>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. ^M00:00:04 ^M00:00:20 >> Mary Jane Deeb: Okay. Good afternoon everybody, and welcome to the African and Middle East Division. I'm Mary-Jane Deeb, chief of the division, and I'm happy to see you all at this very exciting program with Professor Namwali Serpell. This is the first program of 2016 in the ongoing library series entitled "Conversations with African Poets and Writers." In October 2011, the African section of the African and Middle Eastern Division in partnership with the Poetry and Literature Center, headed by Rob Casper and the African Society of the National Summit on Africa then headed by Bernadette Paolo, launched a new program at the Library of Congress consisting of conversations, interviews with established and emerging poets, short story writers, novelists and playwrights of continental and diasporic Africa. Four years later, the series has become well-known and well-established and has brought to the library and to our thinkers and leaders as well as to all those who access the library's webcast around the world, some of the best writers from Africa. From those who are no longer with us like Chinua Achebe and Ally [inaudible], [inaudible] professors of humanities at [inaudible] Universities. [inaudible]. Like Kiera [inaudible]. The boy is loaded of South Africa to the new generation of writers like [inaudible] from the [inaudible], Nigerian writer Igoni Barrett, the poet [inaudible] of the Democratic Republic of Congo, [inaudible] a Gambian poet. We bring them to you, to our patrons and to everyone around the world and we want to let you know that there's a great literary tradition that existed for quite a while but that is blooming in full force now in the United States, in Europe, on the continent in Africa and in many other places as well. And today we're delighted to welcome to our series, Namwali Serpell, the 2015 game prize winner for African Fiction and English. A bright star in the firmament of African writers. But before we start the program, I would like to introduce the new president of our partner organization, the African Society of the National Summit on Africa, Patricia Bain, who will address you in a moment. Patricia Bain was named president of the African Society in January 2016. So officially just two months ago. Prior to assuming this role, she worked for 10 years at the African Society. She served as a director of programs where she supervised a staff of 6 and conducted educational programs and activities throughout the United States and on the ground in Africa that reached thousands of students, educators, and administrators. In this capacity she also worked with many domestic and international partners in devising strategies to heighten awareness and provide information to millions of individuals worldwide. Mrs. Bain also worked as program officer for the organization where she successfully mobilized over 5,000 individuals to participate in programs spanning many sectors and areas. A native of Uganda, Patricia's knowledge of international issues, in particular the continent of Africa resulted in her being selected as a research fellow for the House Foreign Affairs Sub-Committee on Africa for the late congressman Donald Payne who served as chair. In this capacity, she conducted research, wrote speeches, drafted memoranda, headed organized hearings and interacted with the public at all levels in representing the interests of the chairman. Patricia Bain worked at the Embassy of Uganda in [inaudible] in the Office of Consulate Affairs as a special assistant to the ambassador. She graduated from the University of Virginia in May 2001 with a bachelor of arts in international relations. Patricia Bain. ^M00:05:02 [ Applause ] ^M00:05:07 >> Patricia Bain: Thank you Dr. Deeb. Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. Today I'm thrilled to say that I'm also here with our CEO and chairman of the board Ambassador Pamela Bridgewater. Please stand and be recognized. ^M00:05:19 [ Applause ] ^M00:05:22 Together we represent the new leadership at the African Society, and we are very honored and pleased to continue this series with the Library of Congress, the Africa Section, the section of the African and Middle Eastern Division and the poetry and literature center of the Library of Congress. Because the African Society's mission is to educate Americans about Africa, the cultures, the countries, economies, and the contributions that emanate from the different countries of the continent of Africa, and we tell a different story from what you generally see in the media. African literature and poetry is vital to communicating a contemporary and evolving image of Africa. And so, we look for it to hearing from a vital creative voice in Professor Namwali Serpell. The first Zambian to win the Caine Prize winner for African writing, and one who shared her prize money with the other four short-listed writers which I thought was very amazing. ^M00:06:22 [ Applause ] ^M00:06:26 We appreciate your participation here today, and we also welcome those who will be seeing this webcast in the future and join the conversation and get some questions ready. Thank you. ^M00:06:39 [ Applause ] ^M00:06:45 >> Robert Casper: Hi everyone. I am Rob Casper, the head of the Poetry and Literature Center here at the Library of Congress. We're thrilled to be working with Patricia in her new role. A big congratulations to her. She's been part of the African Society