“DECOLONISE YOUR PUSSY”: Other Idioms of Decolonization in Serpell’s The Old Drift

ABSTRACT

I examine how the statement “DECOLONISE YOUR PUSSY” in Serpell’s The Old Drift (2019) deconstructs the term decolonization by introducing a feminist agenda that emerges when the term is not fixed on nationalist goals of postcolonial society. I discuss the phrase as a gesticulation toward a postcolonial self-reflexive attention to women’s issues and decolonization of the female body. My overall thesis draws on recent Afro-feminist and decolonization ideas of scholars such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Naminata Diabate, Sylvia Tamale, Achille Mbembe, and others who I use to interpret Serpell’s feminist agenda in the novel as a subjective/contingent Afro-feminism.

1. INTRODUCTION

The capitalized “DECOLONISE YOUR PUSSY” in Serpell’s The Old Drift shifts our understanding of the term decolonization from decolonial attempts related to nationalist goals to locate and recapture an authentic African and Zambian identity by emphasizing indigenous images in both practice and analysis of the Zambian novel in English (Chinweizu 6–7; Onwumere and Egblonu 151). I understand Serpell’s ideas on decolonization in the novel through the lenses of scholars, such as Achille Mbembe, who argue that decolonization is a multifaced, evolving, subjective enterprise (4). This is so because besides shared colonial experiences related to whether it was settler colonialism or not, or Anglophone, Francophone, or Lusophone, different countries have distinct versions of decolonization based on their diverse colonial experiences (Tuck and Yung 3). Hence, I relate my exploration of Serpell’s call to “decolonize your pussy” to societies such as the fictional Zambia where despite political independence, women and other minorities still face oppression. Such a deployment of decolonization, which expresses subjective sentiments, is at the heart of Mbembe’s recent ideas that suggest that:

decolonization inaugurated a time of branching off toward innumerable futures. These futures were by definition contingent. The trajectories followed by the newly freed nations were partly the consequences of internal struggles within the societies under consideration. These struggles were themselves shaped both by the old social forms and economic structures inherited from colonization and by the techniques and practices of government of the new postcolonial regimes.

(4)

From the above, it is clear that while decolonization may in some cases be based on recapturing something lost or glossed over by colonialism, it manifests many other possible subjective or contingent meanings in reality. For instance, when the narrative of The Old Drift opens, it suggests that indigenous people lost something to colonialism when in the 19th century David Livingstone supposedly discovered and named Victoria Falls, which already had a local name (Mosi-oa-tunya), or when indigenous communities lost their land to the European settlement at the Old Drift and were later forcefully displaced to pave the way for the Kariba Dam. This is juxtaposed with another idiom of decolonization that arises when the novel’s temporal trajectory shifts to the 21st century where postcolonial societies such as fictional Zambia now need to be decolonized from inherited neocolonial political and capitalist economic tendencies. This is specifically suggested in the conversation between Joseph and his grandparents about the Rhodes Must Fall movement where we learn that the movement is not only about the statue as a symbol of racism but inherited capitalist/exploitative ideas as well—hence the “fees must fall” (400) enshrined in the movement.

The above notwithstanding, I focus on the capitalized statement “DECOLONISE YOUR PUSSY” because it accentuates a more nuanced attention to women’s issues despite the many other possible idioms of decolonization. The statement in question appears on a mug belonging to one of the characters, Tabitha, as she speaks to her friend Naila over a video call: “Tabitha reached offscreen and grabbed a purple mug with white letters that read: DECOLONISE YOUR PUSSY” (514). Firstly, a feminist agenda is apparent because the phrase is inscribed on a purple mug, a color that is often associated with traditional feminism. Furthermore, the use of the word “pussy” initiates an exploration of whether the term has something to do with literally decolonizing the female body and its attendant areas related to male domination or to colonization. These attendant areas include sexuality, commodification, the male gaze, and definitions of womanhood that I discuss later in the paper. Thirdly, one notes that by capitalizing the statement, besides using the derogatory term pussy, Serpell uses shock to shove the statement and nakedness in the reader’s face in order to attract their attention. This resonates with Naminata Diabate’s idea of naked agency, which I use to understand the dynamic implication of African women “[e]xposing tabooed body parts[which] often makes men listen or comply when other mechanisms of resistance or retribution have failed” (19). I particularly interrogate whether the statement draws attention to other women biases such as the absence of the woman’s story in history, the place of the African woman in global feminist discourse, women archetypes in literature, and fixed signifier/signified relations between men and women. I further analyze whether the use of “pussy” in the statement and other instances in The Old Drift where Serpell’s characters subvert traditional patriarchal male hegemony, gender roles, and carnivalesque display are part of the author’s feminist agenda. This can be related to the third-wave feminist project of reclamation, which also redeploys or subverts terms like “bitch,” “cunt,” and “slut” in order to make a statement (Snyder 179). Finally, I understand Serpell’s feminist agenda in The Old Drift as a subjective Afro-feminism, which highlights an African, albeit context-specific, feminism. This shifts feminism from purely Western notions of women’s subjugation to one that prioritizes the experiences of African women in particular contexts. I borrow ideas from various African scholars that make the kind of link between decolonization and Afro-feminism that I engage in my analysis of Serpell’s novel. Of particular note is Sylvia Tamale and her view that:

Although it shares some values with Western feminism, Afro-Feminism distinctly seeks to create its own theories and discourses that are linked to the diversity of African realities. It works to reclaim the rich histories of Black women in challenging all forms of domination, in particular as they relate to patriarchy, race, class, sexuality and global imperialism.

