Absolutely brilliant. This book is sizzling with life. Totally underrated! The easiest five stars I’ve given to a book this year. NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel, We Need New Names, is an extension of her Caine prize-winning short story, “Hitting Budapest”, about a girl coming of age in Zimbabwe and the United States of America—and boy, am I happy that his literature prize exists and that it enabled her to work some magic on her brilliant short story. This right here shows how important literary prize
We Need New Names, is an extension of her Caine prize-winning short story, “Hitting Budapest”, about a girl coming of age in Zimbabwe and the United States of America—and boy, am I happy that his literature prize exists and that it enabled her to work some magic on her brilliant short story. This right here shows how important literary prizes and being given an opportunity (financially and platform-wise) are!!!
It has been a long time since I’ve read a book that has elicited such visceral emotions from me. I laughed, I cried. This book made me incredibly happy and incredibly sad at the same time. We Need New Names is one of my absolute new favorite books. The characters, the story, the writing … it is absolutely mind-boggling and amazing what NoViolet Bulawayo has achieved here. And by the way, the main character absolutely hates Jane Eyre and the “stupid decisions” Jane makes in that book and I have never related to a character more in my whole life.
“In order to do this right, we need new names.”
Darling, the protagonist of NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut (!) novel , rackets around the Zimbabwean shanty town of Paradise with her friends: Chipo, 11, mysteriously pregnant, and mute; cheerful Godknows with shorts so thin his buttocks protrude; Sbho the beautiful, Bastard the aggressive, and Stina the voice of reason. Even the grim surroundings can’t keep this little gang down for long, as they run riot through the streets, stealing guavas, poking their noses into everything and scrawling on walls.
We Need New Names is a first-person narrative following Darling as she grows up in Zimbabwe until about the age of 10, when she is sent to the US, to live with her Aunt Fostalina, first in Detroit, Michigan [‘DestroyedMichygen’] and then in Kalamazoo. The first half of the book, in Zimbabwe, is set in the region called Matabeleland, the capital city of which is Bulawayo. Neither Zimbabwe nor Bulawayo are mentioned by name in the book, nor is the President, Robert Mugabe, but there are very obvious references to him and to the country over the first decade of the 21st century, the period during which the book is set.
Even though this is not a explicitly political novel, I found it interesting that with the little knowledge that I had of Zimbabwe under the regime of Robert Mugabe (most of which was acquired by reading Gappah’s
The place where you grow up is the centre of your world. It hardly needs a name. In Darling’s direct childhood account of her life in ‘Paradise’, the absence of these defining names seems natural. She is telling us about her life, not about Zimbabwe or Bulawayo. But to little Darling, other places, states and countries she would prefer to be in are definitely ‘names’. In fact, they are only names… remote concepts and vague ideas, nothing substantial. The reality will be something other than the places imagined.
From the beginning of the book Darling is dreaming of going to ‘myAmerica’, to ‘DestroyedMichygen’, which gloriously seems to be everything that the makeshift slum, Paradise, in unnamed Bulawayo is not. But when her aunt is coming to fetch her and Darling does get to Detroit, reality hits hard. Americans have only the vaguest idea of ‘Africa’, and Darling has to face othering in every aspect of her life. While Darling adjusts to her new life and the new problems it brings with it, underneath it she is aware that something has been broken that she will never be able to mend.
“Leaving your country is like dying, and when you come back you are like a ghost returning to earth, roaming around with missing gaze in your eyes.”
Darling is existentially living in America, while emotionally in some other construct in her memory. One cannot shake the feeling that Darling would’ve been in need of therapy, or at least a person whom she could trust and pour her heart out. And even though, over time, she manages to settle in in school and find new friends, “there are times, though, that no matter how much food I eat, I find the food does nothing for me, like I am hungry for my country and nothing is going to fix that.” Yep, nothing is going to fix that.
We Need New Names reminded me a lot of my own father and how he deals with his displacement in a country that is not his home. There were so many moments in this novel that were so well captured and relatable, they put a chill down my spine. Finally, someone found the right words to describe how (some) immigrants feel in regards to home, language, integration—
“Because we were not in our country, we could not use our own languages, and so when we spoke our voices came out bruised. When we talked, our tongues thrashed madly in our mouths, staggered like drunken men. Because we were not using our languages we said things we did not mean; what we really wanted to say remained folded inside. Trapped. In America we did not always have the words. It was only when were were by ourselves that we spoke in our real voices. When we were alone we summoned the horses of our languages and mounted their backs and galloped past skyscrapers. Always, we were reluctant to come back.”
—and how they act, most notably how they act differently, how a dormant part of their being is being rekindled as soon as they encounter someone from home: “I keep watching Uncle Kojo; whenever he is with someone from his country, everything about him is different—his laugh, his talk, his eating—it’s like something cuts him open to reveal this other person I don’t even know.” The moments NoViolet Bulawayo describes are so real and so true, they make my heart ache.