as you heard from Mary Jane for 10 years and now it's to help us shape this series and continue to do amazing work at that organization. I also want to thank again Mary Jane [inaudible] African/Middle East Division, as well as the Caine Prize for African Writing and the Lannan Center for Poetry and Poetics at Georgetown University, which hosts the Caine Prize residency. This is the first time the Library of Congress is officially partnering with the Caine Prize and the Lannan Center, and we couldn't be happier about doing so. So let me take this opportunity to ask you to turn off your cell phones and any other electronic devices that you have that might interfere with this event. Second, I want to tell you that this program is being recorded for webcast and by participating you give us permission for future use of that recording. Before I get into today's program and explain it a little bit, let me tell you about the Poetry and Literature Center. We are home to the Poet Warrior [inaudible] poetry, and we put on 40 such programs throughout the year, both here at the library within the district and around the country. To find out more about this series and any other literary programs at the Library of Congress, you can visit our website www.loc.gov/poetry. You can also find out more about the African and Middle Eastern division and view webcasts in our conversations with African poets and writers series on their website, www./loc/gov/rr/amed. We're delighted to feature Namwali Serpell today to read from her Caine Prize winning story "The Sack." Miss Serpell will also participate in a moderated discussion with AMED area specialist, Laverne Paige, and we'll leave time after their moderated discussions for questions from the audience. We have two mics. We'll bring a mic around so we can record your question. Namwali Serpell's first published story "Muzungu" was selected for the best American short stories of 2009 and short-listed for the 2010 Caine Prize for African writing. She got the second go round. She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award in 2011, and in 2014, she was selected as one of the most promising African writers for the Africa 39 Anthology, a project of the Hay Festival. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, the Believer, and Plus one, Callaloo, the Guardian and elsewhere. Serpell is currently working on a book of essays "Facebooks", and a novel "The Old Drift." She is an associate professor of English at the University of California Berkley, and her first book of literary criticism "Seven Mods of Uncertainty" was published in 2014. And now please join me in welcoming the 2015 Caine Prize winner, Namwali Serpell. ^M00:10:01 >> Namwali Serpell: Hello. Thank you to everyone for coming and thank you so much to the organizers. I'm going to read a little bit of "The Sack" which is the short story that won the Caine Prize, and then I'm going to read from a different story that just came out. I think just launching at this month. ^M00:10:24 ^M00:10:31 "There's a sack." "A sack?" "A sack." Hmm. A sack. Big? Yes. Gray. Like old [inaudible]. Marks on the outside. No shadows. That's how I know it is moving. Something is moving inside it? The whole sack is moving. Down a dirt road with a ditch on the side with grass and yellow flowers. There are trees above. Is it dark? Yes, but light is coming. It is morning. There's some small birds talking, moving. The sack is dragging on the ground. There's a man pulling it behind him. Who is this man? I can't see his face. He is tallish. His shirt has stains on the back. No socks. Business man shoes. His hands are wet. Does he see you? I don't know. I'm tired now. Close the curtains. Yes, Wana. Jay left the bedroom and went to the kitchen. The wooden door was open but the metal security gate was closed. The sky looked bruised. The insects would be coming soon. They had already begun their electric clicking in the garden. He thought of the man in the bedroom, hating him in that tender way he had cultivated over the years. Jay washed the plates from lunch. He swept. A chicken outside made a popping sound. Jay sucked his teeth and went to see what was wrong. The [inaudible] boy was standing outside the security gate. The boy held the bucket handle with both hands. The insides of his elbows splayed taught. His legs were streaked white and gray. "How do you expect me to know you are here if you are quiet?" Jay asked as he opened the gate. The boy shrugged, a smile dancing upwards and then receding into the settled indifference of his face. Jay told the boy to take off his pata pata's and reach for the bucket. Groaning with its weight, Jay heaved the unwielding thing into the sink. He could just make out the shape of the bream flush against the inside of the bucket. It's thin, protruding. Jay felt the water shift as the fish turned uneasily. "A big one today, eh?" Jay turned and smiled. The boy still stood by the door. His hands clasped in front of him. His legs were reflected in a conclave floor making him seem taller. "Do you want something to eat?" The boy accented with a diagonal nod. "You should eat the fish you catch. It is the only way to survive," Jay said. I told him about the first dream, but I did not tell him about the second. In the second dream, I am inside the sack. The cloth of it is pressing right down on my eyes. I turn one way, then the other. All I can see is gray cloth. There is no pain, but I can feel the ground against my bones. I