(xiii)

Notably in Tamale above, Afro-Feminism may show similarities with Western feminism but is not the same as Western feminism. Hence when I relate Serpell’s use of nakedness as protest in The Old Drift to Snyder’s ideas on third-wave feminism, I do so only as one among other possible interpretive lenses of Afro-feminism. Additionally, as Tamale’s ideas suggest, owing to the diversity of the African experience as illustrated by the multicultural context of contemporary fictional Zambia that Serpell reimagines, Afro-feminist theories are equally diverse. This diversity extends to the need to approach different postcolonial societies differently and according to “particular and specific histories of colonialism, racial formation and gender hierarchy” (Emejulu and Sobande 4). This is especially related to the view that Afro-feminism and women’s activism must extend to “getting rid of those parts of Western feminism that were uncritically adopted and to reconceptualize the struggle for more meaningful and contextually relevant ways of addressing the marginalization of women” (Tamale 40). The suggestion here is a complete overhaul not only of the woman’s story but also discourse surrounding tools used to fight women biases by ensuring that these match the experiences of African women based on their specific colonial and societal gender relations.

In view of the foregoing, Serpell’s Afro-feminism in The Old Drift is a challenge to a sum total of women biases stemming from precolonial society, direct forms of colonialism but also inherited forms of women subjugation. As will be discussed later, the inferior position of women and related biases have always been based on whoever was in power—whether precolonial indigenous patriarchy, colonialism and Western feminism, or postcolonial patriarchy. My analysis therefore also draws on Judith Butler’s idea of gender and performance to anchor Serpell’s illustration and challenge the naturalization of gender biases. Owing to the fact that women and their identity have always been forced to play to the tune of either the precolonial woman or to uncritically adopted colonial tendencies and Western feminist ideas regardless of their contexts and realities, such possibilities always lead to an inadequate and one-dimensional view of women that would fall prey to the dangers of a single story that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warns against. Such a description or classification of women dictated in this case by patriarchal biases is not enough to describe the many possible enunciations of women and the related biases in different contexts.

2. “DECOLONISE YOUR PUSSY,” MATHA, BERNADETTA, AND SELF-REFLEXIVITY

Firstly, the phrase “DECOLONISE YOUR PUSSY” in The Old Drift shifts our understanding of decolonization from writing back to Western colonial stereotypes to a more self-reflexive attention to the oppression of women. When we focus solely on images in literary texts that evoke a pristine precolonial culture lost during colonialism, our agenda fails when other internal issues of postcolonial societies are inadvertently eclipsed in the process. Particularly, women remain colonized, marginalized, and excluded by the machinations of patriarchal postcolonial societies (Spivak 22; Musila 17; Mwangi; Serpell, “Black Hole”). Serpell’s statement therefore demonstrates an awareness of the pitfalls of fixity with terms such as identity or in this case a fixing decolonization on nationalist goals. For instance, if one insists on the definition of a woman that mirrors or satisfies the precolonial image, they would quickly dismiss the image of a woman such as Matha in The Old Drift who does not fit neatly into the category of the common traditional subservient woman.

In order to attend to these other issues, particularly women’s issues such as Matha’s, Evan Mwangi observes that contemporary novelists:

depart from the tradition of “writing back” to the European colonial center by focusing their gaze on local forms of expression that are seen to parallel classical colonialism . . . examined here are contemporary African novels that demonstrate perceptual shifts in focus from issues of external colonialism to a more self-reflexive treatment of gender and sexual relations.

(1)

The shift in the gaze moves decolonization from the first phase or nationalist postcolonial tendencies (Dimitriu) to something entirely different. In the same way that decolonization or writing back was meant to reverse Western stereotypes on colonial subjects, Grace Musila observes that contemporary writers are now writing back and subverting those images in African indigenous culture and tradition that are oppressive to women. One therefore observes a shift in The Old Drift’s portrayal of women like Matha and her mother Bernadetta who are not subservient but partakers in the world or space reserved for men. Yet, their characters are now viewed as acts of writing back and reversing women’s subservient position in their society. It is narrated in the novel, for instance, that Bernadetta, and not her husband, Mr Mwamba, is actively involved in the freedom struggle to the extent that she gets imprisoned while trying to save Ba Nkoloso (the head of the guerrilla movement in Kasama) and dies in prison. The portrayal of Matha and Bernadetta here reflects an Afro-feminist desire for African women to be heard, their stories told, and allowed equal recognition of their efforts in their own spaces and terms.

Furthermore, the phrase points to a carnivalesque usurpation of male hegemony that Serpell uses to make a statement about the need to decolonize women from a patriarchal system. That is, if one takes the capitalized ‘DECOLONISE YOUR PUSSY’ as a carnivalesque spectacle and views Matha and Bernadetta as wearing figurative masks when they take over men’s traditional positions (Siluonde 62–69). In the Bahktinian carnival, masks worn at the carnival were meant to temporarily suspend any existing hierarchies and facilitate free interaction among people of different classes during the carnival. In the present context of the discussion and Serpell’s women in The Old Drift, suspension of such power reveals other idioms of decolonization. This includes other things that arise when all hierarchies and affiliations to preferred identities/genders/sexes are dismantled. One may now understand how Matha and Bernadetta’s portrayal in positions of power in the family could be taken as figurative masks that they wear to unsettle male authority and supremacy in their families and society. In fact, their behavior can be seen as a subversion of roles. This reversal resonates with the Bakhtinian idea that “masks worn at a literal carnival were disguises, facilitating actors’ stepping out of their personalities to take up new personas. People from the lower realms of society would wear masks in order to make fun of and subvert the status quo temporarily” (Bakhtin 62).

