The
first that came to mind was Americanah by Chimananda Ngozi Adichie. I
wrote my dissertation on Americanah. If I had to pare my bookself
down to five titles, Americanah would still be on it. My subconscious
will immediately compare any narrative about coming to America and
finding it's not all it's cracked up to be to Americanah. To
be perfectly honest, by that metric I don't think We Need New Names
is that good.
Maybe
this would be a good time to rewind a bit. We Need New Names is
the debut novel by Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo. It was
published in 2013 and proved a big critical hit. I was somewhat
surprised to find out it made the Booker Prize Shortlist that year –
longlist I could see, but it seems too slight to me to make the big
six. Nothing that year was coming close to The Luminaries anyway,
so I suppose it doesn't really matter.
We
Need New Names is
written from the perspective of Darling, a girl growing up in
Zimbabwe during the late noughties. There are occasional, very brief
interludes that do not appear to be narrated by her. They contain
sentences like
"we were so happy we rummaged through the dustbins of our souls to retrieve the stained, broken pieces of God."
So as you can tell, it's only Darling's parts that are worth reading,
anyway. They follow her from her childhood through to her teenage
years, by which point she has emigrated to America and lives in
Michigan. What rattled me about We
Need New Names, and limited the
extent to which I could get into it, is that there's not much of a
plot to speak of. Each chapter serves as a different vignette in
Darling's life. The Zimbabwe chapters see her playing with her
friends and getting into all manner of scrapes, against the backdrop
of a nation on the brink of collapse. In America she hangs around
with two other black girls, Kristal and Marina, only seems to
sporadically like them, and generally projects an air of ennui. It
wouldn't be fair to say that nothing happens in We Need New
Names – at least, it wouldn't
be fair to the half of the book set in Zimbabwe. Across those
chapters, we have a high stakes guava heist, an exorcism, and a ten
year old girl attempting to perform an abortion. There's a chapter
dealing with Robert Mugabe's repressive government, a chapter dealing
with the AIDS crisis, a chapter dealing with racial tension and
violence. The problem with the book's structure, with each chapter
almost its own short story, is that none of these issues get enough
time to really hit home. The slow and painful decline of Darling's
father after he returns home from South Africa with AIDS could be a
book long sub plot. Instead it's tackled in a matter of pages. And
all of these issues being rushed through in the Zimbabwean half of
the story makes it all the more glaring that in America, barely
anything happens at all.
The
big issue with this lack of narrative cohesion is that it makes it
hard for We Need New Names to
deliver its message on identity, immigration and the nature of home.
Bulawayo has nuanced and interesting things to say on this topic.
Moving to America is Darling's dream as a child, and her life in
Zimbabwe is hard and unstable. Her life in America is comparatively
serene, but it comes at a price. Because she got into America on a
visitor's visa that has long since expired, there is no possibility
of her leaving the country. She can't return to Zimbabwe and see her
mother, or her friends. To Darling, it seems like the latter is the
greater loss. Her interactions with Kristal and Marina are lifeless
in comparison to the boisterous energy that defined her social life
in Zimbabwe. In the book's final chapter, she speaks to her old
friend Chipo on Skype, who criticises her for having fled Zimbabwe
instead of staying to fight for it.
"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?"
Obviously there's a degree of jealousy involved in Chipo making those
comments, because it's patently unreasonable to expect a teenager to
change Zimbabwe's political culture single-handedly. Still, I think
it's impressive that Bulawayo brings up this issue at all. It's one
of the most complex aspects of immigration in the 21st century. No
one could blame Darling and her family for wanting to flee Zimbabwe,
but there's merit in the argument that if those who had the means to
leave the country stayed to fight for political change, they could
have created a better Zimbabwe for everyone. Instead, they simply
seek shelter on the margins on American society.
Ultimately
though, while Bulawayo has plenty of worthwhile things to say, her
lacklustre plotting means she struggles to find interesting ways to
say them. It's not like Americanah, where Adichie can smuggle
social commentary through the voices of likeable, detailed characters
that you care deeply about. Everything in We Need New Names is much
more surface level. One dimensional white people pop up specifically
to say one dimensional white people things about Africa being a
country where everything is war-torn and impoverished. Darling is the
only character who features in every chapter, and is thus the only
one that feels fleshed out. Zimbabwe comes alive in Bulawayo's hands,
but Detroit might as well be any city in America. Late in the novel,
Darling moves to Kalamazoo, and you would have no way of knowing this
if she didn't tell you. Describing a comparatively wealthy area of
Zimbabwe on the fourth page of the book, Darling says
"it's like being in a different country altogether. A nice country where people who are not like us live. But then you don't see anything to show there are real people living here; even the air itself is empty: no delicious food cooking, no odours, no sounds. Just nothing."