am curled up. I hear the sound of the sack sweeping like a slow broom. I've been paying him long enough. Paying down his debt that he should treat me like a real B'wana. He does his duties; yes, but he lacks deference. His politics would not admit this, but I have known this man since we were children. I know what the color of my skin means to someone of our generation. His eyes have changed. I think he is going to kill me. I think that is what these dreams are telling me. Nala, I cannot remember your hands. Thank you. ^M00:14:05 [ Applause ] ^M00:14:09 I'm just going to read a little bit from this -- this is a new story. So when I won the Caine Prize, the writer Tracey Chevalier, infamous for writing "Girl with the Pearl Earring" wrote to me having read an interview I had given with "The Economist" in London. They asked me, "What literary character do you must identify with?" So I listed a bunch of them because I tend to be multi-voiced and identify with many people. One of the characters I said was Jane Eyre who I said was my spiritual twin. So she wrote to me and she said, "Oh, you must write for this collection of stories inspired by Jane Eyre called "Reader I married him." And it's all female writers; British and American Canadian. There's a woman from Istanbul, and I wrote a story about a wedding. I'll just read the beginning of it. It's called "Double Men." A friendship that fails to negotiate dogs and chickens is doomed to wither. Even a friendship that has weathered decades of hardship and tedium. Mama Lota and Nangela had raised their children together, performed birth and death rites in tandem, carried loads light and heavy as one. Now that there were no men left in their households, they depended on each other, hooked to their everday's, the tasks attending to body and home, and a small field they grew enough greens, beans, potatoes, cassava, yams, ground nuts, and maize to feed themselves; and kept the surplus in Mama Lota's storehouse. They gave the damaged but edible leftovers to widows even less fortunate than they. Mama Lota bought the dogs because the storehouse had been robbed again. This time she had caught them in the act. She burst through the door with furious shouts for [inaudible] her barely fair-haired, uncovered, light spoken erratically from the lantern she held aloft. The boys fled crawling from her hail storm except for one boy who Mama Lota speculated later to N'angela must have been raised by a bitter woman who beat him too hard and too often. His lackeys scurried pitifully around him, but this boy alone stood lengthening up like a thread of smoke. His fist wrapped around a stone Mama Lota had thrown. He spat and threw it back. It struck her above her left eye, knocked her over, knocked her out, and turned her eyebrow into a red smear that healed later into a purple crust which everyone said made sense since her husband, long deceased, had been a pastor. Those thieving boys had broken in through the one small window in the storehouse across from the locked entrance. When Mama Lota toppled across the threshold, they ran away through the door she burst through, ran right over her body. Their pockets and hands full of all they planned to sell. And just for the sake of it, they stole the lantern that had tumbled from her hand. This was why Mama Lota had sent her nephew to purchase the Doberman Pinchers. Not because of the stolen food, nor the requited stone, nor even the wound it had opened. It was this pettiness of taking her lamp which her husband had received as a boy from a Muzungu hunter he had fetched game for, and which he had polished every night of their marriage whistling pleasantly through the gap in his front teeth. Mama Lota liked to remember him this way. Nearby, his mouth and hands occupied. And now the glass and metal thing that reminded her of a lost person, it too, was gone. They can't even use it Mama Lota complained in her high soft voice as she poured N'angela a cup of tea a few days later. "Where will they find a paraffin? [inaudible] those boys." N'angela replied in her trembly baritone glancing at the bandage over her friend's eye. They were in Mama Lota's kitchen sitting on a pair of rickety chairs inherited from the church when Pastor [inaudible] died. The women watched the steam untangle above their teacups, shaking their heads at the old familiar nightmare, able-bodied males with nothing to lose. A ferocious noise scrapped through the window. A snarling, snatching sound. N'angela started. The dogs were quarreling. "What is it good to have these Doberman around?" She shuddered. "They're like demons." "The Doberman breed is good for protection. I picked the angriest ones," Mama Lota smiled and frowned. "I'm not going to suffer for some stupid child who throws stones at his elders and just takes." She stuck her teeth. "I don't know." N'angela shook her head. "I think they're eating our chickens." The Doberman's were indeed rapacious. They had rather sensibly begun to supplement the leftovers Mama Lota gave them with mice and birds and snakes, and yes, the occasional chicken from the coop behind the storehouse. The fonder they became of her, the more little broken corpses would the two young dogs lay at Mama Lota's feet. She'd picked the carrying gifts off her steps with a grimace and scold the grinning beasts. Foolish monkeys. She'd frown and then smile patting them on their warm, flat, black foreheads as they wagged the knots where their tails had been. But they