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jennyyates 's review for:
We Need New Names
by NoViolet Bulawayo
This is quite brilliant. It works both as a novel and a collection of related short stories, since each chapter stands alone.
It begins with Darling as a 10-year-old child, living in a marginal neighborhood in a big African city. The country isn’t named, but it’s been through a big political and economic crisis, and many folks have been thrown out of their homes and have found their way into one of these tin-roof dirt-floor houses. Darling is part of a gang of children who are mostly left on their own, while their parents scrape together a living.
It's not easy to write from a child’s point of view, but Bulawayo pulls it off beautifully. We get to know Darling’s friends – Bastard, Godknows, Sbho, Stina, Chipo (who is pregnant, even though she’s an 11-year-old girl). They talk about the world and the way it works, and they play games like Countries, and FindBenLaden. They steal guavas from a nearby rich neighborhood, where, at one point, they encounter a mob targeting all the white settlers (who are mostly children or grandchildren of settlers, at this point). They deal with the NGO folks, who want to take their pictures before they give their scanty gifts.
And then Darling manages to get to the States to live with her aunt Fostalina in Detroit. She’s overstays her visa, and so becomes an illegal alien, and this means she can never go back to visit her family and friends. After all the fantasies about America, the reality is a shock. The novel does a great job of exploring the challenges of trying to belong, when a person is caught between two very different places and cultures.
One chapter, titled “How They Left”, is particularly poignant. Moving away from Darling’s individual viewpoint, it addresses the collective. Let me quote:
< Look at the children of the land leaving in droves, leaving their own land with bleeding wounds on their bodies and shock on their faces and blood in their hearts and hunger in their stomachs and grief in their footsteps. Leaving their mothers and fathers and children behind, leaving their umbilical cords underneath the soil, leaving the bones of their ancestors in the earth, leaving everything that makes them who and what 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. >
This is what it’s like when Darling gets to Michigan.
< If it wasn’t for that the houses here have heat in them, I think we’d all be killed by now. Killed by this snow and the cold it comes with; it’s not the normal cold that you could just complain about and then move on to other things. No. This cold is not like that. It’s the cold to stop life, to cut you open and blaze your bones. Nobody told me of this cold when I was coming here. Had it been that somebody had taken me aside and explained the cold and its story properly, I just don’t know what I would have done, if I would really have gotten in that plane to come. >
The chapter “How They Lived” goes back to speaking in the collective.
< When we die, our children will not know how to wail, how to mourn us the right way. They will not go mad with grief, they will not pin black cloth on their arms, they will not spill beer and tobacco on the earth, they will not sing until their voices are hoarse. They will not put our plates and cups on our graves; they will not send us away with mphafa trees, things we need to enter the castle of our ancestors. Because we will not be proper, the spirits will not come running to meet us, and so we will wait and wait and wait – forever waiting in the air like flags of unsung countries. >