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3.73 AVERAGE
3.73 AVERAGE
The author has crafted a complex multi-layered book. She has a gift for description and her similes are unparalleled. I found the first part of the book at times difficult to follow and kept wondering how her friends got their names. This is not an easy story to tell; children suffering unspeakable tragedies.
The second part of the book taking place in America brought many smiles to my face and looks of horror too. The slapping of the unruly child at the wedding had me laughing aloud.
I'll be interested to read more from this writer.
The second part of the book taking place in America brought many smiles to my face and looks of horror too. The slapping of the unruly child at the wedding had me laughing aloud.
I'll be interested to read more from this writer.
If you were going to read this novel and want to approach it with fewer preconceptions, stop reading after the first three paragraphs.
I took my time reading this book because of other things going on and this might be partly why I noted rather gaping narrative holes between each chapter, but I think they are intentional. These chasms are really noticeable especially in the second half - is this because she is growing up quickly in America - do we only get to see the times she is, often painfully, reconnected to or alienated from Zimbabwe?
For my own purposes, I can trace concerns about hunger (including insatiable hunger for home and belonging not alleviated by plenty), language, and US wars and immigration in this work that I have been working with for 1.5 VNA texts. Bulawayo also seamlessly works in commentary on police violence against people whose crime was driving while Black a number of times, about Uncle Kojo and the girls joy-riding.
Trouble with categorizing:
This books fits, if poorly, on my shelf of what I am thinking of calling the uncontainable - a mode of writing I am starting to love dearly. For now, let me just refer to the uncontainable as books in which the wide, though deep concerns of the author stretch the sequence of the traditional narrative to its splintering point and start to cross the line into connected short stories or vignettes without the specific marketing as such. House on Mango Street and Winesberg Ohio would be examples of the intentional classification of a novel of vignettes or connected short stories and there are moments when Bulawayo's text feels like reading perhaps a cross between Sandra Cisneros and Sherwood Anderson. Also, I often thought of Stealing Buddha's Dinner, a memoir by Bich Minh Nguyen, while reading We Need New Names due to the uncontainable quality of what I was reading and the themes addressed, specifically related to food. Anyway, We Need New Names offers a poignant experience with our humanness - our vulnerabilities and cynicisms, imperfections that can be endearing.
Response and explanation - or at least links to the articles - to criticism that Bulawayo is writing poverty porn:
"But there is another question that I can’t resist asking. About Helon Habila labelling her debut novel as poverty pornography. I actually do not ask the question. Ivan Mulumba Matthias does, and I add soup to it. NoViolet does not mince her words in response. “I do not write to please people. I can’t please everybody. I quickly learnt to be fine with it in 2011. Since I do not write for critics or Habila, I am fine with the poverty porn label.” Dayum. I do not know what to ask next."
quote from http://brittlepaper.com/2014/08/noviolet-bulawayo-produce-african-dispatches-2014-writivism-festival-bwesigye-bwa-mwesigire/
See articles and my commentary:
Helon Habila's review:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/20/need-new-names-bulawayo-review
He mentions an episodic structure of the novel - this is what I was trying get at in my idea of the vignette novel or thematically linked short stories - possibly mislabeled or fitting into the Caine prize parameters? I agreed with his questions about China and I don't think I like what she is suggesting by misspelling Black Power. Moving on, Habila asks - what does the suffering do? is it cathartic or de-sensitizing and essentializing about Africa being a mess? I am not entirely sure but I will come back to this. I do wonder if she romanticized childhood a bit too much but I certainly respect Bulawayo's response above. I also know that you can deeply long for the most imperfect of places and people.
Further reading - an interpretation of Kabila's comments - does it over-emphasize his critique?
http://asterixjournal.com/afropolitanism-africas-new-single-story-reading-helon-habilas-review-need-new-names-brian-bwesigye/
Complicating the poverty porn claim:
What I would like to point out from my reading of this novel is her pronounced ambivalence about the depiction of Africa as a monolith of suffering. She both speaks generally of Africans in "How They Lived" and complains about it when people in America do it: the woman at the wedding, Jim at the store, and Eliot. Perhaps both of these things can coexist because she is really trying for something slightly more universal if you will in "How They Left" - the story of diaspora.
