We Need New Names by Noviolet Bulawayo

Noviolet Bulawayo and I

Darling and her friends Bastard, Chipo, Godknows, Sbho and Stina seem like a perfectly normal band of neighbourhood children, as they frolic about Paradise harvesting guavas from nearby posh Budapest suburb, playing made-up games and imitating the grown-ups. That is until you realize that Chipo is 11 years old and pregnant, having been raped by her grandfather, Bastard harbours vain, it seems, illusions of escaping Paradise to live abroad and Darling's father is slowly dying of AIDS in his bed at home. They live in Paradise, a fictional slum in Zimbabwe's capital, Harare in the difficult years of the mid-to late 90s, where the newly-poor "appeared single file, like ants...with the dust from their crushed houses clinging to their hair and skin and clothes", having been driven from their homes by the government's security forces. The adults vote for "change". When the election is stolen and the brutal dictator returns to power, they begin to consider their options. That is how Darling is sent to live with her Auntie Fostalina and her Uncle Kojo in the US. Uprooted, Darling forges a new identity for herself. She finds that the adults around her are struggling with displacement as much as she is. She finds that while she no longer has to steal guavas to fill her stomach, she now suffers from a hunger for her home that nothing in America can satisfy. When I met Noviolet Bulawayo briefly on 28 June 2014 at the Writers' Conversation hosted by Kwani at Nairobi's National Museum, she said through Darling's experience, she sought to explore the connection between identity and geographical location. Ms Bulawayo told me that she spent her first year in the US in silence, struggling with culture shock and displacement. 

Ms Bulawayo also said she enjoyed writing the first part of the novel while Darling was in Zimbabwe, but struggled with the second part when Darling leaves. Her sadness is illustrated in the melancholic, mournful Chapter 16 in which Ms Bulawayo decries the Zimbabwean immigrants' exchanging of their identity for a soulless existence in America. This one of the several occasions when Ms Bulawayo's voice comes through, barely concealed, interrupting the plot to provide background and to make a point. Darling's ever-humourous voice is replaced by the author's much more adult language that is completely inconsistent with anything Darling might say.  It shouldn't work, but yet it does, somehow. The passages in this chapter are of unforgettable beauty. I was drawn to them again and again.

We Need New Names is a coming-of-age novel and an interrogation of what is it is like to be made to constantly feel one's own otherness in a myriad small ways.