An arresting debut by an young author; a one-time treat

THIS YEAR, I attended an event where Rwanda’s ambassador to India said, “How can there be an African-Western dialogue when all people come to Africa to look at the elephant.” The garnered a few chuckles, but it had a biting veracity to it, too. Africa is a misunderstood continent. Much of its identity is formed from the outside. We have bought our BBC / CNN-esque versions of its suffering, the predatory West’s exploitation, owned by al-Bashirs and Mugabes. Straddled with so much weight, writing about Africa is difficult.

NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel— We Need New Names—attempts a narrative of dispossession, hunger and nostalgia. The book begins with its narrator, Darling, a ten-year-old imp in a shanty-town of Paradise in Zimbabwe. Darling is an original character carrying the honest immediacy which only a child can posses. With her friends, Bastard, Chipo, GodKnows, Shbo and Stina, they are a riot playing their improvised games. Through their conversations the author offers us a striking commentary on the life of rundown Zimbabweans living on the society’s margins.

The beginning is spectacular. Darling with her disjointed sentences offers distressing circumstances with extraordinary energy. After the initial fright at seeing the body of a woman hanging from a tree, the friends take her shoes to exchange them for bread. They run toward the village “laughing and laughing and laughing”. It is evident that when Bulawayo is not-so-controlling of her material and goes unscripted, she achieves brilliant results. When the NGO van with its aid disappears into the distance, the children pull out their new toy guns, and the lines read: “Let’s go and play war, and then we take off to run and kill each other with our brandnew guns from America”. Bulawayo’s chutzpah is commendable.

But then she does it a tad too much (the obese Chinese contractor “chingchongs ching-chongs”). The initial feeling of inexactitude and innocent observations turn into an ill-handled vendetta to put all of the Global North’s carnage into subsequent chapters. New Names becomes an exercise in expansion of her Caine prize-winning short-story Hitting Budapest. It appears that to write No Names, Bulawayo sat uncomfortably in her Cornell dormitory and opened the Africa section of the NYTimes. Then she cut all its headlines and pasted them all in a singular book. In its second-half, the pace slackens and Darling seems distant.

This has been one of my biggest concerns about writing coming out of the post-colonial Asian and African discourse. The news-bulletin-like use of the misfortunes becomes am alarmingly sore way of presenting any continent. It was my complaint with Adiga’s The White Tiger. Bulawayo’s selection in the Booker short-list has guaranteed her a lot of readers. But does the writing offer a fair representation of the realities of Zimbabwe and its people? Or is it a Caine-Booker “aesthetic of suffering”, as Helon Habila calls it, where the pathos is washed way in a sort of weary duplicity of the reality being represented? The latter half of New Names takes places in “Destroyed- Michygen” or Detroit, Michigan when the adamant motif of flight finally allows Darling to move to America, the land of “real” people. I had half-expected the teenage years of Darling to be redemptive, to have Darling beware of her irreconcilable alliance with urban America. However, the country that the ten-year-old Darling affectionately called “my America”, with its promises and freedom, is a long snow-covered winter. The immigrant experience described poignantly in many a diaspora novels has an outright flippancy in Bulawayo’s book. In a Los Angeles Review interview she says of Darling, “Her being a child with no strong ties to Zimbabwean culture meant she simply sneezed Zimbabwe out and inhaled America and kept it moving.” I believe Darling’s years in America are both illuminating and fatiguing. Her new life is an immersion into and disaffection with American culture. She works odd jobs, scores A’s at school, watches muted pornography with her friends “because when the real action starts we always like to be the soundtrack”. Bulawayo’s Darling feels congealed among self-deceptions and a disengaged nostalgia. In due course, the book is cut short and the denouement, the book’s saving grace, is a grim image of an unrecognisable homeland. Watching Darling grow up with resentment and awe, she is distanced even more from the Zimbabwe she left behind.

By the time I finished, it didn’t matter if it was any other African country. As if to prove my point, towards the end, a character wants to go hunt for the elephant that the Rwandan ambassador spoke of. Except he doesn’t know what country he’d find it in.