I might ask what happens to critiques of imperialism and neo-imperialism in her approach, though fictional, of the push factors for migration in the age of market globalism, where are the critical teeth in post-postcolonial texts?
Considering how she deals with problematic depictions of Africa, it is also quite clear that she is both subtly critiquing and exploring what might drive poverty porn regarding female circumcision for one in "This Film Contains some Disturbing Images" -How could Alexis recommend a video depicting ritual genital mutilation to Kristal? What kinds of things are these girls subjecting themselves to through the internet? Why do they watch it? There may also be some queer theory at work here that also needs to be analyzed but I will leave that for another time.
To read more carefully against the binary she is accused of creating that Africa is terrible and America is great, which is pretty ridiculous from the way I read it, there are constant parallels she brings up between Paradise/Michigan, for example: Hitting Budapest and Hitting Crossroad, Writing on the Wall of her bedroom and on the Durawalls of Budapest, games they played in Paradise - countries - "Syria is out". More specifically, in the game "Finding Bin Laden," the dog who betrayed his master is killed in the same chapter in which Uncle Kojo announces Bin Laden has been killed. Is this the neo-imperialism critique I am looking for? If so, she gets into the kind of critical territory I was discussing earlier. The children critique the adult world - wars in and between nations are seen as deadly games.
Finally, this is a world where the names for things indicate uneasiness with their ability to contain what is being described - the same words and names are used to identify disparate experiences or may be considered ironic. Neither the language she has to work with nor a traditional plot structure can contain her message so she directly confronts the uncontainable.
I took my time reading this book because of other things going on and this might be partly why I noted rather gaping narrative holes between each chapter, but I think they are intentional. These chasms are really noticeable especially in the second half - is this because she is growing up quickly in America - do we only get to see the times she is, often painfully, reconnected to or alienated from Zimbabwe?
For my own purposes, I can trace concerns about hunger (including insatiable hunger for home and belonging not alleviated by plenty), language, and US wars and immigration in this work that I have been working with for 1.5 VNA texts. Bulawayo also seamlessly works in commentary on police violence against people whose crime was driving while Black a number of times, about Uncle Kojo and the girls joy-riding.
Trouble with categorizing:
This books fits, if poorly, on my shelf of what I am thinking of calling the uncontainable - a mode of writing I am starting to love dearly. For now, let me just refer to the uncontainable as books in which the wide, though deep concerns of the author stretch the sequence of the traditional narrative to its splintering point and start to cross the line into connected short stories or vignettes without the specific marketing as such. House on Mango Street and Winesberg Ohio would be examples of the intentional classification of a novel of vignettes or connected short stories and there are moments when Bulawayo's text feels like reading perhaps a cross between Sandra Cisneros and Sherwood Anderson. Also, I often thought of Stealing Buddha's Dinner, a memoir by Bich Minh Nguyen, while reading We Need New Names due to the uncontainable quality of what I was reading and the themes addressed, specifically related to food. Anyway, We Need New Names offers a poignant experience with our humanness - our vulnerabilities and cynicisms, imperfections that can be endearing.
Response and explanation - or at least links to the articles - to criticism that Bulawayo is writing poverty porn:
"But there is another question that I can’t resist asking. About Helon Habila labelling her debut novel as poverty pornography. I actually do not ask the question. Ivan Mulumba Matthias does, and I add soup to it. NoViolet does not mince her words in response. “I do not write to please people. I can’t please everybody. I quickly learnt to be fine with it in 2011. Since I do not write for critics or Habila, I am fine with the poverty porn label.” Dayum. I do not know what to ask next."
quote from http://brittlepaper.com/2014/08/noviolet-bulawayo-produce-african-dispatches-2014-writivism-festival-bwesigye-bwa-mwesigire/
See articles and my commentary:
Helon Habila's review:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/20/need-new-names-bulawayo-review
He mentions an episodic structure of the novel - this is what I was trying get at in my idea of the vignette novel or thematically linked short stories - possibly mislabeled or fitting into the Caine prize parameters? I agreed with his questions about China and I don't think I like what she is suggesting by misspelling Black Power. Moving on, Habila asks - what does the suffering do? is it cathartic or de-sensitizing and essentializing about Africa being a mess? I am not entirely sure but I will come back to this. I do wonder if she romanticized childhood a bit too much but I certainly respect Bulawayo's response above. I also know that you can deeply long for the most imperfect of places and people.