And so in the US, Darling doesn’t only have to deal with the racism and othering that she is subjected to, she also witnesses what this displacement does to her aunt and uncle. One of the most memorable scenes in the book is when Aunt Fostalina tries to order a bra, and the American lady on the telephone is unwilling to understand her:
“I know that she will stand there and start the conversation all over and say out loud, in careful English, all the things that she meant to say, that she should have said to the girl on the phone but did not because she could not find the words at the time. I know that in front of that mirror, Aunt Fostalina will be articulate, that English will come alive on her tongue and she will spit it like it’s burning her mouth, like it’s poison, like it’s the only language she has ever known.”
But as the years go by, Darling becomes aware of troubling paradoxes within herself, of her own detachment from her home country. This detachment is marked by long silences in conversations, particularly in the mobile phone conversations she has with her mother and her childhood friends back home. She says she doesn’t know what to reply. She is unable to respond when she has conflicting answers in her head. She struggles to deal with the paradoxes she is now beginning to know.
In general, We Need New Names discusses so many existential themes in such a flawless manner, I am absolutely shook. In the first half of the book, as Darling is still a little girl, the writing is lighthearted, clearly evoking the voice and mannerisms of a child. Just last year, I visited my little cousins (both six) in Cameroon, and Bulawayo’s writing style in the first half of the book was very reminiscent of their mode of speaking. I was incredibly impressed with how well she managed to capture the voices of little kids. But as Darling grows older, the writing matures with her, and I loved the increasing use of metaphors and similes. This coming of age tale really dethrones all other novels of that genre when it comes to the writing style.
There are so many sentences and scenes that stuck with me (which you can probably see by the amount of quotations used in this review); one of which is the story of 11-year-old Chipo who is pregnant. When, one day, Darling and her friend try to perform an abortion, they are interrupted by a woman from the village, who disrupts the children’s naivety and brings the much needed heaviness to the horrific situation. The woman breaks down crying and reaches out to Chipo who has started to wail as well, and then “We are all watching and not knowing what to do because when grown-ups cry, it’s not like you can ask them what’s wrong or tell them to shut up; there are just no words for grown-up’s tears.” I mean, WOW. Again, a perfectly captured real moment. I have no words!
First-person narration in the created character of Darling, aged ten to about nineteen, is sustained throughout the book. However, there are three passages where an authorial voice intervenes and indicates a transition. The first lament is for people leaving their settled homes. Then the second lament is for their lost countries. The final lament is for ‘illegals’ in a foreign land, psychologically unable to return home. These laments contain the most beautiful passages of writing that I encountered thus far in 2020.
The first lament, “How They Came”, describes the people, internally displaced when their homes are flattened by bulldozers. They arrive with the bare detritus of their belongings, to set up in a makeshift slum, with what bits of plastic and tin and wood they have been able to save from the government’s destruction of their township houses.
The second lament, “How They Left”, explores the world-wide scale of despair and departure. This lament closes the first half of the book, after a climax of chilling political thuggery, and moves us on to the second half—Darling’s migration to the US.
“Look at the children of the land leaving in droves, leaving their own land with bleeding wounds on their bodies and shock on their faces and blood in their hearts and hunger in their stomachs and grief in their footsteps. Leaving their mothers and fathers and children behind, leaving their umbilical cords underneath the soil, leaving the bones of their ancestors in the earth, leaving everything that makes them who and what they are, leaving because it is no longer possible to stay. They will never be the same again because you cannot be the same once you leave behind who and what you are, you just cannot be the same.”
“Look at them leaving in droves despite knowing they will be welcomed with restraint in those strange lands because they do not belong, knowing they will have to sit on one buttock because they must not sit comfortable lest they be asked to rise and leave, knowing they will speak in dampened whispers because they must not let their voices drown those of the owners of the land, knowing they will have to walk on their toes because they must not leave footprints on the new earth lest they be mistaken for those who want to claim the land as theirs. Look at them leaving in droves, arm in arm with loss and lost, look at them leaving in droves.”
The third lament, “How They Lived”, occurs before the closing passages of the book—a howl of pain for the deracinated immigrant, cut off from their parents back home, but also from their own westernised children, who “did not beg us for stories of the land we had left behind. They went to their computers and googled …they looked at us with something between pity and horror and said, Jeez, you really come from there?”:
“And when they asked us where we were from, we exchanged glances and smiled with the shyness of child brides. They said, Africa? We nodded yes. What part of Africa? We smiled. Is it that part where vultures wait for famished children to die? We smiled. Where the life expectancy is thirty-five years? We smiled? Is is there where dissidents shove AK-47s between women’s legs? We smiled. Where people run about naked? We smiled. That part where they massacred each other? We smiled. Is it where the old president rigged the election and people were tortured and killed and a whole bunch of them put in prison and all, there where they are dying of cholera – oh my God, yes, we’ve seen your country; it’s been on the news.”