were not foolish. That was a sentimental view to take about such vicious creatures. N'angela discovered how vicious the very next morning. ^M00:19:34 ^M00:19:36 >> Laverne Paige: My name is Laverne Paige, and I'm in the African and Middle Eastern Division. I would like to introduce you again to our speaker and tell you a few personal things about her, such as the fact that she's originally from Lusaka, Zambia in Southern Africa where her family still lives. And her father is the professor of psychology at the University of Zambia, and we have several of his works here at the Library of Congress in our collections. Her mother is an economist and has worked for a while with UNDP, the United Nations Development Program. Professor Serpell moved to Baltimore when she was 9, and she was educated here in the US. She received her B.A. from Yale and her Ph.D. from Harvard, and she's lived in California since 2008 where she is an associate professor of English at the University of California Berkley which we've been told. ^M00:20:51 Her research work is in contemporary fiction and film. Her work concerns the relationship between aesthetic reception, affect, and ethics, and we've been told also that she's currently working on a book of essays and a novel. I'm very interested in the Baltimore part of her story. She grew up there. She started writing quite early. And so, I'm just wondering, when exactly first started writing and why did you turn to fiction? >> Namwali Serpell: Thank you so much. I'm going do the questions. So my family moved to Baltimore in 1989 and it's from around then, and there's a little red notebook that my parents found recently and sent to me, and it has my name very carefully written on the inside; and it has ideas for stories. Some of them I think I thought were going to be actual novels but they've yet to risen. But they had titles like "Gymnastics and Horses Don't Rhyme" which was a story about a girl who had a mother and a step-mother and each of them likes the other's horse. So the mother liked horses and the stepmother likes gymnastics and the little girl tries to figure out how to please them both and eventually does an acrobatic routine on a horse. I think that was because I had not encountered divorce until I came to America. I knew about divorce because my father was divorced, but the idea that you had these two families that you would go back and forth, that was new to me. There was a story about a murder mystery where the witness said they'd seen something from the side of the road and the police officer says, "No. That's not possible because in this country we drive on the other side of the road," because it was a British witness. So again, there were all of these moments where I was trying to understand my new context; and so, in some way I feel like immigration itself was the inspiration for me to start writing. I mean there's lots of other funny little stories. One was called "Weird Science" about reading other people's minds. I think you could get to that point where you're just about to become an adolescent and you realize that there are other people. And so, in that transitional stage is when I really started writing. >> Laverne Paige: Okay. I'm, again, still interested in Baltimore. You early life here. Did you read your stories in your schoolroom? Did you share them with other children? >> Namwali Serpell: Well, my mom was really excited. There was a story that I started writing about the invention of the alphabet. That was a school assignment. You had to write a story. I had a bunch of people sitting in a room and someone said, "Aah" that's our A's, and then a B flew by. The [inaudible] before the horse I think a little bit. So she was very excited about that. And so, that's definitely a story that I read in school. But I was very interested in math and English. So the hard sciences and the very, very human/humanities. So my parents are both social scientists; psychology and economics, but I always gravitated to the edges. And I actually ended up going to a math and science magnet program in high school. And some of you may know the school actually because it featured very prominently on an NPR radio show called "Cereal." So there's a school called Woodlawn High School -- yes, some of you are nodding. So I went to that school. I was in that magnet program then. I didn't quite overlap with the main figures in that radio show. So I started on at Yale doing biochemistry because I was interested in the sciences and then switched to English pretty rapidly. But much to my mother's dismay. I grew up in the suburbs of Baltimore so we didn't live in the inner city. We lived in a prominently Jewish neighborhood actually so we were the only brown people in the neighborhood. But the school I went to, the magnet school which we would drive to everyday was predominantly brown; brown and black. The magnet program inside the school was mostly white and there was me inside the magnet program. So it was like I was the chocolate chip in the whipped cream. The racial politics of Baltimore were very striking for my family. I'm mixed race. My father is British/White. He's British of origin. He's a Zambian citizen and has lived there most of his life. And my mother is Zambian. And in Zambia, some of you may know that in African countries, there's a category for mixed race people. Sometimes it's called colored. Sometimes it's called mixed. I grew up in Lusaka in a very international context. We lived by the