On Pluviality: Reading for Rain in Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift

Abstract

Pluviality, a term I have developed in relation to heavy rainfall and flooding – its timescapes and material and textual conditions – is the focus of this analysis of Namwali Serpell’s magisterial 2019 novel, The Old Drift. Located largely in Zambia, it is nevertheless a novel of the Zambezi watershed, and of hydrocolonial and southern African regional proportions. Encompassing both human and non-human narrators and protagonists, its centrepiece is the Kariba Dam, the largest hydro-electrical dam in the world at the time of its construction. This is a very rainy novel, alert to the region’s histories of flooding and to the ever-heavier rainfall of accelerating climate change, in one of the regions of the world most susceptible to its present and coming effects. I focus on the novel’s pluviality as material, historical and narrative mode, traced in its registers of water and wit, prescience and prophecy, as it surges, silts and drifts across the literary landscapes of African fiction.