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 cannot be the same once you leave behind who and what you are, you just cannot be the same.
When I started We Need New Names, I was immediately enchanted by the main character, Darling, and her gang of friends as they made a raid for guavas on the relatively rich town of Budapest -- they stuffed their empty bellies full of the stolen fruit, despite knowing that it would lead to painful constipation. I later learned that this opening chapter was originally a short story (Hitting Budapest) that won the 2011 Caine Prize for African Literature for NoViolet Bulawayo -- no doubt richly deserved. Despite their hunger and their tin shacks and their ratty clothes and the fact that their school had been closed some time before, the preteen friends accept their lot, make up games, and dream of emigrating to South Africa or Dubai or America. These children aren't innocents (one of them is pregnant, the result of a grandfather raping her) and they are hyper aware of American celebrity culture and how to manipulate western volunteers:
What we really want to do is take off and run to meet the lorry but we know we cannot. Last time we did, the NGO people were not happy about it, like we had committed a crime against humanity…They just like taking pictures, these NGO people…they don't care that we are embarrassed by our dirt and torn clothing, that we would prefer they didn't do it; they just take the pictures anyway, take and take. We don't complain because we know that after the picture-taking comes the giving of gifts.As an aside, I was surprised that this NGO gave the children toy guns. I know when we have packed a shoebox before for Operation Christmas Child, there were explicit instructions to not include war toys, as it might be traumatising. This also made me pause and think since I have seen the pictures sent back to the classrooms that show the smiling children opening their gifts -- it never occurred to me that they might resent having their picture taken, that their dignity might have been too high a price to pay for dollar store pencils and toothbrushes.
In a later chapter, Darling remembers how she and her mother had lost the nice brick house they had been living in; the events that had forced them to construct a shack in Paradise:
The men knock down our house and Ncane's house and Josephat's house and Bongi's house and Sibo's house and many houses. Knockiyani knockiyani knockiyani: men driving metal, metal slamming brick, brick crumbling…When the bulldozers finally leave, everything is broken, everything is smashed, everything is wrecked. It is sad faces everywhere, choking dust everywhere, broken walls and bricks everywhere, tears on people's faces everywhere. Gayigusu kicks broken bricks with his bare feet and rips his shirt off and jabs at the terrible scar running across his back and bellows, I got this from the liberation war, salilwelilizwe leli, we fought for this facking lizwe mani, we put them in power, and today they turn on us like a snake, mpthu, and he spits. Musa's father stands with his hands in his pockets and does not say anything but the front of his trousers is wet. Little Tendai points at him and laughs.On one of their guava raids, from their perch high in a tree, the friends watch as a gang of weapon-waving young men, all the time chanting "Africa for Africans", confront the wealthy white owners of the home and garden:
No, you listen, the white man says, like he didn't just hear the boss warn him about telling black men to listen.
I am an African, he says. This is my fucking country too, my father was born here, I was born here, just like you!Even though they had watched the gang punt a little dog out of the yard, enter and destroy the home, and lead the couple away against their will, Darling and her friends go into the house and make a game out of using their things and eating their food and answering their phone -- they are always capable of regarding the violence around themselves with a detached interest, and I found many instances of this to be deeply touching (from straightening a coat hanger to get rid of the pregnant girl's "stomach" -- even though they don't quite know what to do with it -- to pretending to beat one of the boys to death after secretly watching the funeral of a political activist -- when a Westerner with a camera who has been filming them asks, "What kind of game is that?" one of them replies, "This is no game, it's life".) Perhaps most affecting is when Darling's father finally returns from South Africa:
Father comes home after many years of forgetting us, of not sending us money, of not loving us, not visiting us, not anything us, and parks in the shack, unable to move, unable to talk properly, unable to anything, vomiting and vomiting, Jesus, just vomiting and defecating on himself, and it smelling like something dead in there, dead and rotting, his body a black, terrible stick; I come in from playing Find bin Laden and he is there.Although he is supposed to be kept a secret, Darling's friends enter her shack and immediately show compassion, with songs and touches, to someone whom they recognise as dying of AIDS. In the first half of We Need New Names, Darling and her friends are smart and funny and can dream of "richer" lives without feeling sorry for themselves -- I could admire them without pitying them, and I really felt like I was getting a glimpse at an African, or at any rate a Zimbabwean, childhood.