university. I had friends who were Indian. I had friends who were Zambian. I had friends who were white. It was just a very diverse community and I was born into this family in which race was kind of taken for granted as something inconsequential when it came to how you were treated. And when we came to the states there was immediately an imperative to choose. You had to choose. Are you black or are you white? "Why do you talk that way," and that sort of thing. So there was a lot of pressure to fit into the binary logic in the states. It's so nice to have a president who is Halfrican as we'd like to say and is also American because it's like, "Oh okay, this is recognizable now." This experience is now something people talk about. "Americanah" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche. That's one of the recent novels from Africa that I quite like. And I really wish that had been around when we moved. That that kind of story about an African moving to America. [inaudible] we need their names as another version of that, where it's an immigration story. >> Patricia Paige: I see. Let's flip to the other coast. You're an associate professor of English in the English department at Berkley, and I'm wondering if you can talk about how African literature fits into that department. >> Namwali Serpell: Oh, that's an interesting question. So I was hired ironically as an Americanist because I'm not even a US citizen. But most of the novels in my dissertation happened to be by Americans, and the ones that were not promptly cut. Because when I went from an academic job market all of the good jobs, all of the jobs worth pursuing were Americanists jobs. So Berkley is very open-minded. So as soon as I got there they said you can teach whatever you want and it's fine. And most of what I taught has been post 2000 fiction. I've taught a lot of contemporary fiction and I've only just started teaching African literature, and I've taught it in the context of a class on black science fiction, which was a diasporic class so we looked at texts from the states, texts from the Caribbean, texts from Africa. So in the context of my own teaching, I mostly taught British and American fiction because that was what I was hired to do, but I've recently been branching out into African fiction. >> Patricia Paige: Okay. Did you say black science fiction? >> Namwali Serpell: I did. I said black science fiction. >> Patricia Paige: This is the 10th anniversary Octavia Butler died about ten years ago. >> Namwali Serpell: Is that right. I didn't know. I know they're making -- they're finally making a TV show out of her, "Parable of the Sowers," the series which has been around and it's an amazing work. I taught several of her short stories in that class. I like her books. >> Laverne Paige: Thank you. Let' see. I have so many questions here and so little time. Okay. If you could tell us about your current projects. ^M00:30:01 Your book of essays and novels. I'm curious also about the style of writing that you've described where you write in verse. And so, with the novel, that's a big burst or how you do this. So I'm just wondering how this affects your writing of longer pieces? >> Namwali Serpell: Sure. So the book of essays that I'm working on is the second work of fellowship that I'm expected to write for my job at Berkley. My first book was called "Seven Modes of Uncertainty." That's about the reading experience of encountering text like Tony Morrison's "Love it" or Lolita or "By the [inaudible]" or " The Crying of Lot 49" by Thomas Pynchon showed these novels that confront you with kind of deep puzzlement as to what happened or why it happened, and at the same time crosses that uncertainty of knowledge with an ethical problem. So in "Beloved" obviously slavery and infanticide, and in "Lolita" pedophilia. So you're confronted with not knowing exactly where you stand, and you're given this really kind of intractable ethical problem. And I was interested in whether this is actually useful for us, reading these kinds of texts in thinking about how to be as a person and in terms of ethics. So I don't believe that reading books makes us better people but I do think that books can serve functionally as ethical philosophy. They can teach you how to think about how to be a good person. So that was my first book. My second book takes up a particular issue in ethical philosophy which is the face to face encounter, which is A) an idea about how to interact with humans that is very old from ancient philosophy, you know, it's in the bible has been taken up by a Jewish philosopher most recently Emmanuel [inaudible]. What I'm interested in is -- well, what happens when you look at kind of weird faces, the animal face, the mixed race face, that the passing face, is it white or black? I look at faces that have been damaged and then repaired. So it's a series of chapters about faces and the most recent chapter that I wrote is about emoji's because I was interested in a language made of faces. So I just gave a talk about that. The novel is called "The Old Drift" and it's the great Zambian novel you didn't know you were waiting for. And I'd published parts of that novel over the years. So while I was getting my Ph.D. and while I was getting tenure at Berkley, I was also writing fiction. And so, I've published I think four pieces of this novel as short stories. So "The Sack" is in fact, the last chapter of this novel. So this is how I work in bursts. In that, I don't go