JACK REVIEWS BOOKS to DISTRACT HIMSELF from the INEVITABILITY of DEATH - WE NEED NEW NAMES by No

A BOOK FOR ALL AFRICA Master List

Book Review Master List

There were two books that kept coming to mind as I was reading We Need New Names. We Need New Names is not as good as either of them, but then, both of them are among my favourite novels ever, so that's not necessarily a stinging criticism.

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.