Three things can be drawn from the statement above: first, for the carnivalesque disguise to be effective, the actor had to impersonate (take up a new persona); secondly, there had to be a temporal transfer of power from the higher to the lower realms of society; and thirdly, there had to be an element of humor stemming from either the intentional satirical display of the actor or from the fact that he or she was a misfit in their new position. Indeed, we observe the first and second implication of the carnivalesque figurative masks with Bernadetta in The Old Drift when she shaves Mathas’s head in order to enable her to attend a school reserved for boys against her husband’s and society’s wishes. In a reversal of roles, Bernadetta can only do what she does by taking up the persona or impersonating, wearing the mask of, her husband as head of the family and decision maker. Clearly, these are positions that are normally reserved for Bernadetta’s husband as granted by the society whose patriarchal system demands that women remain in the shadows. The third implication is observed when, later, Ba Nkoloso, the head of the Chachacha rebel cadet squad, has to dress up like a woman to elude the police. This act illustrates how the man is symbolically stripped of the power associated with him as a man. He can only succeed in deceiving the police by ironically drawing power from a woman—through clothing and all her attendant characteristics as weak and passive. The satire stems from the irony and mockery related to the juxtaposition whereby the man who should be a symbol of power is portrayed as weak and now has to draw strength from the woman who is normally considered weaker. Once such hierarchies are challenged as in Bernadetta and Ba Nkoloso’s case above, one realizes such cultural naturalization is at the expense of other possible idioms of gender roles and decolonization (Cheisa 9).

The possibility of many idioms of decolonization can be viewed as a gesticulation toward a history that is more inclusive of women’s stories and perspectives. The extent to which culturally naturalized male hegemony eclipses women’s affairs and stifles their potential means that many official historical narratives have excluded the stories of minorities such as women. That is why in The Old Drift Serpell deconstructs the historical story of the Cha Cha Cha guerrilla tactic, particularly Ba Nkoloso’s guerrilla cadet movement during the Zambian liberation struggle. She decenters the male version of the story by narrating it from the perspective of a woman—Matha—and not the usual male-centered official and common narrative. It must be noted that the desire to rewrite colonial history has often been based on the need to tell the story from the perspective of the colonized. As James Scott observes, the colonial story always had two sides: public transcripts (the public transcript usually becomes the authorized official historical narrative) and private transcripts (the real African story, which remained hidden, ignored, and overshadowed by the public transcripts). On the downside, independence and later calls to decolonize history simply replicate colonial power dynamics. There is simply a shift of power over history or what Michel Foucault terms epistemes of power from colonizers to an inherited patriarchal system (Tamale 13), which relegates women’s stories to the realm of private transcripts (creating margins within margins). This is what one observes in the history related to the space research and philosophy at Ba Nkoloso’s Zambia Academy of Science, which is a cover for covert anticolonial guerrilla operations in The Old Drift. By unction of the post-independence voice of authority (the patriarchal system in this case), “comprador intelligentsia” (Appiah 348), or “guardians of the margins” (Ray 46), official narratives around the controversial space mission have always been centered around the founder and initiator of the whole mission, Ba Nkoloso. Matha, similar to how many black women are portrayed in history, is simply a passive, inactive, appendage of Ba Nkoloso (a man). In a twist, Serpell shifts the focus of the historical narrative from Ba Nkoloso to Matha Mwamba as one of the afronauts/guerrilla fighters. Her involvement in the guerrilla warfare and specifically Mr Nkoloso’s space station is simply part of her larger story, albeit part of a hidden transcript of the official narrative of the Cha Cha Cha rebellion. By shifting the perspective from Ba Nkoloso to Matha, Serpell deconstructs the decolonization agenda by exposing gaps that exist when we attempt to rewrite our history on patriarchal terms while failing to actively engage stories such as Matha’s.

Taking into consideration the above, the statement “DECOLONISE YOUR PUSSY” may be taken to suggest a need to decolonize feminist discourse. Feminism’s preoccupation with Western notions and discourses of women denies minority societies’ interaction with local female heroes that give them a context specific and eclectic historical experience. The portrayal of Matha from the standpoint of bravery and her heroic deeds allows us to witness a side which would be eclipsed if we ignored the “situated subjectivity” that, according to Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, is based on “one’s sense of who one is” (17) in relation to their social location. In many former colonies, perspectives of heroines are informed either by the local patriarchal society (in addition to the lack of local engagement with women’s history) or Western notions of feminism and women’s identity. The Western woman, though subordinate to the white man, has always been “more empowered than Indigenous . . . women who were imagined as degenerate beings” (Tamale 5). Thus, as Alka Kurian notes, for a long time feminism and its “categorisations are conventionally organised around American and European events and personalities. Thus, however unintentionally, the ‘grand narrative’ of feminism becomes the story of western endeavor, and relegates the experience of non-western women to the margins of feminist discourse” (54). What this means is that while feminism fights biases against women, it does so on Western terms and creates an alternative identity for women outside the confines of Western patriarchy. Yet this alternative personality is likely to exclude the African hero and stories such as Matha’s because it may or may not fit into the Western idea of woman—the woman viewed as less than human could never be a hero (Tamale 5). Such an image has been designated the universal alternative for women in all patriarchal societies regardless of their location. This means that even if stories of women such as Matha’s are recovered, they would in most cases be excluded or placed in the margins of the list of acceptable heroines more especially if they did not fit perfectly into the story, personality, and endeavors of the authorized Western feminist woman.