Further reading - an interpretation of Kabila's comments - does it over-emphasize his critique?
http://asterixjournal.com/afropolitanism-africas-new-single-story-reading-helon-habilas-review-need-new-names-brian-bwesigye/
Complicating the poverty porn claim:
What I would like to point out from my reading of this novel is her pronounced ambivalence about the depiction of Africa as a monolith of suffering. She both speaks generally of Africans in "How They Lived" and complains about it when people in America do it: the woman at the wedding, Jim at the store, and Eliot. Perhaps both of these things can coexist because she is really trying for something slightly more universal if you will in "How They Left" - the story of diaspora.
I might ask what happens to critiques of imperialism and neo-imperialism in her approach, though fictional, of the push factors for migration in the age of market globalism, where are the critical teeth in post-postcolonial texts?
Considering how she deals with problematic depictions of Africa, it is also quite clear that she is both subtly critiquing and exploring what might drive poverty porn regarding female circumcision for one in "This Film Contains some Disturbing Images" -How could Alexis recommend a video depicting ritual genital mutilation to Kristal? What kinds of things are these girls subjecting themselves to through the internet? Why do they watch it? There may also be some queer theory at work here that also needs to be analyzed but I will leave that for another time.
To read more carefully against the binary she is accused of creating that Africa is terrible and America is great, which is pretty ridiculous from the way I read it, there are constant parallels she brings up between Paradise/Michigan, for example: Hitting Budapest and Hitting Crossroad, Writing on the Wall of her bedroom and on the Durawalls of Budapest, games they played in Paradise - countries - "Syria is out". More specifically, in the game "Finding Bin Laden," the dog who betrayed his master is killed in the same chapter in which Uncle Kojo announces Bin Laden has been killed. Is this the neo-imperialism critique I am looking for? If so, she gets into the kind of critical territory I was discussing earlier. The children critique the adult world - wars in and between nations are seen as deadly games.
Finally, this is a world where the names for things indicate uneasiness with their ability to contain what is being described - the same words and names are used to identify disparate experiences or may be considered ironic. Neither the language she has to work with nor a traditional plot structure can contain her message so she directly confronts the uncontainable.
A friend of mine borrowed this book before I could finish reading it and gave it back exclaiming that it was the coolest book she had ever read. So, curious, I forced myself to speed through the book.
I could only give this book 3/5. I'm not sure what bothered me about this book. Maybe it was the fact that the book is actually two different chapters of the same person's life - Part 1 sees Darling, a young African girl living a life of want and hunger in the slums, and Part 2 sees Darling as a teenager living in comfort and relative luxury in America. Both these people do not seem the same; the first part of the story does not seem to inform the second part. Or maybe it's the fact that the country she comes from was never once named (we only know that it is Zimbabwe from inference). Or maybe it's the fact that the America that Darling dreams of in the slums is actually the America she lives at age 14, and the disconnect she feels with her motherland later is the disconnect anyone who moves away would feel, regardless of race or circumstances. She is an illegal immigrant, but that is not explored much in the second half.
All in all, this seemed like a good first attempt at a novel, but the wide, yawning, disconnected incidents, the telling and not showing, made me want to put this book down in the second half.
I could only give this book 3/5. I'm not sure what bothered me about this book. Maybe it was the fact that the book is actually two different chapters of the same person's life - Part 1 sees Darling, a young African girl living a life of want and hunger in the slums, and Part 2 sees Darling as a teenager living in comfort and relative luxury in America. Both these people do not seem the same; the first part of the story does not seem to inform the second part. Or maybe it's the fact that the country she comes from was never once named (we only know that it is Zimbabwe from inference). Or maybe it's the fact that the America that Darling dreams of in the slums is actually the America she lives at age 14, and the disconnect she feels with her motherland later is the disconnect anyone who moves away would feel, regardless of race or circumstances. She is an illegal immigrant, but that is not explored much in the second half.
