Title: We Need New Names
Author: NoViolet Bulawayo
Publisher: Reagan Arthur Books Reviewed by Memory Chirere
NOVIOLET Bulawayo’s debut novel, We Need New Names confirms the existence of a certain special tradition in the literature of Zimbabwe which cries for adequate recognition and evaluation.
Ever since Dambudzo Marechera of The House of Hunger’s “I got my things and left . . . I couldn’t have stayed in that House of Hunger where every morsel of sanity was snatched from you the way some kinds of bird snatch food from the very mouths of babes.” In 1978, there has been a quiet but sustained outpouring of narratives about leaving the homeland (Zimbabwe) because of crisis.
Marechera and his contemporaries and those immediately after him like Shimmer Chinodya, Alexander Kanengoni and Valentine Mazorodze pruduced various narratives about leaving home (then Rhodesia) to go either to join the war of liberation or to exile.
These tally well with the legendary escape of current President Robert Mugabe himself and colleague Edgar Tekere, from troubled Rhodesia through Inyanga into Mozambique on foot to lift the war of liberation to a higher notch. There are many such stories in the public sphere.
And in more recent years, specifically dwelling on what is now called “the decade of Zimbabwean crisis”, we have Christopher Mlalazi’s Many Rivers, Brian Chikwava’s Harare North and the multiple voice compilation: Hunting in Foreign Lands, Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s Shadows and Now; NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names, among others, writing on going away.
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In all these stories ranging from the 1970s to the present, home is depicted as going through various forms of turmoil which expresses itself most through political instability.
The central character, who is almost always a young fellow, flees home and country in search of an alternative existence.
However, this character remains double faced; looking at foreign territory with eyes of home and glancing back at home through the teary eyes of new experience and beginning to re-read “home”. The resultant chasm constantly tugs at one’s soul.
However, to read NoViolet Bulawayo’s book is to take constant departures and arrivals, inside out and upside down until you lose count because she is constantly aware of the numerous points of view to the subject of going away from Zimbabwe.
She is aware that the phenomenon that she is working on is actually in motion and that Zimbabwe will one day rest on any of her many intriguing sides. To return home or to remain out here or to forget everything… is where you locate our character. To return home is to jump back into the fire and to accept defeat.
To remain abroad, however, is to wallow in the invisibility of a little foreigner. To forget everything is not possible if you are as sensitive as NoViolet Bulawayo’s Darling Nonkululeko Nkala.
It is most ironical that at that very moment, our character from this kind of literature asks or fails to ask important questions about what exactly has happened or not happened to one’s people and country: How did it start? Who causes it? Who benefits from it? Are we certain that we see all of it for what it is?
The mind of Darling is an encyclopedia bursting with minute details from; the distinct aroma and taste of guavas stolen from the backyards of a posh city suburb to the rigmarole of shanty town dwellers of Zimbabwe. And that kind of pregnancy of detail that you find in this novel, like the descriptions of the onset of Operation Murambatsvina.
Bulawayo’s language, as in the blues, is both depressing and exhilarating. It invites you to laugh and cry at the same time: This novel juxtaposes a tumultuous Zimbabwe against a well fed and technologically advanced America as seen by a young and impressionable Zimbabwean girl.
Darling discovers that Zimbabwe and America are worlds with two very different passwords. What Zimbabwe does not have materially, America offers, but not for free!
