Writer Namwali Serpell ponders the origins of her sense of style

We wear where we’re from. But when you’re an immigrant, the expectation that you must represent is a gift and a curse.

Picture migration. What do you see? A flock of birds notching a sunset sky? A flotilla of butterflies hovering over a field of green? If I said emigration instead, perhaps you would see a black and white montage: huddled masses in Old World clothing – hats and buckles and dresses cut to swooping style, travellers bearing bundles and suitcases, their eyes and smiles glowing with hope.

Now picture immigration. If you’re like me, you see your family. But if you’re going by the news, you might see swarms again, of people this time, crowding together or queuing up, sweeping over borders, washing up on distant shores. Or, more optimistically, maybe you would see an eclectic group of people, each in their distinctive garb: a turban, a dashiki, a salwar kameez, a cheongsam, a huipil.

We wear where we’re from. Here in the US, people love sporting their home town, home state, the

country itself – the flag, the map – blazoned across their chests. Students even waltz around campus wearing sweatshirts labelled with the name of the college. It’s odd, like puttering around the house in a shirt that says HOME. It’s meant to broadcast team spirit, I suppose, a plucky sort of patriotism.

Those who were not born here, we too showcase where we are from, like a perpetual International Day at school. These origin stories are baked into our skin, some of us, carved into our hair. Threaded in a necklace, a bracelet, a sandal. Glimpsed in a preference for colour, bead, pattern or gilt.

For an immigrant, this expectation – you must represent

– is a gift and a curse. Looking different can be lovely and interesting. Looking different can be exhausting and, these days, risky. Plus being an immigrant means you’re from more than one place: where you came from, where you landed, where you paused, wherever you’re off to. Which country should you represent? Where should you wear?

My family moved from Zambia to the United States when I was eight years old. My sisters and I were tossed into the unchartered waters of American fashion for girls circa 1989. To survive, we assimilated. We gravitated toward cheap basics: denim, lycra, bright solids, tennis shoes. I obsessed deeply over the exact size, plunge and shade – hunter green, maroon, navy – of the V-neck shirts the girls wore at school, the slouch of the stretchedout socks they let hang like goiters over their Keds. Instead of jewel tones, I ended up in pastels. My socks didn’t slouch; they scrunched. My shoes were Payless

rip-offs, Neds or something. My fashion sense was a series of near-misses.

A few years later, touristing around London, my sister and I ended up at the original Doc Martens store. Neither of us had saved enough pocket money to buy a pair of classic black eight-holes, so we each bought one boot. For the next year – I was in Grade 8, she in 11 – we traded off sporting them every other day. I still remember the day I dared to wear them with a sundress. It had buttons down the front and it hit around mid-calf, and it was sheer, with a dark green and deep red floral pattern, like the thorny wall that sprung up around Sleeping Beauty. The contrast was the point: the masculine boot with this Rosetti-like dress. This is now a familiar look but it was 1992 and My So-Called Life had yet to air and I’m proud to have pioneered it at Pikesville Middle School. I leaned against a wall and basked in the gazes – envious, dismissive, curious, all drawn to the clash.

The key was to stand out – on purpose. I had also discovered thrift stores, much to my delight and my mother’s dismay.

By the time I moved with my parents back to Zambia for my junior year of high school, I had stopped trying to fit in. The key was to stand out – on purpose. I had also discovered thrift stores, much to my delight and my mother’s dismay. I wore argyle, baseball stripes, kids T-shirts with the armholes and neck cut wide to fit (Incredible Hulk, Darth Vader, a red one with a triceratops on it), plaid, corduroy, Docs,

Looking different can be lovely and interesting. Looking different can be exhausting and, these days, risky.

Vans, Chucks. It was sort of skater, sort of punk, sort of hippy. Posting up in Lusaka at age 15 felt like being tossed out to sea again. My mishmash of quirky contrasts was not what Zambian teens were into. At school, we wore uniforms, so I mostly kept my ‘alternative’ outfits to my wardrobe. Then halfway through that year, my sister – struggling in her first year of college – joined us in Lusaka. With no thrift stores to haunt, she and I turned to salaula, the secondhand clothing that had begun pouring into Zambia in the ’80s. We treated town market like the Salvation Army, rummaging through mounds of clothing the size of termite hills. I found a silk paisley dress I later wore to a Tori Amos concert. I still think about this one shirt: crushed velvet, pointy lapels, a shimmery mint with orange threading. It was just too stinky to keep.

One day, my sister and I looked up and noticed that surrounding the heaps of used clothes from the West were stalls selling familiar three- to six-metre-long stretches of bright-patterned cloth. In Zambia, we call this material chitenge; it’s also known as Ankara or Dutch wax print. Its versatility and appeal is obvious: breathable, lightweight, easy-to-wash cotton, waxed so that its vibrant colours don’t fade. (To this day, I always carry a chitenge in my hand luggage in case of emergencies.)

We had always used it at home for wrappers, hair wraps, tablecloths, towels, dishcloths, pillowcases. Our mothers and aunties often had it tailored into elaborate Nigerian-style outfits to wear to funerals or weddings or parties. But out of context among the ragdoll shambles of salaula, the intricate chitenge patterns suddenly stood out to us – the flowers and ladybugs and butterflies, the kettles and phones and padlocks. My sister, a budding artist, was drawn to the bold palette and graphic shapes. I, a budding writer, was taken with the Warholian irony of these iconic images.