The suggestion here is that it is not enough to recover women’s stories but there is a need to decolonize them from Western feminist discourses that continue to colonize the African story whether intentionally or unintentionally. This is despite a long history of African women taking part in colonial resistance and fighting patriarchal biases even to the point of defiant disrobing. Such stories remain undocumented or overshadowed by Western heroes. It is such unsung heroes that Adichie is referring to in her letter advising her friend to teach her daughter “to take pride in the history of Africans, and in the black diaspora. Find black heroes, . . . women, in history. They exist” (Feminist Manifesto 15). A similar agenda can be said to be behind Serpell’s attention and detail in telling Matha’s heroic perseverance. This is observed in the bravery demonstrated when Matha picks up the pieces and leaves the village after her mother (Bernadetta) is arrested, in how she uses wit to convince the Nkoloso family that she must go with them to Lusaka from the village when her mother dies, and how she manages to educate herself and prove capable of being a cadet in Ba Nkoloso’s guerrilla movement. We are told that, while other girls were busy getting married and having children as society expected, “Ba Nkoloso had taught Matha how to drive a car, fix an engine, and put together a circuit board with a handful of wires and an old battery” (Serpell, TOD 63). It is such local stories about women who transcend the local limits that one would miss if they continued to fix the idea of a hero on Western notions of women. This would be at the expense of women such as Matha whose heroism is defined by her own terms—the ability to transcend local patriarchal limits set for her. The specificity of her barriers to the Zambian fictional society of the novel can be observed in the fact that the novel distinguishes different barriers experienced by different women from different countries in the novel. For instance, whereas Matha struggles to get an education and even join Ba Nkoloso’s ranks in the fictional Zambian society of the 1960s, another character, Carolyn, is privileged to get schooled in England (83) and becomes a school teacher around the same time because women already have the right to education in England, unlike in Zambia. Hence, breaking of such barriers must be viewed as a specific breakage of specific barriers that may not be applicable to other societies, which may be fighting different issues altogether. The subjectivity related to this situation means a universal feminist approach and identity based on one model of a woman, such as the Western one, would not suffice or easily relate to every society or situation.

In fact, the subjectivity and contextuality related to the woman as a hero above challenges the general fixation on women stereotypes and archetypes especially in literary texts. This is because whether we lean on traditional women stereotypes (of women as weak, a seductress, or femme fatale) or other alternatives as prescribed by Western feminism for instance (Thornham), we would still be bound by fixity on terms such as identity. In order to avoid this, many Afro-feminists such as Diabate and Tamale recognize the diversity of the African experience in their indication that to imagine Africa, its women, and identity as a single entity falls prey to essentializing tendencies. According to Brubaker and Cooper, fixed alternatives would not sufficiently provide universal cover with regard to identity and defining women in literature. This is because the alternatives themselves are a sign that there are always other emerging idioms of identity, decolonization, and women definitions. In fact, this may be considered postmodern in its disavowal of grand narratives. Specifically, Leslie Heywood agrees that recent discourse on feminism such as Afro-feminism and third-wave feminism is postmodern in orientation: “In its emphasis on destabilizing fixed definitions of gender and rejection of unitary notions of ‘woman’ and ‘feminism,’ . . . feminism is clearly informed and shaped by postmodern theory” (257–58). This suggests that both positive or negative fixed notions of women would still be problematic as long as they are based on a fixed definition.

One observes that Matha, who inherits her mother’s (Bernadetta) political ambitions in The Old Drift, demonstrates that women in some contemporary novels subvert the usual archetypes and grand narratives associated with women in literary texts. They depart from the common literary archetype of a woman as evil and a seductress. Rather, Matha’s downfall comes at the hands of her male colleague Godfrey. He impregnates her, leaves her, and thus brings her life and dreams to a standstill. Instead, in Medusa-like style and in a reversal of the view of a woman as a “femme fatale” (Guerin et al.), it is Godfrey who seduces Matha with his murderous eyes. We are informed that although Matha’s sister describes him as a “sleepy dude” (175) and his eyes as “vegetable-dull eyes” (176), for Matha, his eyes always “twinkled at her” (172). The portrayal of Matha here is the opposite of expected stereotypes of a seductress and femme fatale above and may be observed as a disavowal of fixed stereotypes especially in relation to indigenous oral narratives. This is similar to Berlie Doherty’s observation on modern novelists such as Chimamanda Adichie that may be considered to be writing back to earlier African novels such as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), where women are portrayed as subservient and appendages of men. It is thus not a coincidence that the female protagonist in Adichie’s short story “The Headstrong Historian” is a descendant of Obierika from Umuofia village. These authors are writing back to grand narratives of women in African literary texts.

