![]() The families first encounter each other in “The Falls,” narrated. In The Old Drift the individual struggle is cast against a world of shifting principles and politics and Serpell captures the quicksand nature of a nation’s roiling change with exacting precision. This link is also illustrated by the three families’ existence and their connection to each other. Namwali Serpell excels in creating portraits of resilienceeach unique and often heartbreaking. The fall of the dam results in the destruction of Zambia and the beginning of Lusaka as a new socialist city-state, suggesting that until Kariba Dam falls, contemporary Zambia is and will continue to be inextricably linked to its colonial history. The dam continues to exist through the novel and is only destroyed accidentally by the children-turned-revolutionaries. The novel begins with the first instance of colonization in Zambia, which is emblematized by the construction of the Kariba Dam at the end of “Sibilla.” The dam is a manifestation of European colonial power over both the natural landscape and the indigenous Tonga people who are displaced by the dam. ![]() Clarke Award for science fiction, and the Grand Prix des Associations Littraires for Belles-Lettres. ![]() Her first novel, The Old Drift, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction that confronts racism and explores diversity, the Arthur C. Colonialism is a constant through Zambia’s history in The Old Drift. The New Yorker has written that it reinvents the elegy. ![]()
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