Ms. Bulawayo gives us a sense of Darling’s new life in staccato takes that show us both her immersion in and her alienation from American culture. We come to understand how stranded she often feels, uprooted from all the traditions and beliefs she grew up with, and at the same time detached from the hectic life of easy gratification in America.
The kids' names give you a clue of how wanted they are at home. There's a Bastard and Godknows. One girl is pregnant at 11. They wear cast-off T-shirts given to them by aid workers, advertising brands they can't afford and colleges they'll never attend. Poignantly, they know their dreams of escape are lined with tin … Chapter by chapter, Bulawayo ticks off the issues that a state-of-the-nation novel by an African should cover — the hypocrisies of the church, elections, the AIDS epidemic, political violence — and beats some subtlety back into them with the hard true sound of Darling's voice … With fury and tenderness, she has made a linguistic bridge between here and there, a journey her heroine charts in this phenomenal tale with the gallows humor of a girl who knows how far down it is when things fall apart.
There is a palpable anxiety to cover every ‘African’ topic; almost as if the writer had a checklist made from the morning's news on Africa … What stops the book collapsing under its own thematic weight is a certain linguistic verve, and the sense that this is a really talented and ambitious author who might at any moment surprise the reader by a plot twist, some technical bravura, or a thematic transcendence that will take the story beyond its gratuitously dark concerns to another, more meaningful level … Bulawayo's keen powers of observation and social commentary, and her refreshing sense of humour, come through best in moments when she seems to have forgotten her checklist and goes unscripted.
Bulawayo’s portrayal of Zimbabwe is notable not for its descriptions of Paradise and Budapest but for those of Darling’s interior landscape — when, for example, she compares camera-toting NGO workers snapping pictures of her friends to paparazzi harassing Paris Hilton, or when she observes that in Zimbabwe you need to be a grandfather to be president, unlike America’s youthful Obama. Sometimes Darling is afraid of her world, which can be both disgusting and beguiling, but she is sure of her place in it … The more Darling becomes an American, the less vibrant Bulawayo’s writing becomes...And yet, despite the course of the latter half of the novel, Bulawayo is clearly a gifted writer.
We Need New Names, a debut novel by NoViolet Bulawayo, straddles Zimbabwe and the United States — the two countries the author has called home — and nearly collapses under the strain … Ironically, the unique angle of her novel, namely that which explores a Zimbabwean teen’s arduous negotiation of life in America, is saddled with unoriginal and trite musings on Americans, as well as predictable instances of culture clash. Of course, the (limited) strengths of We Need New Names deserve attention and measured praise, but for them to carry the novel is an onus too burdensome to bear.
Even as she applies her critical eye to the social realities of her homeland, Bulawayo gives her protagonist a voice imbued with dignity and pride … In Bulawayo's steady hands, what could be a tale of woe becomes a story of resilience. Even as the government sends in bulldozers to ‘clear’ the shantytowns, the adults of Paradise go out to vote. Although she devotes only a few pages to the reprisals that in reality followed these elections — punishment for areas that voted the ‘wrong’ way — her spare description of the aftermath is powerfully affecting.
There is a narrative arc but little plot, as Darling moves from an appalling situation in which she is happy, to a comfortable situation in which she is unhappy; from the influence of one group of friends to another, shallower group … Eventually, the book comes to a halt rather than resolves, closing with another grim image. If Bulawayo is better at individual scenes than overall structure, she is at least in full command of her sparkling prose.
Make no mistake: This is no dry tutorial on post-colonial Africa. Rather, to enter this story is to step inside the skin of young Darling, a Zimbabwean girl, and to get a sense of what it feels like to be her at a particular moment in time … We glimpse the horror of the AIDS epidemic, the lasting, widespread effects of racial inequity, political corruption, deep-rooted poverty and more, but to say that all is bleak in Darling's world would be to get things very wrong. Darling is a dazzling life force with a rich, inventive language all her own, funny and perceptive but still very much a child.
[Bulawayo] occasionally steps out of Darling’s story to survey the immigrant experience more broadly in short vignettes inserted between chapters...Though lovely, these segments float, disembodied, above the text in a way that is occasionally unsettling to the novel. Narrative omniscience, after all, is not what draws us to Darling’s story. It is in fact the opposite: her vulnerable, selfish, and utterly small consideration of the world … We Need New Names is a vibrant first novel, and though deeply rooted in the particulars of Darling’s story, tells a story that will resonate far more widely.
Darling views the world as any child — relentlessly honest and without an agenda. She sees her declining country, ravaged by AIDS, unemployment and one political disaster after another, with a wide-eyed clarity that adds emotional heft … By removing the sentimentality from her storytelling, Bulawayo has written a powerful novel. Her gift as a visual storyteller should propel her to a bright future — a dream fulfilled, no matter the country.
A loosely concatenated novel in which Darling, the main character and narrator of the story, moves from her traditional life in Zimbabwe to a much less traditional one in the States. For Darling, life in Zimbabwe is both difficult and distressing... In America, Darling must put up with teasing that verges on abuse and is eager to return to Zimbabwe … Bulawayo crafts a moving and open-eyed coming-of-age story.
