Sometimes Bulawayo’s writing dissolves into stream-of-consciousness interludes of powerful poetic repetition: “Look at them leaving in droves, the children of the land, just look at them leaving in droves.

Each adult resident receives a paltry bag of beans and rice, for which they must appear ever so grateful. The visitors’ feet have barely touched the ground when they whip out cameras for photos. In greeting an NGO team handing out toys and candy, the kids must be polite to three smiling, white Americans. Meanwhile, Darling impatiently awaits the life-saving plane ticket to “Destroyedmichigan,” Detroit, where her Aunt Fostalina lives.īulawayo offers a scathing critique of foreigners’ knee-jerk racism. Throughout their exploits, Darling and friends attempt to give Chipo a coat-hanger abortion, witness the kidnapping of a white Zimbabwean family by a machete-toting black nationalist gang, and cope with the return of Darling’s long-lost father who has full-blown AIDS. Next door to impoverished Paradise is Budapest, a community of better-off whites and blacks with big houses, where “even the air itself is empty.” Next is the industrial town Bulawayo names Shanghai, full of terrible machines run by Chinese industrial colonizers. These are the family and friends of Darling, the ten-year-old narrator who takes readers on a guava-stealing adventure to ease her starving belly.īulawayo’s novel is peppered with beautiful similes like “Paradise is all tin and stretches out in the sun like a wet sheepskin nailed on the ground to dry.” Each town contains a different world of race and class. Complex and original characters inhabit its tiny, mud-colored shacks: Chipo, eleven and pregnant by her grandfather - the event that provokes her muteness Bastard, a boy whose superficial meanness masks his loss of hope Mother of Bones, who clings to a suitcase of useless old money. The novel opens in Africa, in the shantytown of Paradise, Zimbabwe. It’s the story of one girl’s unique trajectory that shares common roads with all immigrants from all places.

It’s a tale of savage colonialism, of local tyrants and unremitting droughts and rains, of the shattering pain of having to leave because all things are falling apart. We Need New Names, by NoViolet Bulawayo, is much more than a coming of age story.

We need new names review