I mean, how can you not fall in love with this book? The writing is GORGEOUS. Absolutely GORGEOUS! These laments are so tragically beautiful and the ways in which they function as transition and narrative shifts is just perfection. I am shook to my core. These laments are so raw, and have a sense of urgency to them, I want to shout them from the rooftops.
Lastly, I wanna talk about the ending which absolutely destroyed me, because again … it is so true … and therefore, inevitable. It comes to a clash between Darling and the ones she’s left behind. Where there was love and shared kinship before, there’s now a gaping hole, a detachment that no bridge can span. And so, when Darling wants to share some well-intentioned counsel to her friend Chipo after all those years, she is rejected in the harshest of words: “If it’s your country, you have to love it to live in it and not leave it. You have to gift for it no matter what, to make it right. […] You left it, Darling, my dear, you left the house burning and you have the guts to tell me, in that stupid accent that you were not even born with, that doesn’t even suit you, that this is your country?” After that, Darling stands up and throws her computer against the wall. Now, she has no place where she truly belongs.
There are no resolutions, no reconciliations, and there is no ending in Darling’s story. We Need New Names just stops. It’s up to the reader’s imagination to fill in the gaps.
Absolutely brilliant. This book is sizzling with life. Totally underrated! The easiest five stars I’ve given to a book this year. NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel,, is an extension of her Caine prize-winning short story, “Hitting Budapest”, about a girl coming of age in Zimbabwe and the United States of America—and boy, am I happy that his literature prize exists and that it enabled her to work some magic on her brilliant short story. This right here shows how important literary prizes and being given an opportunity (financially and platform-wise) are!!!It has been a long time since I’ve read a book that has elicited such visceral emotions from me. I laughed, I cried. This book made me incredibly happy and incredibly sad at the same time.is one of my absolute new favorite books. The characters, the story, the writing … it is absolutely mind-boggling and amazing what NoViolet Bulawayo has achieved here. And by the way, the main character absolutely hatesand the “stupid decisions” Jane makes in that book and I have never related to a character more in my whole life.Darling, the protagonist of NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut (!) novel , rackets around the Zimbabwean shanty town of Paradise with her friends: Chipo, 11, mysteriously pregnant, and mute; cheerful Godknows with shorts so thin his buttocks protrude; Sbho the beautiful, Bastard the aggressive, and Stina the voice of reason. Even the grim surroundings can’t keep this little gang down for long, as they run riot through the streets, stealing guavas, poking their noses into everything and scrawling on walls.is a first-person narrative following Darling as she grows up in Zimbabwe until about the age of 10, when she is sent to the US, to live with her Aunt Fostalina, first in Detroit, Michigan [‘DestroyedMichygen’] and then in Kalamazoo. The first half of the book, in Zimbabwe, is set in the region called Matabeleland, the capital city of which is Bulawayo. Neither Zimbabwe nor Bulawayo are mentioned by name in the book, nor is the President, Robert Mugabe, but there are very obvious references to him and to the country over the first decade of the 21st century, the period during which the book is set.Even though this is not a explicitly political novel, I found it interesting that with the little knowledge that I had of Zimbabwe under the regime of Robert Mugabe (most of which was acquired by reading Gappah’s An Elegy for Easterly and Chigumadzi’s These Bones Will Rise Again ), even I was able to put the pieces together and contextualise the novel in its time, place and political landscape; most notably the obvious reference to the “Move the Rubbish” campaign which forcibly cleared slum areas across the country.The place where you grow up is the centre of your world. It hardly needs a name. In Darling’s direct childhood account of her life in ‘Paradise’, the absence of these defining names seems natural. She is telling us about her life, not about Zimbabwe or Bulawayo. But to little Darling, other places, states and countries she would prefer to be in are definitely ‘names’. In fact, they arenames… remote concepts and vague ideas, nothing substantial. The reality will be something other than the places imagined.From the beginning of the book Darling is dreaming of going to ‘myAmerica’, to ‘DestroyedMichygen’, which gloriously seems to be everything that the makeshift slum, Paradise, in unnamed Bulawayo is not. But when her aunt is coming to fetch her and Darling does get to Detroit, reality hits hard. Americans have only the vaguest idea of ‘Africa’, and Darling has to face othering in every aspect of her life. While Darling adjusts to her new life and the new problems it brings with it, underneath it she is aware that something has been broken that she will never be able to mend.Darling is existentially living in America, while emotionally in some other construct in her memory. One cannot shake the feeling that Darling would’ve been in need of therapy, or at least a person whom she could trust and pour her heart out. And even though, over time, she manages to settle in in school and find new friends, “there are times, though, that no matter how much food I eat, I find the food does nothing for me, like I am hungry for my country and nothing is going to fix that.” Yep, nothing is going to fix that.reminded me a lot of my own father and how he deals with his displacement in a country that is not his