in order. So I can go kind of across a text, and I've had this novel in my head since I was 21 so I've been developing it over time and working on other stories as well and working on other novels, but because "The Sack" is part of the novel, the momentum from winning the prize allowed us to -- me and my agent to sell the novel so it's going to come out in 2018 with [inaudible] which I'm very pleased about. So I'm hard at work on it right now. >> Laverne Paige: The Zambian novel. I understand that you travel annually to Zambia. So could you tell us something about the literary scene in Zambia? Do you feel connected there? Would you consider teaching there? And how does this compare to your connection with American writers? >> Namwali Serpell: That's a good question. So my parents moved back in 2002 and since then I go back every year; for a while every other year because I was broke. Now I go back much more frequently. Last year I was there four times. I'm going back on Thursday, actually because the Caine Prize Workshop this year. So every year after the prize, the year after the prize is given, the four and the five short-listed writers go to a country in Africa and you have a ten day workshop with local students and with writers from around the continent. And so, the last time when I was nominated we went to Cameroon and this time we're going to Zambia which is wonderful for me. So I've had a lot of contact with the Pen Club, the Pen Society. I can't remember exactly how they go by but in [inaudible] which is made up of young writers and they meet every other week at the [inaudible] and they talk about their work in progress. I've recently became aware of a new outfit, the Lusaka Book Club, which is just wonderful. So they organized an event for me in September, a reading for me at home, and it was just wonderful. And it's just people in the community who are interested in reading and so we had a breakfast and they asked me all sorts of questions about my story. Then the University of Zambia. So my dad has been involved there for a long time. He's been teaching at the department there. He was vice-chancellor there for a minute. So I had some contact with the literature department there. But I'll be very frank with you. When it comes to teaching there, I considered it when I was a graduate student when I was home for one summer, I spent a lot of time at the literature department, and I felt that I couldn't thrive there because of the in-built sexism. That's a problem in English departments across the world. But there, it felt particularly pervasive to me; and so, I just felt like that wasn't an option for me. But to teach there in terms of teaching a workshop, I did a workshop at the American International School. I've done a little workshop with some primary school kids when I was home last. That kind of teaching I might do, but at the university level, I'm not quite sure. >> Laverne Paige: Afterwards I'll ask you more about the book club. >> Namwali Serpell: Yeah. Sure. >> Laverne Paige: That's very interesting to me. I'm wondering about African writers. Your favorites. You seem to read all over the place, and so, also your favorite American writers. >> Namwali Serpell: Yeah. So I'll give you an old writer that I love and a new writer that I love. So when I was quite young I was introduced to the work of Betsey [inaudible] who is Botswanan born but lived in South Africa then went back to Botswana. She wrote a book called [inaudible] and that was very, very powerful for me as a young woman. Most recently, Binyavanga Wainaina who won the Caine Prize early on and used his prize money to start Kwani which is a Kenyan publishing house but also magazine. His kind of semi-fictional least beautifully memoir, "One Day I Will Write About This Place" is one of my favorite new texts coming out today. As for American novelists, Tony Morrison and Vladimir Nabokov who I mentioned earlier are kind of my auntie and uncle I think of them. Uncle Vlad. I talk about Auntie Tony. What I admire about both of them is they seemed to both have been born with a completely self-sufficient sense of their worth as writers and as people. Just completely confident, and it's rare, and it's quite beautiful. Some people I think perceive it as arrogance, but I think it comes with such a healthy dose of humor in both of them. People don't often comment on how funny Tony Morrison's novels are, but they are quite funny. Even Beloved has jokes. >> Laverne Paige: Please point them out. >> Namwali Serpell: I will. I will. There's an amazing scene at the end of "Beloved" between Stamp Paid and Paul D. and they're laughing about Setha. And they're like, "You can't leave her alone with anybody." It's really funny. I think to have that kind of self-possession combined with a sense of humor is something to aspire to. >> Laverne Paige: Okay. Well, with time constraints, I should probably ask this last question which we always ask. What do you think is the future for African writers, both from the diaspora and from the continent? What steps need to be taken to bring more recognition from the international community? >> Namwali Serpell: I think a lot of young African writers are aspiring to move beyond a kind of binary thinking which is that you either write from within the continent about African things which are recognizable to the west, or you write this kind of immigrant narrative that's on the other side. ^M00:40:20 And so, this never the twain shall