We Need New Names: Bulawayo’s Love Song for Zimbabwe

There are some writers for whom storytelling seems almost effortless. NoViolet Bulawayo is one of them. We first encountered her in her Caine Prize winning short story, Hitting Budapest, an amazing tale of dispossession and longing, told through the eyes of six Zimbabwean children brought together by internal dislocation and grinding poverty. In We Need New Names, Bulawayo continues this narrative with loads of ironies and startling craftsmanship.  

 In more than one way, Bulawayo’s book is reminiscent of the Lord of the Flies, a dystopian novel by William Golding, about a band of British boys who found themselves marooned on a desolate island and tried to run their affairs with disastrous consequences. Indeed there is something Goldingsque about this book. Not only in the use of child characters but in the development of these characters. In Bastard, we find echoes of Jack Merridew of Lord of the Flies who is intensely driven by his love of power and control. There are also occasions when we hear the voice of Golding’s Piggy in Bulawayo’s Godknows. However, while Golding’s book is a profound allegory on the death of innocence and the darkness of a man’s heart, Bulawayo leads us into the complexities of internal and external dislocations and the question of identity and belonging.

We Need New Names is a story of two parts. The first part captures life in a country that is falling apart; the pervading bleakness, the violent protests, hunger and death and the mass exodus to safer places. Part two chronicles the suspended lives of the exile; cast adrift in the cruel interplay of fate and mistake, they inhabit the nebulous margins of our world, belonging everywhere and nowhere.

 

With a narrative voice that rings loud with laughter, We Need New Names paints a lush picture of the two worlds that sit side by side in Zimbabwe. The world of the rich and comfortable white folk in Budapest and the wretched universe of black Zimbabweans in a settlement of shacks, ironically named Paradise. Yanked off their once comfortable homes and away from the nurture of schools, the narrator, Darling and her five friends; Chipo, Sbho, Godknows, Stina and Bastard roam the sun-scorched streets of Paradise. They live by the hour, scrounging for food and guavas to quell the rumble of hunger in their stomachs. Guava can be loosely seen here as a paradox – it can douse the fire in the stomach but it can also cause constipation if taken too much. A dilemma is subtly suggested here – to eat or not to eat? This also foreshadows one of the themes of the story; is exile a wise choice for citizens of crumbling societies?

The hungry children hit Budapest again and again and ironically remain the only link between these two close communities that are forced apart by the gulf of possession. Darling, the narrator’s child voice guides us into the tumultuous life in Paradise; so named for the reason of its being the exact opposite of what its name suggests. Through her omnipresent eyes, we encounter quaint characters with outlandish names like Mother of Bones, Mother Love, Forgiveness, MaMoyo, Freeborn, Vasco da Gama, and perhaps the most colourful of them all, Tshaka Zulu and Prophet Revelations Bitchington Mborro.

Bulawayo’s fiction is a story of innocence. But it is also a story of loss. In a piquant child voice, Darling tells us of the crumbling walls of Zimbabwe; of fathers deserting their families for neighbouring countries and of HIV/AIDS spreading like a bushfire in the broken communities. After years of waiting for her runaway husband, Darling’s mother welcomes another man into the pleasures of her bedroom.  A faint reminder that more often than not, when things begin to fall apart, the family, which is the center of society never really holds. Bulawayo captures the nightly visits of the lover in a most lucid prose – “Now mother is moaning; the man, he is panting. The bed is shuffling like a train taking them somewhere important that needs to be reached fast.” We see the picture of total dysfunction in Darling’s playmate, Chipo, a ten-year old, pregnant for her grandfather and in false prophets like Prophet Revelations Bitchington Mborro who assert themselves in the community; offering voodoo solutions for purely economic maladies. For this brood of social renegades, Bulawayo deploys a caustic tongue in her description – “the evangelists and Prophet Revelations Bitchington Mborro arrive after everybody, like chief baboons…” (page 32). Their comical appearance and exaggerated piety all hint on the falsehood that swaddles a fallen society - things are not always what they seem. But these characters are also veritable sources of humour which Bulawayo mines to hilarious effect. We see a bit of this when Darling’s father returns from South Africa, a living skeleton, stricken with HIV/AIDS. Prophet Bitchington arrives with a religious flourish and begins to cast out the grandfather’s spirit, which he claimed was the cause of the ailment.  Then, he goes on to name his fee in dollars and two fat virgin goats. On hearing this, Darling’s mum boils out of their shack, slamming the door hard behind her. “God also told me that the wife is possessed too, by three demons. One causes her to be unhappy all the time, one is the spirit of the dog, and the last one gives her a bad temper, rendering her a dangerous woman. But now we have to deal with the husband,” Bitchington intones in a solemn prophetic voice, drawing instant laughter from the reader.

We Need New Names is layered with meaning. Sometimes, weighty issues are given a most subtle treatment. Godknows startles the reader when he says “China is a red devil looking for people to eat so it can grow fat and strong.” But this is a seemingly innocent child-talk that casts a hard look at the spread of Chinese influence across the world but especially Africa where most construction jobs are easily snapped up by Chinese firms. Similarly, Bulawayo deftly deploys the “Country-game” played by the children to devastating, satirical effects. In the game, the players fight to assume the names of prosperous countries like the USA, Canada and Britain. And then she tells us that “Nobody wants to be rags of countries like Congo, like Somalia, like Iraq, like Sudan, like Haiti, like Sri Lanka and not even this one we live in – who wants to be a terrible place of hunger and things falling apart?” The narrator also nicely foreshadows the turn of events in part two of the story with Darling emerging the winner of the fight to assume the persona of USA in the game. Darling would eventually relocate to USA to live with Aunt Fostalina.  

