MyWeku

 

Best known for her writing and academic work, Namwali Serpell, a Zambian who holds a Ph.D from Harvard University, has made it onto the shortlist for the Caine Prize 2010 with Muzungu. Her story, Muzungu,  from ‘The Best American Short Stories 2009′, in her own words helps her understand “the sadness and exhaustion of race; how events can press against each other; the disruption of the solipsism of childhood, a breaking out into being seen by others but also into being with them”

Namwali Serpell joins fellow shortlisted writers, Lily Mabura (Kenya), Ken Barris (South Africa), Alex Smith (South Africa) and Olufemi Terry (Sierra Leone).

How did you hear about your selection for the Caine Prize shortlist and how did you feel?

I was sitting in a tea shop with my dear friend, Swati Rana, in the middle of our weekly writing group session when I received a forwarded email from Heidi Pitlor, the series editor of The Best American Short Stories, who was kind enough to nominate me. I felt surprised and then very, very happy–it took a few minutes for it to sink in.

How would you describe Muzungu and where did you find the urge to write it?

I wrote Muzungu one long, summer afternoon in my old apartment on Washington Street in Somerville, MA, where I was living while attending graduate school. The story is, as always, a clutter of real things. My father, who is white, once told me about being used as a sort of game to scare children in a rural village he was visiting. It struck me then as an uncanny reversal of what I’d gathered from reading and living about being called out as black. I can’t explain exactly what made me gather certain converted memories–mirrors, guava trees, our dogs Benjy and Casper, a flutter of birds in the suburbs of Baltimore–together around this moment. What others have said about the story helps me understand some of what I wanted to capture: the sadness and exhaustion of race; how events can press against each other; the disruption of the solipsism of childhood, a breaking out into being seen by others but also into being with them.

The Chair of the judging panel for the Caine Prize, Fiammetta Rocco, has described Muzungu as “an incredibly rich story about a very well-explored subject”. Did your interest in ethics play a role in exploring the connections between the white family and their black servants?

My academic work (on ethics and literature) and my creative work (on whatever it may be) interact in mysterious ways. I think the two sides of me function in a kind of split, silent co-existence. If my scholarship speaks to my writing, I am not entirely privy to the conversation.

How do you juggle an intensive academic career with writing?

Every time I am put upon to make a choice between writing fiction and writing about it, I end up doing both. Time seems to stretch to make this possible–or maybe I’m making up for lost time. I tend to work in bursts and so I divvy up the months–teaching and research during the semester; writing when school’s out. In the summer and winter holidays, I’ll devote half the time to writing a scholarly piece and the other half to creative writing. Writing stories is far less structured for me so during those periods, I’m doing a lot of lolling about, waiting for words. In the meantime, I tend to read novels; luckily, this serves both of my work interests, as well as my own pleasure.

You left Lusaka, Zambia at an early age. Has Zambia lost one of its daughters forever or do you plan on reconnecting in some way with the country at some point?

I’ve been back to Zambia many times since we moved to the States. We lived in Lusaka for a year when I was 15 and since my parents moved back in 2002, I’ve been back for several longish stints of 1-3 months, usually during the academic holidays. I’ll be going home for Christmas again this year. Zambia doesn’t yet accommodate dual citizenship so I keep resisting becoming a U.S. citizen, despite having lived here on a Green card for so long. I think I will continue straddling borders for a while. After all, it is my unlikely, hybrid national status–I can work and live in the U.K too–that made me eligible for both The Best American and the Caine prize. The fictions I invent, like my dreams, tend to roam freely across my home country and my adopted ones.

What words of wisdom will you like to give to budding writers, especially those in Africa who may one day wish to be as successful as you are?

First of all, read other people’s writing. Don’t write in a vacuum. Second, let other people read your writing. I have been involved for a decade with small writing groups (in Cambridge, Lusaka, and now in Berkeley). It’s very simple: three of us will get together once a week or so to discuss our writing. In the last couple of years, I have become a proselytizer for what my friend Mike Vazquez calls the “lock-down”: three hours a week, in an Internetless space, writing next to other people writing. That’s my advice in a nutshell: peer pressure! It helps you carve out an inviolable space to write but it also encourages you to share your work, which is crucial. I’ve always felt that to write without readers is not just lonely, it’s cowardly.

Anything else to add?

Read!