Sticky Blood Relations: A Book Review of The Old Drift
What if your family tree mapped the blood you shared with other people rather than births and deaths? A vein of blood rather than branches and roots.
More than just one family’s history, The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell is a complex narrative of blood relations. Spanning five generations and more than one hundred fifty years the focal family of The Old Drift is a cluster of Zambians all linked by blood. This debut historical fiction is composed as if a swarm of mosquitos were telling the family’s story rather than the descendants. The narrators follow the droplets of blood passed during birth, sex, fights, and medical procedures.
Set in the forest thickened, mosquito infested land around Victoria Falls, which becomes Zimbabwe and Zambia during the time period of the book; on the first pages of The Old Drift is a diagram of a pruned family tree. Pruned because the names listed are the most essential characters yet only a fraction of the crew readers will meet. Our eyes are guided by the funnel effect to the bottom where two things are evident straight away. The point of the funnel leads to the only unnamed character “a boy” and a date in the future, 2024.
From our piqued curiosity about the boy from the future, unravels the first strand of story that Serpell expertly braids together with another story and another. Page after page she plaits a hefty rope of characters only to detangle the braid one strand at a time by the end of the book. Despite one thin thread remaining in our grasp by the final page, readers are bequeathed with so much more. Lifetimes, loss, gain, conflict, and more happen right before our eyes. The lone strand acts the reminder that life is something we cannot hold onto no matter how tight our grip.
The true treasure found within the pages of her debut novel is Serpell’s mastery of allusions and motifs. To prepare for this review I stuck a post it note in the front cover, the same as I do with any other novel, to keep a list of symbols and themes. A typical novel might have three to five motifs or colors or images that resound to the end. My list for The Old Drift grew until it seemed every single animal, mineral, and name had a layered meaning.
In an online interview with Crown Publishing Group Serpell said, “My interests in science, my interests in history, my interests in different cultures in how they’ve all come together to produce Zambia is at the heart of The Old Drift.” And her interests abound into a 500 plus page novel. There were moments I imagined this book as a series, the main characters growing into full plots of their own. I also thought of dissecting the book into short stories for a neater, more linear read.
This book is not for the faint hearted or easy breezy reader. Serpell mounts tension in her characters’s lives the way lava boils and brews inside a mountain, erupting a new character forth into the story from a previous character’s hottest trouble and heartache. Sometimes the new character bursts forth into the story so abruptly it startles the reader the way a birthed baby startles their new parents.
Her style resonates well with the actual story material, each new generation of characters born from their mothers and grandmothers before them. A life must come from a previous life, blood must come from living blood cells.
The Old Drift will probably be the most challenging book I read this year. The requirement to keep pace with Serpell is daunting. Yet her first few chapters are so enticing and interesting, she starts with a story about a baby girl covered in endless growing hair hidden away in a jungle cottage, that you begin the race without realizing she set you on pace to run a marathon.
Aren’t we all due for a challenge though? Working up to your monthly reading goal, one can burn through great literature just to keep up with a hard-earned routine. The Old Drift strengthened all of my reading muscles: sharp sight, vocabulary, conclusive thinking, and memory. This book earns a buy and read again status because one read is not enough to experience everything Serpell created, let alone enjoy the wild adventure within her pages.
In an interview with PBS about being a resident alien in the US, Serpell commented, “You can leverage being an outsider in order to be the most unique and be the biggest voice in the room and bring a new perspective to the things everyone else takes for granted.” Her confidence in who she is coupled with her mastery of storytelling emerge in this stunning novel. We can all hope her big Zambian voice is read all around the world because it is a fresh perspective for everyone to enjoy.
For more stories of about messy blood relations check out these titles.
