Visiting Zimbabwe with We Need New Names
For the third installment of the Vicarious Reading Book Club, five fellow book lovers met again at The Immigrant in the East Village and traveled to Zimbabwe with some help from NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names.
I loved this book – its language, its characters, and its highly rewarding snippets of African and American culture. But most of all, I loved how much it had to say about the role that place plays in determining and defining who we are as people.
We Need New Names is the story of literally moving from one physical place to another – it follows a young girl named Darling’s childhood in “Paradise” (aka post-Rhodesia Zimbabwe) and her subsequent adolescence in Michigan. It’s also the story of the figurative role of location and how large it can loom in young imaginations. For example, Darling’s friends in Zimbabwe name the spaces that surround them after exotic locales – Budapest is a rich neighborhood adjacent to theirs, for example, while Shanghai is a shopping mall under construction. It’s the only way within their control to escape their circumstances.
Later, these same friends – with quirky nicknames like Bastard, Bornfree, and Nomoreproblems – play something they call country-game. The game begins by drawing a big circle with a smaller circle inside it and then writing the names of countries chosen by the players in sections of the outer circle:
“But first we have to fight over the names because everybody wants to be certain countries, like everybody wants to be the U.S.A. and Britain and Canada and Australia and Switzerland and France and Italy and Sweden and Germany and Russia and Greece and them. These are the country-countries. If you lose the fight, then you just have to settle for countries like Dubai and South Africa and Botswana and Tanzania and them. They are not country-countries, but at least life is better than here. 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?”
Much of the magic of We Need New Names lies in how Bulawayo filters the challenges of an impoverished African life through a child’s eyes. In Darling’s world, coat-hanger abortions are interpreted as a game, rigged elections are just town drama, AIDS is seen as a mysterious illness that maybe Reverend Bitchington Mborro can pray away, and prostitution simply seems like mysterious men coming by the house. Then Darling moves to Detroit, Michigan (or, in her words, Destroyedmichygen) and finds herself shocked by sights that read as utterly normal to my North American eyes. To her, the frantic motions of aerobics look like madness, cold feels like it will kill you, and snow seems like something that could smother you silently.
Years later, looking back, Darling views her immigration story not just as strange, but also as profoundly sad – tantamount to tearing someone from the one place they truly belong:
“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.”
This is the kind of writing that makes me so excited about Vicarious Reading as an endeavor. I’m a person who views the place of my birth as an accident of fate. I’ve frequently decried the ridiculousness of spending your whole life in one spot, arguing that the likelihood that that place you’re born is where you’re meant to be is vanishingly small. But by exploring the pull that place exerts on people, Bulawayo made me much more alert to the possibility that even if you do stay in the same place, the idea of home can shift like quicksand beneath your feet:
“There are two homes inside my head: home before Paradise, and home in Paradise; home one and home two. Home one was best. A real house. Father and Mother having good jobs. Plenty of food to eat. Clothes to wear. Radios blaring every Saturday and everybody dancing because there was nothing to do but party and be happy. And then home two – Paradise, with its tin tin tin.”
”There are three homes inside Mother’s and Aunt Fostalina’s heads: home before independence, before I was born, when black people and white people were fighting over the country. Home after independence, when black people won the country. And then the home of things falling apart, which made Aunt Fostalina leave and come here. Home one, home two, and home three. There are four homes inside Mother of Bones’s head: home before the white people came to steal the country, and a king ruled; home when white people came to steal the country and then there was war; home when black people got our stolen country back after independence; and then the home of now. Home one, home two, home three, home four. When somebody talks about home, you have to listen carefully so you know exactly which one the person is referring to.”
After racing through it in three days, gushing over it in book club, and extolling its virtues here, I still feel like I could write forever about how much I enjoyed and learned from We Need New Names. Instead, I’ll paste the discussion questions I used below, in the hopes that they might spur some of you to pick this beautiful book up.
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Discussion Questions
Let’s compare Darling’s two living environments – a communal, extended one in Zimbabwe with a smaller one in Michigan. Where is she happier? Where is she better off?
Friendship is a big theme of this book, and Darling’s friendships in Zimbabwe are contrasted against her friendships in America. Is the author trying to tell us that the nature of friendship fundamentally different in Africa, or is Darling simply growing up?
Geography is this book’s singular obsession – defining one place’s relative superiority to another in country game, naming different places after different locations around the globe, migrating from one country to the next, and ultimately being stuck where you end up. What are we meant to take away here? Is place a defining feature of who we are or is it just where we happen to be?
Belonging to a place is also an important notion here. The man whose house was raided says “I’m an African. This is my fucking country, my father was born here, I was born here, just like you!” And when Darling is living in America, she Skypes with Chipo, who tells her that she can't refer to Zimbabwe as her country anymore. What do you think of scenes like that? What makes a country “yours?” Is it being from there? Is it having ancestors from there? Is that something you can forfeit or have taken away from you?
In what ways does America change Darling's personality? Is America the reason for this shift or is it Darling herself? Does your personality change depending on where you are or who you are with?
How do you think your country of residence, birth, or origin affected the way you read and interpreted this novel?
How do Bulawayo's descriptions of Zimbabwe diverge from other portrayals of Africa? In some of the tragic moments in the book—for example, when Darling and her friends try to remove the baby from Chipo's belly—there are unexpected moments of levity. Does Bulawayo's method of depicting tragedy make the harrowing elements resonate with you in an unexpected way?
What do characters like Chipo (pregnant at 10), Uncle Kojo (becomes an alcoholic when his son TK joins the army), Tshaka Zulu (character in an insane asylum) tell us about trauma and psychological breakdown?
Despite living in poverty, a world away from American culture, we see through the lives of Darling and her friends that lots of American pop culture makes its way firmly into the imagination of these young people—from Beyonce to the Kardashians to the television show ER. Did that surprise you? How are Darling's ideas about American pop culture affirmed or challenged when she arrives in Detroit?
The scene in which the aid workers visit Darling's village gives insight into the sometimes dehumanizing impact of charity: "The man starts taking pictures with his big camera...they don't care that we are embarrassed by our dirt and torn clothing...we don't complain because we know that after the picture-taking comes the giving of gifts." How did this passage make you feel? If this scene were written from the point of view of the aid workers, how do you think it would be different? What role does our intention play when we contribute to charitable causes?
The title of the book refers to the choice that many immigrants make to give their children names that, as Darling says, "make them belong in America." How important is a name? How much weight do names hold in your family or in your culture?
How would your reading experience have been different—and how might the power of Darling's message have been affected—if the novel hadn't been written in her voice? Are there places you think you would have understood more about the story?
Let’s talk about the language – names like BornFree and Godknows, places like DestroyedMichygan. Why do you think the author made this stylistic choice?