Skip to main content

We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo: book review




We Need New Names (2013) commences with a young girl called Darling from shanty Paradise who crosses Mzilikazi Road to get to Budapest to steal guavas. Darling, the narrator, is 10 years old. She hangs around with her friends: Godknows is ten, Bastard is eleven, Sbho is nine, Stina doesn’t know her age because she has no birth certificate, and Chipo is eleven and pregnant.

It is in Zimbabwe where these friends play country-game in which “we fight over the names because everybody wants to be certain countries, like everybody wants to be the U.S.A and Britain and Canada and Australia …” Nobody wants to be countries like Congo, Somalia and Iraq. Darling always wants to be the U.S.A where her aunt Fostalina lives. School doesn’t exist for these children, not like it did before their fathers lost their jobs, before they lived in the shanty town, and before her father left home to go to South Africa. He returned home with the Sickness, skinny and dying of AIDS. He wasn’t the same and she wasn’t sympathetic – he shouldn’t have left her and her mother for so long.

The election did not change a thing, not as her parents hoped. “Look at them leaving in droves, the children of the land, just look at them leaving in droves.” They are leaving “because it is no longer possible to stay. They will never be the same again because you just cannot be the same once you leave behind who and what you are, you just cannot be the same.”

Darling leaves too. She leaves her mother and her friends to live with her aunt in Detroit. It’s not the same as her home. At school, children “teased me about my name, my accent, my hair … the way I dressed, the way I laughed … in the end I just felt wrong in my skin, in my body, in my clothes, in my language, in my head, everything.” She soon learns, from television, to talk like an American, and look people straight in the eye.

Bulawayo speaks from experience. She left Zimbabwe at eighteen to begin a new life in a new country. This is a child to teenager transition, growing up, out of country and out of place. Missing the old friends and making new ones; being dissed by the old for talking like white folk and being dissed by the white folk for being not. Life changes and people do too. And with it, the language of the novel changes, from that of a young Zimbabwean child to an American teenager and beyond. The innocent language of jacaranda trees and smells and colours and watching men play board games - the poetic language - transitions to phone text shorthand, relationships, and American politics - the serious language.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pir-E-Kamil - The Perfect Mentor by Umera Ahmed: book review

The Perfect Mentor pbuh  (2011) is set in Lahore and Islamabad in Pakistan. The novel commences with Imama Mubeen in medical university. She wants to be an eye specialist. Her parents have arranged for her to marry her first cousin Asjad. Salar Sikander, her neighbour, is 18 years old with an IQ of 150+ and a photographic memory. He has long hair tied in a ponytail. He imbibes alcohol, treats women disrespectfully and is generally a “weird chap” and a rude, belligerent teenager. In the past three years he has tried to commit suicide three times. He tries again. Imama and her brother, Waseem, answer the servant’s call to help Salar. They stop the bleeding from his wrist and save his life. Imama and Asjad have been engaged for three years, because she wants to finish her studies first. Imama is really delaying her marriage to Asjad because she loves Jalal Ansar. She proposes to him and he says yes. But he knows his parents won’t agree, nor will Imama’s parents. ...
1 comment
Read more

Apes go to the movies - and remember the scenes

Apes remember major events in movies, even after a single viewing. That’s the findings of primate research in Japan (New Scientist, September 17, 2015). Researchers at the Kyoto University in Japan conducted experiments with two species of apes – chimpanzees and bonobo primates – to test their memory and recall. Instead of using food to test memory, they used films. The researchers made two short movies to show to the apes. Fumihiro Kano and his colleague, Satoshi Hirata, starred in the films with another person dressed as an ape. They wanted to have strong dramatic scenes to see if the apes remembered them. In the first 30-second movie the character ape bursts through a door on the right hand side (there is also a door on the left hand side) and attacks the two researchers (characters) 18 seconds after the start. After 24 seconds a human character choses one of two weapons next to each other and launched a revenge attack on the ape. In the second 30-second movie t...
Post a Comment
Read more

The acacia thorn trees of Kenya

There are nearly 800 species of acacia trees in the world, and most don’t have thorns. The famous "whistling thorn tree" and the Umbrella Thorn tree of Kenya are species of acacia that do have thorns, or spines. Giraffes and other herbivores normally eat thorny acacia foliage, but leave the whistling thorn alone. Usually spines are no deterrent to giraffes. Their long tongues are adapted to strip the leaves from the branches despite the thorns. The thorny acacia like dry and hot conditions. The thorns typically occur in pairs and are 5-8 centimetres (2-3 inches) long. Spines can be straight or curved depending on the species. MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Suda...
1 comment
Read more