This is a neat bit of foreshadowing. It makes it clear that
Bulawayo's America is at least boring because that's the point she's
making, rather than out of lazy writing. But it's not all that
rewarding to read half a novel set in a place like this, and at times
Bulawayo's heart doesn't seem in it, either. A chapter in which
Darling, Kristal and Marina all go to a shopping mall deals with
school shootings, Islamophobia, and police brutality towards black
people. All these issues receive about a sentence each, so it has the
vibe of Bulawayo ticking off boxes.
The
second book that We Need New Names reminds
me of, however, is a more favourable comparison. A couple of months
back in the shop, a woman came in and told me she'd named all four of
her children after favourite authors of hers. She called the one in
the pushchair Junot, after Junot Diaz. Now, this woman had a kind of
smug and airy and middle class demeanour, and so I was tempted
to remind her that Diaz had been
outed as a sex pest.
But I didn't, on the basis that I might have
got fired, and it would have been a cruel thing to do, and I suspect
Jack-sceptics might be inclined to
accuse me of having an irritatingly smug
and airy and middle class demeanour. Mostly though,
I didn't because I've been there. The Brief and Wondrous
Life of Oscar Wao is a
wonderful, completely enchanting novel. It's told in an exuberant and
incredibly likeable
narrative voice. It hums all the way through with kinetic energy and
rude jokes and geeky sci-fi references. I couldn't disavow it, even
if Diaz is a nasty piece of work. And there are moments in We
Need New Names that really
do evoke the best bits of Oscar
Wao.
It's
most obvious in the first half of the book, which focuses on
Darling's childhood. The first chapter is called 'Hitting Budapest,'
and was first published in 2010 as a standalone short story. It won
the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2011 and I can see why. It
introduces Darling and her group of tearaway pals as they attempt to
steal from people's Guava trees in the affluent suburb of Budapest.
There's a real verve to this chapter. There's a strange intimacy in
its more grotesque moments, like the description of Chipo's vomit
being
"like urine, only thicker,"
or Godknows'
"buttocks peeping like strange eyes through the dirty white fabric"
of his shorts, or Darling's needlessly detailed description of the mechanics of pooping when you've had too many guavas. It's all shot through with this really genuine, charming, childlike spirit. It doesn't shy away from the desperation of these children's situation. They're stealing these guavas because they haven't eaten all day, and the chapter ends with a particularly harrowing final image. The kids themselves aren't even that pleasant; the ringleader, Bastard, really lives up to his moniker. But there's life here. There's energy, warmth, compassion. It's a super bit of writing.
The
next few chapters continue in this vibrant vein. As a child, Darling
is a charismatic enough narrator that even mundane moments become
pretty wonderful in her voice. She is completely irreverant in a way
only a 10 year old with nothing to lose can be. But it's not just,
for example, Darling's willingness to point out when Prophet
Revelations Bitchington Mborro has got so sweaty that you can see his
nipples through his shirt. It's the manic intensity of Mborro's
preaching itself, and the mayhem of the chapter's conclusion, when a
woman has an exorcism forced upon her. There's a breathtaking
audacity to Darling encountering an obese foreman at a Chinese-run
building site and saying
"the fat man starts ching-chonging to us like he thinks he is in his Grandmother's backyard."
And there are occasions where Darling's indifference to life's major dramas has a very interesting and strange effect. Take this sublime juxtaposition when she explains why she's going to try and perform an abortion on her friend Chipo:
"one, it makes it hard for us to play, and two, if she has the baby, she will just die."Darling goes about gathering rocks because she thinks it might be helpful in some way for the procedure. In the background, her friend Forgiveness ominously straightens a coathanger. It's funny and haunting.
I
was pleased to discover, when looking at Bulawayo's Wikipedia page,
that Junot Diaz had in fact nominated her for the National Book
Award's '5 under 35' award. Maybe he recognised a kindred, anarchic
spirit. The difference between them is that Diaz's stories situate
themselves in these raucous, dirt poor, angry, exciting immigrant
communities in America, whereas Darling and her family are just sort
of lonely and glum. Obviously it would be a terrible idea for
Bulawayo to manufacture a tight knit community where one doesn't
exist (according to Wikipedia there are just under 15,000
Zimbabwean-Americans currently living in the U.S, compared to over 2
million Dominican-Americans, who populated Diaz's Oscar Wao).
But maybe the whole of We Need New Names should have taken place in
Zimbabwe.
To
use an old cliche (love a good cliche, I do), We
Need New Names is
a book of two halves. It's impossible to overstate how much better
the Zimbabwean half is to the American half. It makes for an uneven
and ultimately underwhelming read, despite the novel boasting some
truly glittering highlights. You can read the first, award winning
chapter, 'Hitting Budapest, online for free
right here, and you should. It's super. Beyond that, I think 'We Need New
Names' is a breezy and easy enough read that it's worth picking up
for cheap second hand, but I'm hoping I'll be able to offer stronger
recommendations than that over the course of this project.
