The Long and Short of It: We Need New Names
BOOK: We Need New Names
FORMAT: Hardback (borrowed from Library)
While voices in the diaspora are becoming more and more
recognisable to the average reader, I would hazard a guess that only the
smallest few are familiar with the vast bodies of African literature available
in English at the present moment. Books
such as We Need New Names take an
important step in bridging cultural differences between European/ Western
societies and developing African nations because more than anything else, they
highlight the similarities. This is what
struck me most about this remarkable book.
Darling and her friends are normal children. They play games of make believe like the
country game, where everyone wants to be a ‘good ‘ country like the USA or
Australia or Britain, but no one wants to be somewhere like the Congo. They play ‘Find bin Laden’. And they hunt for guavas because they are
hungry. But this is not childish hunger-
this is starvation. Darling, Bastard,
Chip, Sbho, Stina and Chipo hunt for guavas in a place called Budapest, which
is where all the rich people live. They
gorge themselves on these guavas even though they know that this will make them
constipated and that the seeds might rip their anuses when they defecate,
because it is better than starving. The
worst a child might see when out exploring in Australia is tame compared to the
things Darling and her friends see; a white man and woman taken from their
homes by a mob advocating ‘Blak Power’; a neighbour shot; a dog kicked over a
fence; a woman hanging dead from a tree because she has contracted The Sickness-
AIDS. Each time something like this
happens, as I reader I found myself thinking that no, this was a feint that
would be reversed at the last moment.
After all these are only children.
But only once does that happen.
In the scene from which the book has taken its name, Sbho
and Darling and a new girl in the village perform an operation to get rid of
Chipo’s pregnant stomach because it is in the way of their playing. They adopt new names and become characters
from ER. Thankfully, at the last moment
a village woman named MotherLove discovers them, and stops the backyard
abortion before the new girl can insert the mangled coat hanger inside of
Chipo.
Darling talks of going to America and her dreams are only
limited by her imagination. She tells
her friends she will have a Lamboghini car, that she will go to Cornell, that
she will live in a big house like the ones in Budapest when her Aunt Fostalina
comes for her. But America is not the
country where dreams come true. As a
Zimbabwean and as an African living in America, Darling encounters
hardships. No one understands her even
when she is speaking English. She has to
pay her way through college working in a supermarket where her job is to sort
cans for recycling. She cleans the home
of a rich man whose daughter is an anorexic.
Darling finds the idea that a white girl choosing not to eat could ever truly know starvation
laughable. She feels it all the time,
that she is not an American.
But neither is she a Zimbabwean anymore. In a powerful Skype conversation with the
grown up Chipo, Darling is admonished for her sympathy for her country’s plight
because she chose to leave. Chipo uses
the analogy of the burning house- do you leave, or do you get water and try to
save it? Darling is left with a sense of
loss and does not know where she belongs.
We Need New Names is
a powerful and subtle tale of identity and coming of age, and it is a mighty
shame that this book did not win the Man Booker Prize. I see NoViolet Bulawayo’s writing as on a par
with the great Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s.
I heartily enjoyed this book and gave it five stars.