Antonomasia's Reviews > We Need New Names

This had been on my radar for a while, but due to a few disappointing reviews I doubt I would have bothered with it if I hadn't been reading the Booker longlist. And whilst the book's not perfect, it was a great deal better than I'd been led to believe.

The freshness of the voice hit me from the first page. Darling, the young Zimbabwean narrator is on the way to steal guavas from a rich area with her friends, says We didn't eat this morning and my stomach feels like somebody took a shovel and dug everything out. A simile you can feel.

Recently I've noticed a few things that predispose me to like a contemporary novel, including characters from a social class different from the one I grew up in, and vivid metaphors which germinate from the story's setting. We Need New Names has both in abundance. Darling is too immersed in her world, doesn't know enough that's different, to describe it in a sensationalist way. That "this is how it is" voice, hearing things on someone else's terms with little overt judgement or analysis is very appealing, and which I often find makes so-called difficult subjects quite easy to read about.

We Need New Names moves so much faster, is more political and more immediate than Ghana Must Go another 2013 debut novel by a young woman with an African background and an Ivy League education. Bulawayo lived in Zimbabwe till she was 18 and she's used that experience to make this book way more interesting than Selasi's slow upper-middle class American family saga with a few scenes in Africa. (Another obvious new release to compare would be Americanah, which I haven't read.)

The most frequent criticism of this book I've seen is that it goes wrong in the second half when Darling goes to live with her aunt in America. I really can't see where this is coming from. The episodic structure is so similar to the Zimbabwe half for starters. There is something less zingy about its tone but that reflects the disagreeable Michigan weather, the amount of time spent indoors and the whole failed-American-dream thang. (Zimbabwe: local people killed with machetes over politics; USA: local people killed with guns because of money or general violent tendencies. Zimbabwe: 11 year old gets pregnant and too few people care; USA: kids regularly watch hard porn online whilst parents are at work. The jobs aren't much better for illegal immigrants in America, but at least there's organised education, sanitation, abundant food, abundant opportunities for consumer debt, and the inspiration of a young black president. And in both countries, friends to have adventures with.)

There were a few faults that could have been easily sorted out through editing. Inconsistent chronology, and stylistic tics like overuse of 'verbing and verbing and verbing' and of the Achebe-allusion "things fall apart". Cut these by half and they'd have still been distinctive and memorable. The book could have done with footnotes, especially for the phrases in Ndebele, and possibly (like A Tale for the Time Being) for other points too. I enjoyed looking things up online and now know a bit more about African politicians and musicians - but it's not always convenient to google stuff when reading.

We Need New Names had some totally unfussy reflection on the differences and kinships between black American / Ebonics culture and recently-arrived immigrants from Africa. Something I'd heard a little about in a British context but not enough. And a great scene about trying to communicate with officialdom in English as a foreign language which made me think & was reminiscent of A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers.
...because you have to do all this [preparation], when you get to the final step, something strange has happened and you speak the way a drunk walks. And because you are speaking like falling, it's as if you are an idiot...Those who speak only English are busy looking at your falling instead of paying attention to what you are saying.

The Guardian review of this book asks Has the Caine prize [for African writing, which NoViolet Bulawayo won in 2011] created an African aesthetic of suffering? This sounds like a question worth considering, one which I don't have sufficient knowledge to answer. But Bulawayo addresses the wider issue - of what people think and show and want to hear about Africa - to an extent through her narrative: in scenes of white western journalists Darling and her friends encounter in Zimbabwe, and near the end when she phones one of her old friends who stayed there. You think watching on BBC means you know what is going on? No you don't my friend, it's the wound that knows the texture of the pain; it's us who stayed here feeling the real suffering, it's us who stayed here who have the right to say anything. As well as a critique of the author as self-appointed spokesperson this could allude to the way that a lot of internationally recognised African writing comes from authors who no longer live on the continent. I haven't read a lot of African fiction, so this is a tentative opinion on Bulawayo's response to literary stereotype-mongering.

A very readable book which gave me quite a bit to think about - glad I gave it a go after all. The quotes I've used don't reflect the freewheeling sense of adventure in We Need New Names/, which isn't a tediously worthy book as I may have made it sound here - it's as vibrant as its cover.