meet. There's a kind of idea of authencity and literary nest that don't always coincide in the ways that we want them to. So I think being around to talk about our work without becoming cultural commentators or sociologists of where we're from is a big push among young African writers, and I think on the other hand, being allowed to write about whatever we want is also really important. That kind of freedom to express an African sensibility without necessarily African troubles like child poverty or HIV, Aids or whatever it may be, is a freedom I think all of us aspire to. So for this workshop that's coming up, I've been having conversations with some of the other short-listed writers about, "Well, what are we supposed to write?" Because it's going to be in the Caine Prize anthology. Does it have to be a story set in Africa? Because I've written stories set in the states. I have ideas for novels that are set in the states that don't necessarily involve African characters. Sometimes they involve African American characters. Sometimes white characters. And so, my friend, she said she's going to write an African fairy tale, a mini African Harry Potter. And I'm thinking about writing something more experimental and more kind of oriented toward an international perspective, so a series of interactions between characters that are mostly over the Internet. So I think that's the future I think, just the freedom to write about whatever you want and to have African just be part of what you do but not necessarily constrained by -- I think it's died. Not necessarily constrained by what people think African means if that makes sense. >> Laverne Paige: We have a lot to look forward to. That's all I can say with your writing. And as for the -- we anticipated having the anthology here but we don't. However, you can read the sack. It can be downloaded from the -- >> Namwali Serpell: From the Caine Prize website. >> Laverne Paige: -- Caine Prize website, so you still have access to that. And I think now if you have questions -- how much time do we have? About 15 minutes. Okay. So questions? >> Speaker 1: Thank you very much professor. I was interested in your thing that you interracially had been a theme and an inspiration for you in your writing. In the context of [inaudible] on immigration. Do you think that might be a future topic for [inaudible]. >> Namwali Serpell: That's an interesting question. So what's funny about me saying that immigration was the spark is that I actually don't have any immigration stories technically unless you count Time Travel as an immigration. I have a story in which someone who is raised in the west in the future time travels back and geographically travels back to Africa, but obviously that's much more speculative than addressing contemporary issues of immigration. So I have not yet written my Americana or my we need new names, and I'm not sure that I will. I kind of -- I very much enjoy kind of having Africaness appear in my American fiction in an indirect way; almost in a stylistic way and vice versa. That said, my novel, "The Old Drift" involves immigration but it involves telling the story of how people came from the west to Zambia. So "The Old Drift" is the title of it and it's named for an early colonial settlement near what become known as Victoria Falls. We call it [inaudible] which means the smoke that thunders. So before -- so just 20 years after David Livingston discovered Victoria Falls, the British came over from what was then Southern Rhodesia and came up. And they went across the Zambezi and they went across on what's called a drift. So it's a calm place in the water that you can drift things across, and they made a settlement called the Old Drift. They also come to what they call black fever which is actually malaria. So there's a little graveyard there called the Old Drift Cemetery. And so, I'm interested in those kinds of migrations or immigrations into Zambia. So I have people coming from India. People coming from England and people coming from Italy. And as a way of understanding the international kind of context in which I grew up in the 70s, late 80s. So I'm interested in immigration to Africa which is kind of reversal of the normal way of thinking about it. But in terms of immigration to America, that's still unchartered territory for me. ^M00:46:22 ^M00:46:29 >> Laverne Paige: Those of us who downloaded "The Sack" and read it, now that we know it's the last chapter [inaudible]. Actually I love it. Is the whole book comprised of chapters that have been published separately as short stories, or was it designed to each chapter[inaudible] stand alone? >> Namwali Serpell: So it's not a big collection of like inter-linked stories. It's not a collection of short stories. So my first published story was "Muzungu" which I wrote in the context of writing this novel. It was a chapter of the novel. I sent it to Callaloo with another chapter, and they choose this one, and it was part of an issue that was called "New Writing From Africa." They then nominated it for the Caine Prize for short stories, and so then it got labeled a short story and then it was in the best American short stories. And in fact, when I first received the email saying I was in this collection, I said, "Well, my story is neither American nor a short story." And they wrote back like, "No, no. It's okay." So that's happened a couple of other times. "The Sack" as well. I sent to the Africa 39 Anthology unlabeled and they wrote me