The first part of We Need New Names ends with the death of Bornfree Lizwe Tapera. His passage hangs over the dying community like a lunar eclipse. Before that, we see a mob sweep through Budapest like an angry hurricane, dislocating comfortable white folks in their sheltered world and leaving the provocative sign - Black Power in caking feces on the wall.  Darling, soon leaves for the US to live with aunt Fostalina in Detroit, Michigan. And then begins a new vista of hope and despair. She discovers to her chagrin that America is not the perfect picture of her dream. This sudden realization is captured in a single striking line – “no matter how green the maize looks in America, it is not real.” She finds out that her Auntie Fostalina’s life is far from perfect; that she scraps a living by working multiple jobs and lives with Uncle Kojo; a man who has spent many years in America without becoming a permanent resident, who is nostalgic about his native Ghana, and has become an emotional captive in cold America. We are also made to realize that there are two types of hunger; one for food and the other for belongingness, for identity and both are just as important. Again, Bulawayo captures this masterfully  – “there are times, though, that no matter how much food I eat, I find that food does nothing for me, like I am hungry for my country and nothing is going to fix it.”

Things soon take a humorous turn as we encounter Tshaka Zulu in America. Zulu is perhaps one of the most admirable characters in the book. Against the wishes of his father, Zulu sells the old man’s cows to finance a flawed dream of abundance in America. Pressed against the hard realities of America, Zulu’s dream turns to nightmare and cost him his mind. Zulu represents the hordes of dream-chasing immigrants who are stranded in America with no hope of either returning to their roots or becoming fully accepted in their adopted country. But Zulu never truly arrived America; trapped in the interstices of home and exile, Tshaka becomes a metaphor for belonging. He is quick to brandish his shield and shout greetings into space in his native tongue. Bulawayo captures this perplexity of migration and adaptation in the following lines – “we could not use our languages, and so when we spoke our voices came out bruised. When we talked, our tongues thrashed madly in our mouths and staggered like drunken men… In America, we did not always have the words. When we are alone we summoned the horses of our languages and mounted their backs and galloped past skyscappers.”

 Bulawayo’s lyrical prose is in itself a fascinating discovery. Joyous sentences dance to rhythmic royal African drums on every page as every line sparkles with life. We come across gems -   “When you look into their faces, it is like something that was in there got up and gathered its things and walked away.” We also read - “Look at that drum of a stomach, it’s like he has swallowed a country,” lines that make you want to leap up and punch the sky.

The narrator’s voice acquires a new stridency as Darling begins to adjust to her new home in America.  She makes new friends in Kristal and Marina and begins to acquire American accent. Laughter lurks behind the narrative voice as Darling and her new friends discover the magic world of sex from the computer screen in the basement of her new home. But even so, she is never truly weaned of her longing for home. Déjà vu soon strikes again all around her as Tshaka Zulu finally goes down in a blaze and Uncle Kojo loses his mind, pinning away from his only son’s departure to Afghanistan as a combatant in the US Army. Darling returns home  from work one day to catch Aunt Fostalina with another man in the house while Uncle Kojo sits listless in the living room, gazing blindly at the images of fighting soldiers on a TV screen. What flashes across the reader’s mind here is the image of Darling’s mum, welcoming a lover into her bedroom at night with her father away in South Africa.

Darling’s longing for home begins all over again and she pulls up her Mac for a Skype session with her mother but instead, Chipo, her childhood friend picks the call. In the ensuing exchange, Darling learns of what has happened to her group of six friends. But she also gets to know that in fleeing crumbling Zimbabwe, she has lost whatever right she had to sit in judgment over those that preside over her affairs. This, to my mind, is a piquant rebuke of African exiles that are quick to hurl stones at blundering leaders back home in whose hands the flower of Africa’s promise at Independence has long wilted. Bulawayo delivers this rebuke in the voice of her most unlikely characters – Chipo. “It is the wound that knows the texture of the pain; it is us who stayed here feeling the suffering so it is us who have a right to even say anything…why did you run off to America, Darling Nonkululeko Nkala, huh? If it is your country, you have to love it to live in it and not leave it. You have to fight for it to make it right. Do you abandon your house because it is burning or do you find water to put the fire out?”

Without a doubt, NoViolet Bulawayo has had an auspicious beginning in her writing career, but this may well be her best offering ever. Of course there are flaws in We Need New Names. Certain things seem a bit overlaid in the book. For instance, while incest is common in every society, the likelihood of a grandfather impregnating his ten-year old granddaughter is farfetched in most parts of Africa. Again, the theme of poverty and hunger also seems over-stretched.  But these are minor flaws that round off a thoroughly realized narrative.

In all, We Need New Names is a song of enchantment capturing the dilemma of identity, dislocation and belongingness. But it is also a sad love song for the bedraggled motherland whose children are scattered across the face of the earth, belonging everywhere and nowhere.