All in all, this seemed like a good first attempt at a novel, but the wide, yawning, disconnected incidents, the telling and not showing, made me want to put this book down in the second half.
Absolutely beautiful, sad and thought provoking book.
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
I'm bummed. I have abandoned the book at page 75. It, in my opinion, just was not interesting at all. The character development was slow and awkward. The story wasn't moving along at a speed that kept me interested.
At 75 pages in the story wasn't going much of anywhere even though I know, from reading summaries of the book, it does go somewhere but I questioned how tedious the journey might be when I started scanning and flipping through sections of the book. (This has become a sure sign that I am considering abandoning the title - I stop reading for a moment and start flipping and skimming to see if I can gauge whether it is going to pick up the pace or not.) Bulawayo takes the reader, through 10 year old Darling, from a shantytown in Zimbabwe to America. From my scanning the story line really never gained speed, nor did character development. I'm so bummed! I was super excited to pick up this book and I felt it held a lot of potential. But it was a tedious read and the stack of books I have on my nightstand that I believe hold some good and engaging reads ultimately prevailed.
At 75 pages in the story wasn't going much of anywhere even though I know, from reading summaries of the book, it does go somewhere but I questioned how tedious the journey might be when I started scanning and flipping through sections of the book. (This has become a sure sign that I am considering abandoning the title - I stop reading for a moment and start flipping and skimming to see if I can gauge whether it is going to pick up the pace or not.) Bulawayo takes the reader, through 10 year old Darling, from a shantytown in Zimbabwe to America. From my scanning the story line really never gained speed, nor did character development. I'm so bummed! I was super excited to pick up this book and I felt it held a lot of potential. But it was a tedious read and the stack of books I have on my nightstand that I believe hold some good and engaging reads ultimately prevailed.
I enjoyed this book because of its roots in nonfiction and the author's own experience. It was different from most books I've read (I admit I haven't read much African literature, aside from poetry) and I appreciated the change of pace. However, I feel like I wanted more from the book as a whole.
The narrator's voice is unflinching and real, and her narration alternates between heartbreaking and hilarious, between naive and insightful, between kind beyond her age and downright mean. I tend to love narrators/authors who are honest with themselves and, by proxy, with the reader; I loved the scenes with Darling and her friends stealing guavas, acting out in front of the philanthropists, and spying on the funeral of a victim of the political fallout because of the believable grit in Darling's voice as she relayed the true-to-life and un-embellished events that took place.
Still, the voice wasn't enough to carry the book through to become one of my favorites. Maybe I'm just sensitive and internally reeling from the revelation of The Real World in this book, where 11-year-old girls get pregnant in Zimbabwe and young kids watch hardcore porn in their aunt's Michigan basement when no one is home. That's a world I've never experienced, so it's possible that it didn't resonate with me because of my lack of experience.
Either way, We Need New Names was appreciated by critics and consumers alike, so it has to be doing something right.
The narrator's voice is unflinching and real, and her narration alternates between heartbreaking and hilarious, between naive and insightful, between kind beyond her age and downright mean. I tend to love narrators/authors who are honest with themselves and, by proxy, with the reader; I loved the scenes with Darling and her friends stealing guavas, acting out in front of the philanthropists, and spying on the funeral of a victim of the political fallout because of the believable grit in Darling's voice as she relayed the true-to-life and un-embellished events that took place.
Still, the voice wasn't enough to carry the book through to become one of my favorites. Maybe I'm just sensitive and internally reeling from the revelation of The Real World in this book, where 11-year-old girls get pregnant in Zimbabwe and young kids watch hardcore porn in their aunt's Michigan basement when no one is home. That's a world I've never experienced, so it's possible that it didn't resonate with me because of my lack of experience.
Either way, We Need New Names was appreciated by critics and consumers alike, so it has to be doing something right.
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
N/A