home. There were so many moments in this novel that were so well captured and relatable, they put a chill down my spine. Finally, someone found the right words to describe how (some) immigrants feel in regards to home, language, integration——and how they act, most notably how they act differently, how a dormant part of their being is being rekindled as soon as they encounter someone from home: “I keep watching Uncle Kojo; whenever he is with someone from his country, everything about him is different—his laugh, his talk, his eating—it’s like something cuts him open to reveal this other person I don’t even know.” The moments NoViolet Bulawayo describes are so real and so true, they make my heart ache.And so in the US, Darling doesn’t only have to deal with the racism and othering that she is subjected to, she also witnesses what this displacement does to her aunt and uncle. One of the most memorable scenes in the book is when Aunt Fostalina tries to order a bra, and the American lady on the telephone is unwilling to understand her:But as the years go by, Darling becomes aware of troubling paradoxesherself, of her own detachment from her home country. This detachment is marked by long silences in conversations, particularly in the mobile phone conversations she has with her mother and her childhood friends back home. She says she doesn’t know what to reply. She is unable to respond when she has conflicting answers in her head. She struggles to deal with the paradoxes she is now beginning to know.In general,discusses so many existential themes in such a flawless manner, I am absolutely shook. In the first half of the book, as Darling is still a little girl, the writing is lighthearted, clearly evoking the voice and mannerisms of a child. Just last year, I visited my little cousins (both six) in Cameroon, and Bulawayo’s writing style in the first half of the book was very reminiscent of their mode of speaking. I was incredibly impressed with how well she managed to capture the voices of little kids. But as Darling grows older, the writing matures with her, and I loved the increasing use of metaphors and similes. This coming of age tale really dethrones all other novels of that genre when it comes to the writing style.There are so many sentences and scenes that stuck with me (which you can probably see by the amount of quotations used in this review); one of which is the story of 11-year-old Chipo who is pregnant. When, one day, Darling and her friend try to perform an abortion, they are interrupted by a woman from the village, who disrupts the children’s naivety and brings the much needed heaviness to the horrific situation. The woman breaks down crying and reaches out to Chipo who has started to wail as well, and then “We are all watching and not knowing what to do because when grown-ups cry, it’s not like you can ask them what’s wrong or tell them to shut up; there are just no words for grown-up’s tears.” I mean, WOW. Again, a perfectly captured real moment. I have no words!First-person narration in the created character of Darling, aged ten to about nineteen, is sustained throughout the book. However, there are three passages where an authorial voice intervenes and indicates a transition. The first lament is for people leaving their settled homes. Then the second lament is for their lost countries. The final lament is for ‘illegals’ in a foreign land, psychologically unable to return home. These laments contain the most beautiful passages of writing that I encountered thus far in 2020.The first lament,, describes the people, internally displaced when their homes are flattened by bulldozers. They arrive with the bare detritus of their belongings, to set up in a makeshift slum, with what bits of plastic and tin and wood they have been able to save from the government’s destruction of their township houses.The second lament,, explores the world-wide scale of despair and departure. This lament closes the first half of the book, after a climax of chilling political thuggery, and moves us on to the second half—Darling’s migration to the US.The third lament,, occurs before the closing passages of the book—a howl of pain for the deracinated immigrant, cut off from their parents back home, but also from their own westernised children, who “did not beg us for stories of the land we had left behind. They went to their computers and googled …they looked at us with something between pity and horror and said, Jeez, you really come from there?”:I mean, how can you not fall in love with this book? The writing is GORGEOUS. Absolutely GORGEOUS! These laments are so tragically beautiful and the ways in which they function as transition and narrative shifts is just perfection. I am shook to my core. These laments are so raw, and have a sense of urgency to them, I want to shout them from the rooftops.Lastly, I wanna talk about the ending which absolutely destroyed me, because again … it is so true … and therefore, inevitable. It comes to a clash between Darling and the ones she’s left behind. Where there was love and shared kinship before, there’s now a gaping hole, a detachment that no bridge can span. And so, when Darling wants to share some well-intentioned counsel to her friend Chipo after all those years, she is rejected in the harshest of words: “If it’s your country, you have to love it to live in it and not leave it. You have to gift for it no matter what, to make it right. […] You left it, Darling, my dear, you left the house burning and you have the guts to tell me, in that stupid accent that you were not even born with, that doesn’t even suit you, that this is your country?” After that, Darling stands up and throws her computer against the wall. Now, she has no place where she truly belongs.There are no resolutions, no reconciliations, and there is no ending in Darling’s story.just stops. It’s up to the reader’s imagination to fill in the gaps.