We speak Nyanja, Namwanga, Mwambe and Bemba. My parents speak two different Bantu languages, and even my sister and I speak different languages so we all speak to each other in English. The local news is still delivered in seven languages. I wanted readers to get a sense that Zambia contains a multitude of cultures that are lassoed together. We’re seen as happy and sweet and a little moony, stargazey. There’s a mix of Bantu languages woven into the text. I also had timelines, to make sure that one character reached Victoria Falls after bungee jumping started - or that another character is the right age to play with He-Man figurines as toys. Then there’s a large Excel document that describes the entire plot - each scene, each episode, each sequence - in a synecdochic fashion, like fractals. How did you keep track of all the characters?I work on planes and trains a lot, so there are lots of cocktail napkins with A, B, C, C, B, A and spiral drawings. I was very much influenced by “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez, and “Midnight’s Children” and “The Satanic Verses” by Salman Rushdie. I figured out that if you were to sketch out the movement between the families as a triangle it forms a spiral. I wanted the reader to get a sense of circulating between three families, and I knew that I wanted to move generationally from the oldest to the youngest generation - with hinges from the grandmothers to the mothers, and from the mothers to the children.
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