The disavowal of fixed identity/archetypes frees a woman’s identity from fixed signifier/signified relations (Derrida) and gesticulates toward a plurality of meaning. This is a challenge to the idea of the word woman as pertaining to a single meaning in The Old Drift because it would require thinking in hierarchized binary pairs because a woman would always be the opposite of something that she is not—in this case a man. As the case might be in a patriarchal system (where men are always placed at the center of society), men would always be the preferred member of the woman/man binary. This is why in many societies, “woman” has “historically been defined in patriarchal societies as the opposite, negative, or inverse of everything that defines men” (Wilson 182). For many former colonies this image of men and women still influences postcolonial society (Tamale). If one went by the opposite and negative hypothesis, then women such as Sylvia in The Old Drift would have to be defined only by that which matches the expected opposite and inferior position in relation to a man. However, the fact that aside from being a mother she is also many other things such as a sex worker (with another complex web and infinite chains of possible manifestations) means that the fixity on a particular signifier/signified and binary is not sustainable. That is why one would have to align themselves to Brubaker and Cooper’s idea to open up to infinite possible idioms of decolonization, of feminism, of a woman to further dismantle signifier/signified thought with the view that:

[to] signify directly, does not point to an object or idea in the world in a one-to-one correspondence. What one person means by “mother” can be quite different from what another person means, and even one person’s use of the word “mother” can conjure several different concepts at the same time.

(Wilson 181–82)

Clearly, the fact that different people and even a single person may understand the idea of the word mother differently means the word woman should not be fixed on one meaning—the opposite or negative of a man. For instance, if, on the one hand, one considers Sylvia in The Old Drift only as Jacob’s mother, her definition corresponds to a specific signified that has to do with a female parent (opposite of Jacob’s father as the male parent). In this case one would have to settle for the woman one observes taking care of her son Jacob, making sure that he is always by her side while she works at her salon and as the female parent who grounds Jacob for wandering away from home without permission. On the other hand, the fact that Sylvia is a sex worker by night conjures a different personality, different from her mother role but by virtue of binary opposition, still the opposite but now negative of a man.

It must be noted that the very fact that Sylvia’s situation presents two signifieds (female parent and sex worker) of a man breaks down the fixed relationship between one signifier and one signified. Similarly, fixity on signifier/signified and binary pairs expects us to define Sylvia either as only a mother or a sex worker or a woman but never both. Such a definition does not take into account what happens when Sylvia does not fit perfectly into the mother category (signifier) because her role as Jacob’s mother in the sense of female parent (signified) is marred by her being a sex worker (second signified). She does not fit neatly into the idea of a mother because by the societal standards of the novel the image of a mother is one who is married and not a single sex worker like Sylvia. To make matters worse, she becomes pregnant by mistake from one of her clients. Yet Sylvia is a typical example of plurality of identity and the danger of confining what a woman can or cannot be to a fixed notion. Indeed the plurality and openness to identity suggested in The Old Drift with Sylvia is noted long before in African circles where taking part in colonial resistance, women had to strip themselves of their societal designated roles as women—daughters, wives, etc. (Diabate). Yet the question that remains is whether they ceased to be women in moments where they substituted their roles as mothers, women for war? The point Serpell makes with regard to Sylvia answers our question—in the Zambian society of the novel it is clearly unacceptable to mix motherhood with an unmarried status and getting pregnant by mistake on the job as in Sylvia’s case, yet motherhood here clearly defies a single identity. It is for this reason that I suggest that when asked to choose who Sylvia is, we cannot choose one but both seemingly opposing identities (mother and sex worker), which are simply two among the many possible manifestations of Sylvia’s character. This means that women’s identity as one of the other idioms of decolonization must be liberated from subscription to one patriarchal definition and opened up to infinite possibilities.

3. “DECOLONISE YOUR PUSSY,” NAILA, AND THE DECOLONIZATION OF WOMEN’S BODIES

In this section, I argue that the phrase “DECOLONISE YOUR PUSSY” is a call to decolonize women’s bodies—taking pussy as a synecdoche and symbol of a woman’s body. This is related to how definitions of women’s beauty, decisions of what to do with one’s body, dressing, and many other things are dependent on the male perspective in many patriarchal societies (Musila; Mwangi). The depth at which the patriarchal power over a woman is inscribed on the body suggests a system that is deeply ingrained in socialization, societal norms, beliefs, and culture (Adichie, “We Should All Be Feminists”). That is why one of feminism’s concerns is ways in which women’s bodies are controlled within a patriarchal system (Carson). Serpell demonstrates a similar feminist agenda in her women characters such as Matha and Naila. For example, Matha’s membership in the guerilla cadet squad with its attendant “unwomanly” dressing, training, and other athletic antics subverts patriarchal inscriptions and taboos related to women’s bodies. Yet, for Matha, acting responsibly (in relation to the body) would be to subscribe to behavior that is only correct by authorization of a patriarchal system. This is problematic because it evidences Butler’s observation that:

To be female is, according to that distinction, a facticity which has no meaning, but to be a woman is to have become a woman, to compel the body to conform to an historical idea of “woman,” to induce the body to become a cultural sign, to materialize oneself in obedience to an historically delimited possibility, and to do this as a sustained and repeated corporeal project.

(902)

This means the idea of a woman (in a patriarchal system) is a pre-inscribed identity that women conform to and that they are socialized into through the indoctrination of specific behavior. In addition, since this image is perpetuated from one generation to another, it becomes a cultural symbol of how a woman must carry one’s body.

