it has different connotations in the west, but at home that’s just what you’re called. ![]() “In Zambia the category for people like me has its own word, which is ‘coloured’,” she explains. But it wasn’t until the family moved to Baltimore in 1989 that Serpell was first confronted by the idea of racial identity being split into two distinct parts. Her father is a white, British psychology professor who became a Zambian citizen in 1978, while her mother’s parents were from two different tribes in the north of the country. What we think of as novel often emerges out of the combination of pre-existing cultures or traditions.”īorn in Lusaka in 1980, Serpell could almost be talking about herself. Instead of a problem that demands explanation, she explains, these collisions are at the heart of the creative process: “I don’t think there’s anything new under the sun. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |