Tears still fall: feminine self-mourning in Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift

This article expands the notion of “self-mourning” from its previous definition of grieving one’s mortality to include grieving intangible losses of self. Feminine self-mourning thus refers to grieving one’s conscription into womanhood and the losses incurred therein. This article uses Namwali Serpell’s Citation2019 novel The Old Drift as a case study, specifically examining the character Matha Mwamba, who perpetually weeps for several decades. This expression of feminine self-mourning generates a logic of consolation that constitutes the reception of comfort from the consistency of grief rather than from its lessening. This consistency, spanning the high colonial period to post-independence, productively connects multiple generations of Zambian women, troubling the supposed rupture between women read as passively accepting colonial society and those of later periods who are read as modern and rebellious.