Throwing Your Voice: An Interview with Namwali Serpell

On Thursday, January 9th, 2020, Dr. Namwali Serpell came to Oregon State for a graduate-student colloquium, a reading, and a short interview with editor-in-chief, Nicole Horowitz. Here are some notes from the events. 

Namwali Serpell was dressed in black and came sailing through the lobby of the Hilton Garden Inn. Her posture hinted at an extreme ease with the situation at hand, despite the quick clip of a heavily scheduled and hectic (at least for me) day.  Perhaps this comes from an adaptability in navigating different spaces. Serpell, who was born in Lusaka, Zambia, spent part of her childhood in England before ending up in Baltimore. She then went to Yale, then Harvard, then Berkeley, so it was no wonder that the bustling schedule of a Corvallis visit was a piece of cake in comparison.

Dr. Serpell has a background in both literature and creative writing, and as 45th Parallel is a magazine run by both writers and literature scholars—celebrating “in-betweenness” was a focal point. The interview began with an exploration of this intersection, asking Serpell, who is the author of both the critical monograph Seven Modes of Uncertainty and the 2019 novel The Old Drift– which Serpell referred to as “the Great Zambian novel you didn’t know you were waiting for”—was able to carve out a place for herself in both worlds. 

“I’ve always been both,” Serpell asserted, explaining that the writing of her first acclaimed short story, “Muzungu,” happened while in her Literature PhD program at Harvard. She further explained that though she has always been interested in creative work, her training as an English major, which began at Yale, prepared her well for the world of academia. She considered and eventually chose a PhD in literature because it would allow her “time to read and write” in both critical and creative modes. 

“Sometimes I think of myself as a bit split,” she added, noting a favorite analogy in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, “the problem is, I never know which is the writer and which is the critic.” While Serpell had been referring to the split nature between her critical and creative work, I couldn’t help but see this sentiment appear in how she navigated the rest of her time on OSU’s campus. In a meeting with graduate students, Serpell began to discuss her writing habits, and revealed how truly multi-modal her work is—from creative non-fiction to criticism to auto-fiction to genre-manipulating pieces at play in The Old Drift. “I don’t exactly have a brand,” she calmly exclaimed, with a wry smile. 

One of the pieces of advice Dr. Serpell gave to her audience was to abandon the notion of “writing what you know.” She urged, instead, that “writing requires learning how to throw your voice,” and that students should learn to explore characters who might not look, act, or have the same experiences as the author.  She urged students to push back at her as they grappled with this idea, pointing out the potential for cultural appropriation and misrepresentation of a narrative. 

Opening the space for a difficult dialog, Dr. Serpell explained her reasoning behind the suggestion, noting the importance of a type of multilingual “heteroglossia” in writing, “Most of us speak more than one language, if not dialect, if not idiolect. So why would we want to speak in one voice?” She also gave helpful suggestions for how to capture the voice of someone else, which involved in depth research, personal interviews with people, and learning how to throw your voice and make it accurate.

I asked Namwali Serpell “Do you write uncertain literature?” I was curious to hear her answer, citing a key theme of her scholarly text on the point of literature being to ask, and not answer, ethical questions of our age. I hoped the answer might also hold some key to understanding how to navigate the space of  moral and genre ambiguity as a writer partaking in throwing her voice and work across the scholarly and creative genres. 

“Every reading is a misreading,” she said, in response. Her claim was that her work would always be read and misread, interpreted along the lines of uncertainty, or even incorrect certainty, no matter what. A fact “both irritating and liberating.”

Her responses were thought provoking, honest, and not afraid to challenge a traditional belief in writing the known. It’s 2020, cancel culture is rampant and often deserved, so to hear Dr. Serpell in frank dialogue with a group of students about how to throw their voices might be called any number of things (depending on who you ask) but it must also be called brave.