The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

Now, as her baby wept for hunger and as she herself wept distractedly – weeping was just what she did now, who she was – Matha felt that dawning shock that comes when you look at yourself and see a person you once might have pitied.

Matha Mwamba was not an escaped inmate. Nor was she the mother of Christ, nor a saint, nor a witch. But she was silent and unfriendly, and this served to confirm each one of the reputations that floated around the crying woman of Kalingalinga.

A ROOF WITHOUT HARVEY TILES IS LIKE A FACE WITHOUT A SMILE – IT MIGHT BE GLOOMY. A ROOF WITHOUT HARVEY TILES IS LIKE AN AEROPLANE WITHOUT A PILOT – IT WON’T FLY. A ROOF WITHOUT HARVEY TILES IS LIKE A SCHOOL WITHOUT TEACHERS – THERE WILL BE ILLITERACY.

For the rest of the day, she wandered around with this new crew, which lost and regrew members like a lizard as it moved deeper into the exotic delights of the show. At Lusaka’s 58th Agricultural and Commercial Show, Sylvia Mwamba saw for the first time: a man in bumshorts and a boa; a headless woman in a dark tent; an albino woman walking around in a chitenge just like someone’s mother; one zombie and his nation, dancing on a makeshift stage – a ‘Thriller’ performance; a woman who slapped a man’s face, then gasped at herself, a smile stealing to her lips; and a live penis. This last was by far the most riveting.

Loveness told her all about it. How you have to pull your malepe until they stretch – as long as your thumb – so that with the right stimulation, they swell with blood and grasp the man’s mbolo. ‘It’s simple,’ she said.

‘Halifogali, nevah said a sorree, jumped in a lorree

slept. In the front, the salon girls blow-dried and hotcombed and slathered lye on recalcitrant kink. They held lighters to the ends of braided wig extensions to keep them from unravelling, rolling them between spit-dampened fingers. The whole place reeked of burning – electrical, frictional, chemical – Sylvia’s girls sifting varieties of incineration as indifferently as demon drones in hell.

He’d clip his lips shut with them and waddle around like a duck, to make the girls laugh, to make his mother notice.

WeeeeeweeeEEEEweeeeeeEEEeeeeeeEEEEEeeeeWEEEEEEeeeeeeEEEeeee. We. On we drone, annoying on, ennuiing on with our wheedling onomatopoeia. Udzudzu. Munyinyi. Vexatious pests! But better than your barking with wet, pungent holes! We? We sing with our dry, beating wings. A plangent vibration adrift in the air, a song as gracile as the swarm itself, our buoyant undulant throng. Why do we sing? For love, naturally. At dusk or at dawn – the tipping of the day – our males hover over a chimney or a steeple. Around this post, they form a grey haze, a swirling mass of seduction. One by one, the females fly in, braving the entomological gauntlet. With quickspinning wings, each strums a keen air as she swoops through the chaos of men, and with their hairy antennae, they track her. Then comes the chase, the grapple, the fall – you humans have these rituals, too. The male on the bottom, the pair tightly lock, and after a minute or so, they part ways. On occasion, her grip is too tight and he’ll pay for a life with his nethers! If he escapes unscathed, he’ll do it again, six to eight times in his lifespan. But the female is done now – she has loved and lost once – and she has all that she needs for the breeding. A puddle, a pond, a lake, a river: she moves over the face of the waters. Hovering, she curtsies, and thrusts from her bottom a hundred fertilised eggs. She dive-bombs the surface with babies-to-be until a battalion awaits there. She gathers them into a small tapered craft, a canoe...

Isa’s parents had settled into life in Lusaka the way most expats do. They drank a lot. Every weekend was another house party, that neverending house party that has been swatting mosquitoes and swimming in gin and quinine for more than a century.

It was like a mosquito, that word – invisible but unavoidable – and it even sounded a bit like one: mwenye.

Sibilla had fought with her husband about this practically since they’d arrived in this country, from the moment she had tried to be an emissary for the Tonga villagers before the floods at Kariba. His callous dismissal of them, those old people who simply wished to drown with their gods, had made her see him in a new light. She had never tried to leave him – they shared too many secrets. What could she do without his protection? Where could she go? But Sibilla’s marriage had long felt like a handbag that she had neglected to empty out, that she still carried around even though she kept her money, handkerchief and comb elsewhere on her person.

‘This dress looks too bright,’ he mused. ‘Is white even a suitable colour for you?’ ‘Why are you so full of poison?’ Isa cried, then turned and swept off down the corridor.

He raised his stein to his lips, eyes gazing into the middle distance. Federico’s skin was an empty suit now. He lived elsewhere, in the past, wandering in a ruin of his own making. Why bother being kind in the present?

How unwise, he thought, to love someone in advance of knowing them.

It was a nice piece of rhetoric but Daddiji’s victory didn’t last long. Isa had two advantages over him: time on her hands and the need to be right, a need so intense that it often surpassed the original argument. Soon

Daddiji grinned stupidly: ‘Good morning, Nonna Sibilla! Fine-fine morning, isn’t it?’ ‘It is just okay,’ Sibilla mumbled and proceeded to the chicken coop. Naila would be awake soon. The child needed breakfast – and protection.