The fact that what a woman does with their body is a patriachically encultured aspect is the reason some consider womanhood a performance. This is inclined to Butler’s idea that gender is a performativity that one enters into after choosing, albeit choosing to conform to the historical idea of a man or woman—based on patriarchy in this case. The idea I suggest here is emphasized by Butler’s distinction between performativity and performance where performance is a role that a subject willingly takes up and performs but performativity preexists the subject and directs the subject to a role they must perform whether they like it or not (Butler 33). It is this performativity aspect that makes human beings naturally lean toward predefined gender roles. It is the same idea Serpell illustrates by juxtaposing the role women’s bodies are expected to play in the 1960s Zambian society of The Old Drift with Matha’s involvement in activities of the male-dominated guerrilla cadet. In the novel, Matha is seen taking part in training drills that include being rolled downhill and on water in a forty-gallon oil barrel, swinging from trees. Yet, one observes the shock, laughter, and disdain coming from her peers (some with children on their backs), who are among the people watching the training. On one hand “Those girls [her peers] teased Matha—they said she wasn’t serious, that she laughed too much” (163), because for them, by getting married, using their bodies to have children, and not taking part in the cadet movement, they are more serious than Matha and conform to societal standards. Essentially, the control of what the woman’s body can or cannot do lies in the fact that adherence to the official narrative could be an expression of one’s identity (if Matha takes the side of the other girls as expected) but at the same time a disavowal or disguise of the real identity (if Matha conforms to societal expectations). It is this denial to do what one wishes with their body that is problematic in the context of the patriarchal control of women’s bodies.

More specifically, in The Old Drift, Serpell draws attention to the need to decolonize the female body from commodification and objectification because in many societies women’s bodies are viewed as objects that only have value in relation to their ability to offer physical satisfaction (Snyder). This position is taken at the expense of any other nonphysical aspects of their character and personality that women may have to offer. It is such issues of concern that the decolonization agenda glosses over when attending to recapturing a precolonial indigenous culture. The proponents of such a notion of decolonization do not, for instance, attend to gaps in how indigenous culture and literature imagines the woman in many oral narratives as bride prizes or something that men have to work for to earn (Siluonde). It is such self-reflexive attention to local female objectification and commodification that Serpell evokes in Joseph’s assumption that his girlfriend Naila’s tattoo of a barcode on her buttocks is an affirmation that she is a commodity. On the contrary, I read the tattoo as Serpell’s way of satirically denouncing body objectification and commodification, especially since it is on Naila’s buttocks. Such an act is double-edged because it may “on one hand, seem to repeat gender stereotypes and, on the other, mock them through mimicry and subversion” (Krolokke and Sorenson 23).

The subversion or protest aspect by revealing her buttocks is not a new phenomenon in Africa. Diabate discusses how from as early as the 1929 Igbo Women’s War, “thousands of women opposed colonial incursion and exploitation. They [women] deployed multiple contestation strategies and even showed their naked buttocks” (175). So, while both the barcode and exposing the buttocks would be viewed as Naila’s affirmation of her commodified body, evidence of similar routes of protest in Africa and Joseph’s reaction as well as Naila’s response to it in the excerpt below proves otherwise. In order to show her friend Tabitha the tattoo over a video call, we are told that Naila:

tilted the screen to catch her image, then turned and pulled the back of her panties down, unveiling the patch of brindled skin . . . Naila craned her neck to look at the fresh tattoo. It was a role of thin vertical lines of different weight, tiny numbers nudging up into them from the bottom edge.

“What price comes up when you scan it?” Joseph laughed from across the room. “You can’t scan it,” said Naila. “The lines are meaningful but not, like, capitalistically.”

(515)

Clearly, Naila’s behavior here demonstrates that she is making a feminist statement as a last resort similar to the way many older women in some African societies have been said to do when all avenues of protest fail. Naila flaunts her buttock tattoo of a barcode and in so doing (taking Korolokke and Sorenson’s second interpretation of such acts above) parodies women’s body commodification and objectification (especially that many cases of sexual harassment involve inappropriate slaps on women’s buttocks). Bearing in mind Diabate’s caution that defiant disrobing could have multiple interpretations, Naila’s exposure of her buttocks can also be considered in light of “the angry exhibition of mature female nakedness constitutes the last stage in genital shaming and cursing.” Earlier stages include the “verbal suggestion ‘Do you want to see where you came from?’” (19). It is for this reason that Naila’s later response to Joseph’s assumption that the barcode tattoo relates to some price tag is pregnant with meaning.

The fact that Naila’s response that neither does the tattoo signify a commodity nor does it have to mean anything especially not in capitalistic terms where everything is commodified confirms the parody when it eludes the expected meaning, response, and attitude toward a woman’s body. Yet the fact that Naila’s action elicits a different response from Joseph than what she intended speaks to Diabate’s view that defiant disrobing must be viewed in relation to the context, intentions, and reactions of the target and those around the person disrobing. That is why, in relation to a woman’s body, Naila’s intention and Joseph’s misinterpretation of the tattoo, and by extension a woman’s body and women’s protests, must not be viewed through a single lens. In this case the woman’s body does not need to be commodified or be viewed as an object with a price tag on it to exist—“it does not have to mean anything.”

Actions such as Naila’s above further speak to how contemporary women can be said to have developed the habit of returning the male gaze that has always been fixed on them. Issues of commodification and objectification discussed above are products of how men determine what they want to see when they look at a woman. Consequently, inadvertently or otherwise, women are oriented to feed that gaze and when men look at them, what is seen, meant, and preferred meets set expectations. That is why the efficacy of defiant disrobing in many African societies such as the 1929 Igbo Women’s War lies in the fact that their naked exposure would ideally be sexually suggestive since “The short loincloths indicate their readiness to undress” (Diabate 185). Yet it is a different kind of readiness—readiness to expose their buttocks as a naked weapon, an act that becomes a weapon because it is shoved into the faces of men returning the gaze in a different way from what is expected. This is further reminiscent of how at one point lipstick, wigs, and generally makeup was associated with being slutty (Snyder), or how up to now the image of women is based on idealized forms of the female body in magazines, modeling, adverts, movies, and music videos. According to Carson, these images are usually meant “for male consumption and sexual delectation” (94). In Serpell’s The Old Drift one notes how women like Naila and her friend Tabitha intentionally move about naked and even video call each other without any care to dress up lest they feed the male gaze/view related to indecency. In fact, in more recent times women return the gaze in a similar way to Naila and Tabitha: by women now reclaiming and owning those images and derogatory terms that feed the male gaze and shoving it right in men’s faces—returning the gaze with a different meaning—they thereby dilute the initial male gaze. In third-wave feminism, for instance, proponents are of the view that “using makeup isn’t a sign of our sway to the marketplace and the male gaze; it can be sexy, campy, ironic, or simply decorating ourselves without the loaded issues” (Baumgardner and Richards 301–02). The loaded issues here have to do with how the male gaze dictates the meaning and what women do with their bodies. On the contrary, the idea is that one can do whatever they want with their bodies without subscribing its meaning to what men expect to see.

