Drifting histories: the grandmothers and pluvial time in The Old Drift

This paper examines how Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift reimagines Zambian national history through cyclical temporalities, embodied by the Grandmother characters. Serpell’s matrilineal structure and hybrid narrative form—spanning the genres of magical realism, socialist realism, and speculative fiction—disrupt linear, patriarchal conceptions of both history and progress. The Grandmothers’ aging and “mutated” bodies become archives, carrying traces of past violence as well as future potential. Through the representation of a matrilinearity which is focused on repetition and the loops of history, Serpell is enacting what Sarah Nuttall calls pluvial time: a mode of historical recurrence shaped by the rhythms of water, return, and renewal. By intertwining domestic, national, and ecological histories, Serpell reframes history as a process of drift rather than linear progress. The Old Drift thus envisions a feminist politics of narration in which knowledge flows across generations, suggesting that the future can only be imagined through the re-emergence and transformation of what has come before.