She wished to remain non-aligned in their peculiar Cold War.

What would become of Isa’s precious little girl if she were to wake up and look down and discover the final trump card in this stupid game between her parents: a blank price tag – or was it a receipt? – tied with a thread to her big toe?

This was the worst thing about being a sibling: you never knew when you would feel the chill.

She was wearing the uniform Isabella insisted on, a pink and white affair that made her look clownish under her magnificent headdress of long plaits – like a kudu in pantaloons.

They drove east, away from the orange sun. It rotted behind them, leaving pulpy stains in its place.

Blood, blood, glorious blood! Nothing quite like it for sating the gut. Don’t mistake our thirst for a catholic taste. In fact, it is rather selective. Only our females imbibe the red stuff, and only to nourish our ova. Nor are we wanton when it comes to bloodlust, just opportunistic and savvy. The more you brood and wallow about, the more we tend to devour you.

This is the curse of 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.

The belief in other minds – the realisation that other people have their own vibrant mental lives and are not merely projections of our own – seems to emerge between the ages of four and eight.

Daddy drank deeply from his glass of Scotch and laughed, but it wasn’t a happy laugh. It shot out, rat-a-tat-tat, and Lee was surprised to realise that it was aimed at his own stripey sweater. Was he not strong? Lee wiped off the oil smeared around his lips. Is that what Daddy meant? The worst part of his father’s cruelty was its inconsistency. Lee never knew when he was going to receive a cold look or a light smack or – and this hurt the most – a sneering insult.

As the years passed, Lee learned to track the seasons of his father’s animosity. Sometimes, Dad would lob insults like bombs with timers. The words would tick along innocuously – ‘foolish’, ‘soft’, ‘small’ – only to explode later into their full meaning: that his son was stupid and weak, a runt and a disappointment. Dad’s cruelty was not restricted to Lee.

This was the cringing face he wore around his father, as if his greedy entitlement had been replaced by fear. Disgusted, Thandi turned back around and walked out the door.

Thandi was ready. Every night, she lay beside her husband in bed, White Linen perfume seeping from her neck and tickling her nose. For a long time, she had been too preoccupied with caring for her son to mind that Lee had stopped having sex with her. Now that Joseph was almost self-sufficient when it came to food, clothing and shelter, she was ready to make another baby, a new needy being. But in the meantime, her co-creator had slipped away. Their marriage had ceased to be conjugal; his body did not conjugate hers; there was no grammar between them.

It was a small death every time.

‘It is very rude,’ said Grandpa. ‘She has dishonoured my son.’ They stared at him. He had always had a strained relationship with his son. Now that Lee was dead, Grandpa seemed unusually interested in honouring him, or at least in displaying that honour to others.

that satisfaction that lays over disappointment like the play of iridescence on the surface of an oil slick.

‘Our country is full of broken promise,’ said God. ‘But the promise never shatters completely – there’s never the total disaster, the catastrophe we need to start the revolution!’

God’s face was wrinkled and his dreads were matted, but he was still quick and strong. His hands were busy now, rolling two new joints of mbanji. ‘This is how we put revolution in the body!’ he laughed.

Once she gave up medicine, it wasn’t so hard to give up food. The resurgence of pain helped. It gripped her here and there over the course of the day, like an animal leisurely clenching its jaws around her body parts, its teeth puncturing her skin centimetre by centimetre, skewering her organs at the rate of a shadow’s creep.

Sylvia closed her eyes. I’m not sad, she thought as pain lackadaisically crunched into her back. I’m angry.

Mother had found him. Had she tried to shake him awake? Had she knelt at his feet? Had she washed them before they took him to the mortuary, before they slid him into the furnace at the crematorium? Ashes! Ashes! We all fall down …

Chitemene.

Naila was used to this by now. She was mixed and itinerant; she was Zambian here, Indian there, foreign and uncomfortably female everywhere.

Addicted to aid, indeed.

You limit yourselves to two dumb inertias: a state of rest or perpetual motion.

If errare humanum est indeed, then it follows that si fallor, sum.

‘I was thinking of the olden days, when the British first came here, a hundred years ago. Imagine the feelings of a local chief – what is the Tonga word? – a muunzi, chased suddenly to the north; run over the land across the region in a hurry and put in charge of one of these settlements that the white men – a lot of useless men they must have been, too – had built for 60,000 villagers in a month or two. It must have seemed like the end of the world, the soil full of lead, wood that burns too much smoke, ground hard as a rock. Chased from the Zambezi, without stores, under orders. No riverbanks, no marshes, no trees. The Tonga became scavengers, nothing to eat for a fishing culture, nothing but dirty water to drink. No bukoko beer, no escape. Scattered, a people lost in a wilderness, like a needle in a stack of hay. Cold, swamp, storms, disease, isolation. Death skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush. People dropping like flies.

The conquest of Africa, which meant stealing it from those with a darker complexion and flatter noses, is an ugly thing, men. Even worse was the idea at the back of it, not curiosity or love, but just belief in an idea – something they set up, and bowed to, and sacrificed us to—’