Paul Theroux, in his disturbing recent Africa-based novel, The Lower River, portrayed gangs of feral children, American aid workers insulated from their supposed beneficiaries by walls of sun-glasses and air-conditioning, and a dystopian society collapsing under the combined weight of failed government and the aids virus. If Theroux’s is an outside-in view of Africa, Zimbabwe-born NoViolet Bulawayo presents an alternative, inside-out view.
We need New Names is the story of Darling, a feisty 10-year-old girl in the dystopia that is Zimbabwe. She happens to herself be a member of a gang of near-feral children; she has herself learned how to manipulate the sun-glassed and air-conditioned aid workers by pushing their guilt-buttons; her own father is obviously dying of AIDS. The book is a fascinating reversal of the gaze: ‘You really don’t get it, Mr Theroux’, it seems to say. ‘This is how it actually is’. It is an authentic, and unsentimental statement, made all the more powerful because it is narrated by a child, without artifice or guile. Darling belongs to a middle-class family driven into a horrific slum called ‘Paradise’ by a vengeful government that brooks no political dissent. She and her gang run wild because their school has shut down, as all the teachers have disappeared. Civilisation appears to have collapsed all around them, except perhaps in the neighbouring district called ‘Budapest’, where the expats live behind high walls and higher security. And yet the grimness of this existence is illuminated with a small, but inextinguishable light of humanity, humour, even joy. The slum children invent exuberant new games to play, despite the fact that they have to steal guavas to ease their constant hunger, and their thin buttocks show through their threadbare clothes. Their parents, meanwhile, go forth idealistically to vote, even as the government bulldozers roll in to flatten their hovels. And that is the beauty of this novel: the way NoViolet Bulawayo presents the indomitability of the human spirit through her mixture of rage and humour, sorrow and tenderness.
Darling is luckier than the others, for she is rescued by her aunt, and goes to live with her in Detroit. Suddenly, the narrative shifts to a different trajectory, as she attempts to adjust to life in America, marvelling poignantly, for example, at the amounts of food that are available: one meal, she observes, is enough to feed two people for three days back home in Zimbabwe. Inevitably, Darling becomes Americanised, and the same girl who once prised a pair of good shoes off a dead body, now does things like going to malls, trying on dozens of clothes and leaving them in a pile in the dressing room. You then realize that NoViolet Bulawayo has played a sly trick on you: the small, flickering light of humanity and joy that burned so fiercely all through the dystopian Zimbabwean existence has now been slowly, finally, extinguished by its apparent opposite, the supposedly utopian American way of life. We Need New Names is, despite its flaws and inconsistencies, a powerful and moving novel, reminiscent, in equal parts, of Monica Ali and Zadie Smith, and of Binyavanga Wainaina’s Kenyan coming-of-age memoir, Someday I will Write About This Place. No wonder, it was a contender for this year’s Man Booker Prize.