It is in a similar light that Serpell uses the derogatory term pussy in The Old Drift as a way of subverting a derogatory term and owning it. Characters in the novel can be said to be returning the male gaze because two female characters, Naila and Tabitha, for instance, roam around naked (without being asked), which would normally be sexually condescending if looked at from the male gaze perspective. One only has to observe Joseph’s reaction to seeing Tabitha naked when he does not expect her to be naked as she converses with Naila:

Finally Tabitha glitched into view.

“Sup, bitch,” she sang. She was topless, doing her make up, using the laptop camera as a mirror. He [Joseph] straightened out of her view, cupped his hands under his chest and jiggled them with a questioning look.

“Ya, she’s topless,” Naila intoned. “Avert your eyes lest the sight of nipples blind you.”

(513)

The unexpected way and easy attitude with which Tabitha flaunts her nakedness oblivious to Joseph in the room gesticulates toward a return of the male gaze. This is because Joseph’s reaction to seeing Tabitha topless suggests shock and not the objectified satisfaction one expects from a man who sees a woman naked. Since Tabitha and not Joseph (as a man) is in control, the nudity fails to facilitate the gaze in the expected way. Instead, control and also the gaze is reversed or returned to the man, in this case Joseph, who is more embarrassed by Tabitha than she is. That is why Naila advises Joseph to avert his eyes lest the nakedness blinds him—a blindness that comes from the fact that Tabitha and not Joseph (as a man) is in control of her nakedness.

Decolonizing the pussy or the female body also suggests gaining confidence with regard to aspects of the female body that are normally related to shame. This is in relation to how issues that have to do with maternity, menstruation, are considered unclean and shameful (Guerin; Carson). Yet, women are often defined in relation to the same negativity and shame ascribed to the female body. To decolonize such an attitude would require one to take the French feminist stance and subvert such negativity and shame by laying claim, loving, embracing, and celebrating those things that are considered shameful about the female body (Carson; Wilson). Serpell demonstrates such a feminist agenda using two different time frames where one group of women is described using the negativity and shame related to the body while the other group is described later with a more open-minded approach to their character and personality outside their body. The first type of women mentioned above justifies the claim that:

while men lay claim to the supposedly “superior” category of mind, the biological processes—menstruation, gestation—are writ large upon the surface of the female body, and thus become the means by which “woman” is defined. . . . produces the powerful threat of the abject—that which is dispelled by the social order—particularly liquids and waste substances produced by the body, like tears, urine, sexual fluids, faeces, etc., which are viewed as abject waste products and a source of revulsion.

(Carson 99)

Clearly, such biological processes “are writ large upon the surface of the female body” (94) and become the means by which a woman is identified and associated with negativity. As a result of the female body always being related to menstruation, gestation, lactation, and childbirth, it is inscribed on their bodies, making their bodies just as repulsive as the processes. In the 1960s of The Old Drift, we witness a scene where women are described only in association with the maternal aspects and fluids: “Some of them had babies on their backs . . . while they were busy wiping poo and snot and spit and piss from their babies’ wet holes” (163). The comfortability and naivety exhibited while being surrounded by maternal fluids and its attendant shame and negativity suggest an ignorant acceptance of the position the women find themselves in. The fact that they are clearly accustomed to being defined by bodily and maternal aspects and fluids suggests how deeply ingrained the taken for granted relationship between women and their bodies (in negative light) is.

In the second instance, and in the 21st century of The Old Drift, the young woman Naila is described as displaying her nakedness openly. Yet, the sophistication with which she approaches the issue of her tattoo on the buttocks and generally her nakedness suggests a grotesque carnivalesque subversion of patriarchal negation of maternal and other aspects related to the body. It is not uncommon to witness people from the lower realms of society, in this case women, involving the lower stratum of the body that are related to parts and waste that we often do not expose to the public (such as Naila’s nakedness) in protest. Naila flaunts her nakedness as a way of celebrating the woman’s body, which is often negated by associating it with maternal fluids, body waste, and so on. It is against such a background that Adichie advises the following in relation to women and shame:

speaking of shame—never, ever link sexuality and shame. Or nakedness and shame. Do not ever make “virginity” a focus. Every conversation about virginity becomes a conversation about shame. Teach her to reject the linking of shame and female biology. Why were we raised to speak in low tones about periods? To be filled with shame if our menstrual blood happened to stain our skirt? Periods are nothing to be ashamed of.

