We Need New Names - NoViolet Bulawayo

NoViolet Bulawayo captures the voice of young Darling so well. I read the entire novel through her eyes, from the 10 year old girl in Zimbabwe to the teen in the US. The prose is deceptively simple: behind Darling’s observations as a child lie so many truths, ones that adults have often blinded themselves to accept.

We Need New Names is Darling’s story, one of displacement and trauma in Zimbabwe, victim of the government named “Operation Murambatsvina”, where homes were bulldozed to the ground for no legitimate reason (other than crushing Mugabe’s opposition groups at the time). But We Need New Names is also a story of immigration, of learning to live in the US, thousands of miles from her closest family and friends, coming of age in a country that is not always what it appears to be on the outside. Both of these parts of Darling’s life are told through the eyes of a child who sees everything but does not always understand what she sees.

I love how NoViolet Bulawayo takes a simple object and makes it so symbolic all through the book. The guava, for example. Darling and her friends are always hungry, so they trek to the rich neighborhoods to steal guavas from the trees there. They gorge on them, even though they know that they will cause painful constipation later on. Later on, the guavas appear again, snuggled across the ocean from Zimbabwe to the Midwest, a sweet reminder of home that Darling can never seem to find elsewhere. I have my own guava, but it’s a watermelon, and I know I will forever be disappointed by every single watermelon that I try here as it will never be as crispy and sweet and perfect as the ones from the land that I miss so much.

I also thoroughly appreciate how NoViolet Bulawayo weaves so many important talking points into the narrative: alcoholism, displacement, belonging and not belonging, culture clashes, school shootings etc. There are many important mentions of how language is often used to define who we are, which I thought was very interesting. There really is a lot to unpack in this novel and it leaves you thinking about it long after you have finished it.

I’ve read several novels by women writers from Zimbabwe this year and each one has struck me in different ways. In my opinion We Need New Names really emphasizes how we never know what someone else’s story is, and we can also never know what is going on in another country unless we have been there, or at least looked so much further than what we are shown. We have so much to learn, so much.