The many layers of NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel We Need New Names

A girl named Darling narrates her life as a child in Zimbabwe and her growth to adolescence in the United States.  We Need New Names, which builds on Bulawayo’s 2011 Caine Prize winning story “Hitting Budapest” and which has been long-listed for this year’s prestigious Booker Prize, pays great attention to form and language, layering […]

A girl named Darling narrates her life as a child in Zimbabwe and her growth to adolescence in the United States.  We Need New Names, which builds on Bulawayo’s 2011 Caine Prize winning story “Hitting Budapest” and which has been long-listed for this year’s prestigious Booker Prize, pays great attention to form and language, layering ironic meaning upon ironic meaning onto almost every event and name and situation. The prose is so thick with metaphor that it is almost poetry. Sometimes the heavily encrusted symbolism of every name, person, and place feels like a little too much; nevertheless, the overall effect left me stunned, sometimes breathless.
The novel begins with the young Darling and her friends playing between the Zimbabwean slum ironically named Paradise, where the destitute live after their homes were bulldozed by the government, and its double, the wealthy suburb named Budapest. There, inhabitants seem to live with one foot inside the country and one outside: the woman visiting her “dad’s country” from London who snaps photos of the children, or the white couple who insist that they are Africans, “my father was born here, I was born here, just like you,” yet look with hatred at the children while being carted away by nationalist party thugs.  The people and places Darling knows during her childhood in Zimbabwe have other doubles, faded and less dramatic, in America, where Darling joins her mother’s twin sister, Aunt Fostalina: Paradise and Budapest are reflected in the slum of Detroit, Michigan (which Darling initially calls Destroyedmichygen) and the more suburban Kalamazoo. Even the graveyard near Aunt Fostalina’s house echoes the graveyard “Heavenway” in Paradise. Aunt Fostalina becomes her American mother, both mirroring and inverting her mother’s behaviour in Zimbabwe. While Darling’s mother works for food, for example, Aunt Fostalina spends money to stay thin. Darling herself is twinned. After a stilted phone conversation with her friends left in Zimbabwe, she says “It’s hard to explain, this feeling; it’s like there’s two of me. One part is yearning for my friends; the other doesn’t know how to connect with them anymore, as if they are people I’ve never met.”
Social issues are echoed, as well, highlighting the problems prevalent in each society. A girl in Paradise hangs herself because she discovers she has AIDS, and a boy in Michigan hangs himself because he’s bullied by his classmates. Darling’s 11-year-old friend Chipo’s  pregnancy, a result of rape and incest, is echoed again in Darling’s American friend Kristal’s teenage pregnancy.  The violence of gangs and election violence in Zimbabwe is repeated in the violence of the boy who comes to school with a gun in America, and the implicit fear of the American police in the black community.
Although those who had faced hardship in Zimbabwe also face hardship (though of a less spectacular kind) in America, they maintain a façade of happiness. Darling’s aunt takes multiple jobs to help pay for a house in the fancy suburb of Budapest so that Darling’s mother can enjoy a house in Zimbabwe nicer than Fostalina’s own in America. The exploitive photographs taken by NGOs and journalists in Zimbabwe, who “don’t care that we are embarrassed by our dirt and torn clothing […] they just take the pictures anyway, take and take” are contrasted with the many photographs taken by Africans living in America: “We took pictures outside the White House; we took pictures leaning against the Lady Liberty as if she were our grandmother; we took pictures at the Niagara Falls, at the Times Square; we took pictures with dolphins in Florida, took pictures at the Grand Canyon—we went everywhere and took and took and took pictures and sent them home, showing off a country that would never be ours.”  While the photographers in Zimbabwe exploit poverty, the immigrants to America use photographs to conceal their poverty.  This is the other side of America, not the elite life of educated Africans portrayed by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Americanah, but the more desperate lives of often illegal immigrants of the sort seen in Lonzo Nzekwe’s film Anchor Baby—those who take minimum wage jobs sorting recycling or working in nursing homes.  The easiest path to legal status is to marry an American citizen, which results in awkward insincere weddings of the sort Aunt Fostalina’s old boyfriend has when he marries an obese American woman. Darling snarkily observes: “I look at Aunt Fostalina and she is all smiles looking at the couple, and I know the reason she is so happy is that Dumi’s bride is fat and ugly.” 
These parallels of disfunction in both Zimbabwe and America point to a larger global malaise. The war games the Zimbabwean children play with toy guns donated by an NGO are laden with symbolism. Their games, the “country-game” where they dramatize the unequal power relations between the nations of the world, or the game “Finding Bin Laden” or the re-enactment of the killing of the local political activist Born-Free become allegorical performances of real atrocities. When a journalist asks Bastard “what kind of game were you just playing?” the boy replies, “Can’t you see this is for real?”  In America, Uncle Kojo’s son TK transitions from video games to becoming an actual soldier when he joins the American army and goes to war in Afghanistan looking for Bin Laden. The games re-enact history, and history re-enacts the games.
Beyond the structural beauty of Bulawayo’s writing, much of my enjoyment of the novel came from the honest voice she gives Darling. As serious as the issues in the novel are, I often found myself laughing at the young narrator’s impertinent observations. The language of the child in Zimbabwe transitions to that of the adolescent in America: she shifts from using phrases in Shona to using particularly American expressions like “clobber” or “whole ‘nother” or “dude.” In both places, Darling has a delightfully irreverent turn of phrase, making ironic cutting observations: In church with her grandmother she describes “an ugly baby; his face looks shocked, like he has just seen the buttocks of a snake.” In America she expresses annoyance at the endless news coverage on the singer Rihanna, “I know her crazy boyfriend beat her up but I don’t think she had to be all over, like her face was a humanitarian crisis, like it was the Sudan or something.”
The innocent yet frank child’s voice also enables her to honestly describe horrifying abuses: the pregnancy her eleven-year-old friend Chipo suffers after being molested, the sexual assault on a woman by the Prophet Revelations Bitchington Mborro in front of a church full of passive worshippers, the killing of the activist Born Free. As she grows up in America, Darling becomes more aware of the causes behind these social ills. The thoughtless British-Zimbabwean woman wearing a “Save Dafur” t-shirt who throws away food as she photographs the children in Budapest, transitions into the wealthy American girl, Kate, whose family Darling serves as a maid.  Kate wears an “Invisible Children” t-shirt, trying to save children in Uganda, yet writes “expensive nonsense” about depression “in her expensive diary.” Now, Darling is better able to articulate her rage: “You have a fridge bloated with food so no matter how much you starve yourself, you’ll never know real, true hunger. […] you have a dog whose wardrobe I couldn’t afford; and, what’s more, you’re here, living in your own country of birth, so just exactly what is your real problem.”
Yet, Darling herself begins to see Zimbabwe through the eyes of BBC, just as the Americans she criticizes. Over the phone, she expresses to her friend Chipo, left behind in Zimbabwe, the “pain” she feels at what “they have done to our country. All the suffering…”  Chipo, who has named her daughter Darling, responds, “But you are not the one suffering. You think watching on BBC means you know what is going on? No you don’t, my friend, it’s the wound that knows the texture of the pain […] 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?”
Bulawayo, thus, brilliantly draws together the suffering of the impoverished on both continents, yet also sharply throws into question the intentions of those outside of Africa who would “save it,” white or black. What is the role Africans living abroad in the affairs of the countries they left? Bulawayo draws deep truthful characters and lets that question echo.