We bought cheap swathes and took them to Kamwala, the Indian trader neighbourhood, where local tailors had their sewing machines embedded in the pavement outside the stores. I got three mini-skirts sewn in an A-line cut: cobalt and mango pens over lime lined with burnt umber; an Escherish interlocking pattern of periwinkle and lemon; russet @ signs shadowed by turquoise on beige. It was the ’90s and bellbottoms had made their first comeback, so I got some of those made too: a black pair with white and cerulean lily pads, another pair in a messy orange and navy plaid.

There’s a photo of me in Cairo, wearing a pair under an oversized white tee with a greyscale photo of the band Blind Melon. I was doubling down on contrast: a chitenge pattern with an ‘alternative’ band shirt, plus the Western cut of the bellbottoms in a distinctively African print.

That there might be a history and politics to all of this didn’t really occur to me until a decade later. I was at a party with a group of fellow graduate students and I had blundered into an argument about the literary canon. A white friend averred that African literature couldn’t be any good because it was too young:

‘It just hasn’t been around long enough to develop.’ I was flabbergasted to learn that not only did my friend feel this way, but that this was not a minority opinion in the room, nor at the university, nor in academia. Most distressing of all was my friend’s willingness to say it to my face. I felt obscurely guilty, as though I hadn’t made it clear enough to everyone that I was Zambian.

I called my sister to vent. ‘Maybe you should start wearing more chitenge,’ she said. I considered. I read. I learned about

the multicultural history of the material: its origins in the Dutch East Indies, where the Javanese used wax to dye batik; the West African soldiers, recruited by the Dutch to fight wars in Indonesia, who took a liking to the patterns and brought them home; the Belgian who invented a machine to print cloth with resin on both sides; the imperfections that resulted from this method – crackling lines, offset shadows – that led Europeans to export it to the lowest common market: Africa; the absorption of those errors into the very design of the material; the refinement of the form according to local taste: bright colours, geometric shapes, images of imported objects.

I’d just been hired as a young brown female professor and I still felt I had to dress for authority

– I couldn’t just wear bellbottoms and mini-skirts to class. The next time I visited home, I selected some demure chitenge material and had it sewn in the patterns of some business casual dresses I had bought from TJ Maxx. A year later, I paused before a storefront in the West Village in New York. In the window was a full-skirted dress in a blue and white chitenge pattern. I went in and tried it on but couldn’t quite stomach paying $200 for a dress that I knew I could have made at home for $5.

Western cut/ Africanprint clothing has arrived. Chitengecovered décor, outfits, shoes and jewellery is everywhere, from high fashion to Anthropologie, from my friend Towani Clarke’s Kutowa

Designs to online purveyors like Suakoko Betty and Kaela Kay. With this new plenitude of options, I’ve levelled up on contrast. I wear multiple chitenge patterns at once – not in the familiar patchwork form of the backpacks and tablecloths that tourists like to buy, but in a carefully designed ‘power clash’: two items of clothing that share either a similar pattern or a similar palette, but never both.

In the Piccadilly Top Shop, I found some crop-tops from the London-based design duo Koro Kimono. These clash nicely with my A-line mini-skirts. The Haitian-Italian designer Stella Jean is an inspiration: I’ve hunted down chitenge pencil skirts and bomber jackets online to wear with plaid shirts. Strolling through Venice, I saw a chitenge macro-skirt in the window of a tiny store. Inside, I found a vintage Dolce & Gabbana tee: pale blue with red baseball stripes, silkscreened with a kitschy ’80s ad for an ‘African Safari’, narrated in neon font and bedecked with rhinestones.

When I was nominated for the 2015 Caine Prize for African writing, I went to one reading wearing that shirt with a chitenge skirt I’d found in my San Francisco neighbourhood: a beige, navy, tangerine pattern with a polka-dot waistband. I felt 15 again: the sporty shirt, the chitenge pattern, the flashy irony. I accepted the prize in a Kutowa design: a full-length wrap dress inspired by Diane von Furstenberg, with an Obi belt, a blue and green print snaking over a gold and brown crosshatch.

The mélange of influences in this dress made it the perfect envelope for a writer like me. My fiction riffs on Conrad and Ngugi, Ovid and Ferrante, Milton and Hurston. My novel The Old Drift is about British, Indian, and Italian immigrants to Zambia, as well as those who drift within its borders. If I have an aesthetic principle, it is creolisation: the mixing of cultures. That is how I represent.

We wear where we’re from, yes. But being required to show off your culture can feel like a constraint. I wear this contradiction on my body. Chitenge clothing both reflects my identity and complicates it. The patterns I boast – the colourful flocks and flotillas of animal, vegetable, mineral – bespeak a history of colonialism and migration, but also my personal history: who I am and where I’ve been. When these patterns clash outright, they put on display the conflict all immigrants feel: disparate places are not so easy to reconcile – and that might be good, or at least interesting to look at. ✤