and they said, "Is this a short? Should we write a story or say it's a short coming novel?" And I said, "You know, I don't know what the title of the novel is going to be so just publish it as "The Sack," and then it was again nominated as a story. I have actually written short stories. It's not just that I keep writing this generic line, but I've written a short story called "The Book of Faces" which is the take on Facebook and the Book of Job that's a self-contained short story, and I've written a short story called "Bottoms up" which is a sci-fi story as well. So I do write short stories, but these just happen to be self-contained chapters of the novel. ^M00:48:34 ^M00:48:44 >> Speaker 3: Thank you professor. It's lovely to be here. [inaudible]. >> Namwali Serpell: Thanks for coming. >> Speaker 3: I actually grew up near Yale, and I'm wondering what are your experiences at Yale and how do they compare to your experience at Berkley? [inaudible]. >> Namwali Serpell: Yeah. They were very, very different. So I went -- my parents encouraged me to go to an ivy league school. I was very much under the impression that it was just for rich people, and I went there to visit and I really enjoyed it, and I thought, "This is just an amazing opportunity," for which I only just completed paying -- ^M00:49:27 [ Laughter ] ^M00:49:31 -- Paying off my student loans. And you know it was wonderful. It was very different from Baltimore. I didn't really understand the socio-economic politics at Yale. And I didn't know that people were actually rich until I graduated, and I discovered that my roommate's pearls were real. I thought they had to be fake. That sort of thing. But the FM center was a big part of my kind of acculturation into learning about what it is to be black and an ivy leaguer. ^M00:50:08 And I started a poetry circle there where it's like a poetry performance monthly extravaganza. And I called it Black Coffee. I was very influenced by Love Jones. I don't know if any of you know that movie. I said on the poster, "Black-oriented but not black limited" so it was open but it was Afro-centric in spirit. And we had a really fun time. Sometimes we had students from Harvard come visit for the weekend and we gave performances, and I sang. I wasn't much of a [inaudible] but I liked to sing. I lived in New Haven for a summer and I liked it a lot. I really love that city. I think the racial politics at Berkley are quite different because of the overturning of a proposition, I think, a few years before I got there. We can no longer use race as a determining factor in who we admit and our population of black students has accordingly dropped a lot. So it's something like 2%. So it's a very different campus from what I experienced even at Yale. So the diversity on campus is much more comprised of Asian American students and Latino/Latina Chicano/Chicana students. So I've learned a lot about those cultures and in teaching my classes that's been a very interesting aspect is seeing these kind of forms of cultural solidarity across the student population. >> Laverne Paige: What? Okay. One more question. ^M00:52:03 [ Inaudible comment ] ^M00:52:04 ^M00:52:05 ^M00:52:09 >> Speaker 4: Thanks again for your talk. It was a great presentation. I have a multipart question if that's okay. One, is there anything you took away [inaudible] Baltimore [inaudible]? And two, do you have any claims or aspirations to make one of your stories into a movie or a play or some other kind of art form? >> Namwali Serpell: You know, when I was a teenager I used to go to Fellow's Point a lot, and there was a pizza place there. I don't know if it's still there that had a pineapple pizza that me and my mom used to eat. So I know it's not very Baltimore, but that's just the truth of my memory. We haven't been back in a long time. My sister passed away there and I think that marked that space as a space of mourning for my family. So we drifted around the D.C. area since then and I have a lot of love for D.C. and for Baltimore, but sometimes it's more of like a sad space. I think about the Nina Simone song or her -- I think it's just her rendition of the song about Baltimore. She says, "Baltimore ain't it hard just to live?" And there's something about that space that still for me, rings that bell in my heart. And I have a novel that I've finished but who knows what's going to happen to it? Which is set in the states and is a noir so it has elements of crime fiction, and I think that would be -- it has all these really dramatic explosive moments like a bomb going off in an airport and the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge collapsing and stuff like that. So that will be fun to film. The Old Drift is about three generations of three families, and the grandmothers all have these kind of mythical elements to them. So one of them is born covered with hair, and one of them is covered with eyes, and one of them cries all the time; and I always think they would be really wonderful to make into a graphic novel because they're so kind of weird. It would be really fun to draw. >> Robert Casper: Well thanks for that. Thanks Laverne. Thanks Nawali. Thanks for coming out. Look for Namwali Serpell's books to come and please come back to our events both our [inaudible] writers and events here in the African Relations Division. Thanks so much. >> Namwali Serpell: Thank you. ^M00:54:48 ^M00:54:52 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at Loc.gov. ^E00:54:58