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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.


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