(“Feminist Manifesto” 18)

Viewed from Adichie’s angle, one would understand why Naila’s nudity must be approached with caution. After all, despite freely exposing her nakedness for a feminist purpose, Naila has more depth to her character and contributes actively and meaningfully to her conversations with Joseph and Jacob. She is also one of the masterminds in the second Chachacha that the trio plan. Hence, this display can be considered a subversion or turning of society inside out to expose those things, in this case the commodification of a woman’s body, which is usually so subtle that it would not normally and openly be talked about except if forced on the reader like this.

Lastly, the statement “DECOLONISE YOUR PUSSY” is a call to literally decolonize the vagina or pussy from sexual exploitation. This means to liberate the word pussy from its derogatory meaning but also to decolonize the actual vagina/pussy from all negativity, biasness, and abuse whether physical or otherwise. This is why Serpell introduces us to characters like Naila who does not conform to sexual subjugation by men but takes control of her sexual experiences. The fact that Serpell uses the derogatory term “pussy” and not vagina in the novel evidences a call to decolonize the vagina by subverting the negative term and owning it. In fact, the use of the word pussy draws attention because it is often related to negativity but also because here the meaning becomes double-edged: on one hand it is a derogatory term with attendant negatives related to women. On the other hand, the strength of its use comes from the fact that connotatively, the word pussy explains the physical abuse and subjugation related to the actual vagina in a patriarchal society.¹ Thus, Serpell subverts this patriarchal hegemony by creating characters that are in control of their sexuality and sexual experience. The subversive aspect is stronger when Naila is said to control her orgasms. This agrees with how “third-wavers feel entitled to interact with men as equals, claim sexual pleasure as they desire it” (Snyder 179). Third-wave feminism’s suggestion is that women take the sexual experience into their own hands and on their own terms—owning the term pussy. This is Naila’s approach in The Old Drift and she boasts to her friend Tabitha about how she is in control of her sexual experience with Joseph and that she has trained the “dick” like a pet even if it is not that good: “the dick isn’t even all that—I’ve just trained it. Like a pet snake. ‘A Kundalino’” (515). The idea of taming and training Joseph’s penis demonstrates how Naila and not Joseph is in control of her sexual experience. In fact, the depth of this control is highlighted by how Naila manages to control her orgasms while having sex, just before her conversation with Tabitha:

“But,” she straddled him, “I know that you know that I know when you’re about to come.” She crushed the spliff in an ashtray and ground her pelvis against his. The thin layers of underwear between them quickly came off and they were at it for the second time that morning. To prove her point, Naila stilled her hips when he was close and moved achingly slow, inching them towards a staggered climax: her first, then him.

(515)

Naila is not only getting equal satisfaction from the sexual experience but as in the third-wave feminist direction, Naila does so on her own terms—making sure she is sexually satisfied. Controlling when Joseph (as a man) has an orgasm, as demonstrated above, represents usurpation of the man’s role in the whole sexual experience because the man thinks he is in control, yet he is not.

4. CONCLUSION

I have argued that the statement “DECOLONISE YOUR PUSSY” in The Old Drift is Serpell’s way of redirecting the decolonization conversation to biases on women that mirror colonial tendencies. Of particular note is a feminist agenda that calls for a subjective Afro-feminist approach to the fate of women in postcolonial societies such as the fictional Zambia in her novel. While other idioms of decolonization have focused on recapturing an indigenous culture lost during colonialism, our agenda fails when it eclipses other idioms of decolonization that remain in the shadows. This happens when the term decolonization in its usual form cannot account for internal aspects that need to be decolonized in many postcolonial societies. In order to address these other idioms, I observed how contemporary novels such as The Old Drift, specifically Serpell’s statement and other instances in the novel, reveal the gaps that are exposed when attention is taken away from such notions of decolonization focused on nationalism. Of particular interest is Serpell’s feminist agenda, which illuminates issues such as women’s stories and place in history and context-specific heroes such as Matha and her guerilla cadet involvement, which challenge a male-centered decolonization agenda to claim historical narratives. In addition, I contended that Matha’s story dismantles universalist and essentialist attitudes toward the identity of women and shifts the whole feminist discourse and definition of a woman toward liberation, infinite possibilities, and a more context specific discursive environment. Furthermore, my reading of Sylvia in the novel demonstrates how the fixed idea or signifier and signified related to archetypes and literary stereotypes breaks down as Sylvia’s character does not fit perfectly into the prescribed image of a woman. Instead, Sylvia as a signifier splits into three directions—as mother, prostitute, and woman.

I further argued that the use of the word “pussy” with decolonization in Serpell’s statement is specifically a call to decolonize the female body from patriarchal hegemony as the word “pussy” here is taken as a symbol of the whole body, but also as the literal vagina. This idea is firstly related to the act of defiant disrobing and genital cursing as protest in many African societies. In addition, it is related to third-wave feminist tendencies of drawing attention to derogatory terms against women, owning and reclaiming them so as to draw them and other biases out. I argued this point through my reading of Naila’s tatoo of a barcode on her buttocks. Additionally, one further observes how women in contemporary societies have learned to return the gaze by behaving like Naila’s friend Tabitha and shoving her nakedness in Josephs face as she chats with Naila. This destabilizes Joseph’s control of women’s bodies as a man because Tabitha is in control of whether to flaunt her nakedness or not. As such, the bared breasts do not have the kind of objectified satisfaction one expects if the nakedness was summoned by a man. Lastly, through a carnivalesque subversion and grotesque display of nakedness and maternal fluids and related aspects Serpell’s characters demonstrate that definitions of women based on maternal aspects is based on a culturally naturalized negation that can easily be subverted and celebrated as positively womanlike.