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.