But in the second half of the book, Darling finally joins her aunt in Detroit and the American dream turns out to be not what she had expected -- there is snow and gunshots and an obese cousin who plays video games all day. Her aunt is obsessed with being skinny and is exercising any time she isn't working (which is two jobs so she can afford to send money back home). With her new friends (a Nigerian and an African American), Darling watches porn (and for no good reason, a video of a young girl suffering a Female Genital Mutilation ceremony) and whereas she used to be charming and resilient, Darling is now flat and doesn't really react to what's going on around her. Years pass and Darling continues to be disconnected -- and I was disconnected from her.
Things felt less real in the American half of the book -- it felt cliché to have the daughter of the rich man who Darling is cleaning for turn out to be an anorexic. Or when Darling confronts her African American friend about the amount of slang she uses, Kristal replies:
First of all, it's called Ebonics and it be a language system, but it be our own, naamean, 'coz we ain't trynna front.I didn't buy for a minute the use of the word Ebonics by this teenage character.
By the end of We Need New Names, Darling starts to realise that she would have been better off staying in Zimbabwe, that hiding out illegally in the US (after letting her visitor's visa expire, like so many of her compatriots) and working night and day to improve the lives of the family she left behind (who are now asking for satellite dishes instead of care packages) is no life at all. I can't argue with that conclusion if the author believes it, she certainly portrayed Darling as happier and more herself when she was in her real home, but this book was so uneven to me that I couldn't fairly compare the two halves of Darling's life -- they seemed to have happened to different people.
I wanted to give this book its proper context and have been looking at Zimbabwe and Mugabe, and seeing what others have had to say about We Need New Names. I was intrigued by these two reviews, one from The Guardian which discusses whether NoViolet Bulawayo is guilty of writing the "Caine-prize aesthetic":
The Guardian
And this one from New Zimbabwe that found the second half of the book to be more profound:
New Zimbabwe
If We Need New Names had ended as strongly as it began, it would have been one of my favourite books of the year. As it is -- as can be seen by my lack of passages from the second half if nothing else -- it screeched to a halt and left me wanting.
Just to start a conversation, I asked my younger brother recently, "Why is it, as Canadians, we can look at places like apartheid-era South Africa and see that a minority white rule over the original black inhabitants is obviously wrong while seeming not to care about having taken the land we live on away from its original inhabitants?"
Kyler immediately took issue with my premise: "Who says what's 'obviously wrong' or not? Zimbabwe was the bread basket of Africa until the white farmers were kicked off the land they had developed for generations. Now everyone is starving, so how is that better? And as for the Natives, why does everyone go around talking about an Indian genocide when there were 200 000 inhabitants in Canada before the Europeans came and now they number 2 million?"
I can't find the sources to back up his numbers, but his statements made me plenty uncomfortable. The scene in We Need New Names in which the white couple are removed from their home is written judgement-free by NoViolet Bulawayo; it is what it is, and even protesting that his family had lived on the land for generations didn't make the white man any more African. So how does that work in reverse?
Can people who voluntarily emigrate to America (or Canada or wherever) ever really belong there? Is there irony in Africans voluntarily following the path of those ancestors who were kidnapped into slavery? Do the Natives in Canada have some case for kicking out all of us non-Natives and reclaiming the land -- and back to my original question -- why does that sound ridiculous to me whereas redistributing the farmland in Zimbabwe sounds fair (even if it was grossly mishandled by that thug, Robert Mugabe)? Is it because the non-Natives are the majority and that's just democracy? My family has been in Canada for at least 150 years, is that long enough for squatter's rights?
It's at a time like this that I wish I was in a book club...so much to discuss.
