Memory Chirere Reviews “We Need New Names”

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Memory Chirere is an award-winning Zimbabwean writer who teaches Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Zimbabwe.

NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel, We Need New Names confirms the existence of  a certain special tradition in the literature of Zimbabwe which cries for adequate recognition and evaluation.
Ever since Dambudzo Marechera of The House of Hunger’s “I got my  things and left… I couldn’t have stayed in that House of Hunger where every  morsel of sanity was snatched from you the way some kinds of bird snatch food from the very mouths of babes” in 1978, there has been a quiet but sustained outpouring of narratives about leaving the homeland (Zimbabwe) because of  crisis.
Marechera and his contemporaries and those immediately after him like  Shimmer Chinodya, Alexander Kanengoni and Valentine Mazorodze produced various  narratives about leaving home (then Rhodesia) to go either to join the  war of  liberation or to exile. These tally well with the legendary escape of  current  President Robert Mugabe himself and colleague Edgar Tekere, from troubled  Rhodesia through Inyanga into Mozambique on foot to lift the war of  liberation  to a higher notch. There are many such stories in the public  sphere.
And in more recent years, specifically dwelling on what is now  called ‘the decade of Zimbabwean crisis,’ we have Christopher Mlalazi’s Many Rivers,  Brian Chikwava’s Harare North, and the multiple voice compilation, Hunting in  Foreign Lands, Novuyo Rosa Tshuma’s Shadows and now; NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need  New Names, among others, writing on going away.
In all these stories ranging from the 1970s to the present, home is  depicted as going through various forms of turmoil, which expresses itself most  through political instability. The central character, who is almost always a  young fellow, flees home and country in search of an alternative existence.
However, this character remains double faced; looking at foreign  territory with eyes of home and glancing back at home through the teary eyes of  new experience and beginning to re-read ‘home’. The resultant chasm constantly  tugs at one’s soul. However, to read NoViolet Bulawayo new book is to take  constant departures and arrivals, inside out and upside down until you lose  count because she is constantly aware of the numerous points of view to the  subject of going away from Zimbabwe. She is aware that the phenomenon that she  is working on is actually in motion and that Zimbabwe will one day rest on any  of her many intriguing sides.
To return home or to remain out here or to forget everything… is  where you locate our character. To return home is to jump back into the fire and  to accept defeat. To remain abroad, however, is to wallow in the invisibility of  a little foreigner. To forget everything is not possible if you  are as sensitive  as NoViolet Bulawayo’s Darling Nonkululeko Nkala.  It is most ironical that at that very moment,  our character from this  kind of literature asks or fails to ask important  questions about what exactly has happened or not happened to one’s people and  country: How did it start? Who causes it? Who benefits from it? Are we certain  that we see all of it for what it is?
From Marechera to Bulawayo, history may one day judge these stories against that rubric.
The mind of Darling is an encyclopedia bursting with minute details  from, the distinct aroma and taste of guavas stolen from the backyards of a  posh  city suburb to the rigmarole of shanty town dwellers of Zimbabwe. And that  kind  of pregnancy of detail that you find in this novel, like the descriptions of the  onset of Operation Murambatsvina, is  one of its strengths:
“…the bulldozers appear boiling. But first before we see them, we  hear them. Me and Thamu and Josephat and Ncane and Mudiwa and Verona are  outside  playing with More’s new football, and then we hear thunder. Then Ncane says,  What is that? Then Josephat says,  It’s  the rain. I say, No, it’s the planes. Then Maneru’s grandfather comes sprinting  down Freedom Street without his walking stick, shouting, They are coming, Jesus  Christ, they are coming! Everybody is standing on the street, neck craned,  waiting to see. Then Mother shouts, Darling-comeintothehousenow!  But then the  bulldozers are already near big and yellow and terrible and mental teeth and  spinning dust. The men driving the bulldozers are laughing. I hear the adults  saying, Why why why, what have we done?”
NoViolet Bulawayo’s language, as in the blues, is both depressing and  exhilarating. It invites you to laugh and cry at the same time:
“Look at them leaving in droves, the children of the land, just  look  at them leaving in droves. Those with nothing are crossing borders. Those  with  strength are crossing borders. Those with ambitions are crossing borders.  Those  with hopes are crossing borders. Those with loss are crossing borders.  Moving,  running, emigrating, going deserting, walking, quitting, flying, fleeing to all  over, to countries whose names they cannot  pronounce…”
And when they get to the destinations of choice, the Zimbabweans and  fellow migrants find that there is no sweetness here   either:
“And the jobs we worked, Jesus-Jesus-Jesus, the jobs we worked….We  took scalding irons and ironed our pride flat. We cleaned toilets. We picked  tobacco and fruit under the boiling sun until we hung out our tongues and  panted  like lost hounds. We butchered animals, slit throats, drained  blood…holding our  breaths like crocodiles under water, our minds on the money  and never on our  lives. Adamou got murdered by that beast of a machine that  also ate three  fingers of Sudan’s left hand… Ecuador fell from forty stories working on a roof  and shattered his spine, screaming, Mis   hijos! Mis hijos! on his way down”
This novel juxtaposes a tumultuous Zimbabwe against a well fed and   technologically advanced America as seen by a young and impressionable   Zimbabwean girl. Darling discovers that Zimbabwe and America are worlds with  two  very different passwords. What Zimbabwe does not have materially, America  offers  but not for free! Closely looked at, America offers its own kind of  turmoil to  those (like Darling) who do not want to be second class citizens and  who  constantly claim that they have somewhere ‘my country, my people, our  President,  our language’ and other things.
The vivid backlash or maybe the ‘cruelty’ of this story is  contained  in poor teenage – mother-Chipo’s words from Zimbabwe in a telephone  conversation  with Darling:
“Just tell me one thing. What are you doing not in your country  right  now? Why did you run off to America, Darling Nonkhululekho Nkala, huh?  Why did  you just leave? If it’s your country, you have to love it to live in it  and not  leave it. You have to fight for it no matter what, to make it right.  Tell me, do  you abandon your house because it’s burning or do you find water to  put out the  fire? And if you leave it burning, do you expect the flames to turn  into water  and put themselves out? You left it, Darling, my dear, you left the  house  burning and you have the guts to tell me, in that stupid accent that you were  not born with, that doesn’t even suit you, that this is your  country?”
Chipo’s analysis may have its own problems but this and other acute   questions raised by this novel, will mark it as one of the tightest rope  walking  narratives by a Zimbabwean. Zimbabweans, wherever they are today, will  find out  that this searing novel, begs the citizen’s position to the Zimbabwean  question.  The book is to be launched this May 2013 and the author is currently  based in  the US.
The first chapter to this novel, ‘Hitting Budapest’ won No Violet   Bulawayo the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing when it was presented as a   separate short story. Announcing Bulawayo as the winner of the £10,000 prize at   a celebratory dinner held at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, the chair of judges   and award-winning author Hisham Matar said: “The language of Hitting Budapest   crackles. Here we encounter Darling, Bastard, Chipo, Godknows, Stina and Sbho,  a  gang reminiscent of Clockwork Orange. But these are children, poor and  violated  and hungry.
This is a story with moral power and weight, it has the  artistry to  refrain from moral commentary. NoViolet Bulawayo is a writer who  takes delight  in language.”