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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
May 2013, 304 pages
Paperback:
May 2014, 320 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Naomi Benaron
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Darling is only 10 years old, and yet she must navigate a fragile and violent world. But Darling has a chance to escape: she has an aunt in America
Darling is only 10 years old, and yet she must navigate a fragile and violent world. In Zimbabwe, Darling and her friends steal guavas, try to get the baby out of young Chipo's belly, and grasp at memories of Before. Before their homes were destroyed by paramilitary policemen, before the school closed, before the fathers left for dangerous jobs abroad.
But Darling has a chance to escape: she has an aunt in America. She travels to this new land in search of America's famous abundance only to find that her options as an immigrant are perilously few. NoViolet Bulawayo's debut calls to mind the great storytellers of displacement and arrival who have come before her - from Zadie Smith to Monica Ali to J.M. Coetzee - while she tells a vivid, raw story all her own.
Excerpt
We Need New Names
We are on our way to Budapest; Bastard and Chipo and Godknows and Sbho and Stina and me. We are going even though we are not allowed to cross Mzilikazi Road, even though Bastard is supposed to be watching his little sister Fraction, even though mother will kill me dead if she found out; we are just going. There are guavas to steal in Budapest, and right now I'd rather die for guavas. We didn't eat this morning and my stomach feels like somebody just took a shovel and dug everything out.
Getting out of Paradise is not so hard since the mothers are busy with hair and talk, which is the only thing they ever do. They just glance at us when we file past the shacks and then look away. We don't have to worry about the men under the jacaranda either since their eyes never lift from the draughts. It's only the little kids who see us and want to follow, but Bastard just wallops the naked one at the front with a fist on his big head and they all ...
In less skillful hands, such a thematically dense work could easily come across as self-pitying or mired down in the bogs of the “African tragedy.” Bulawayo confronts these challenges by giving us Darling, a no-nonsense ten-year-old narrator who stomps through life with a heart-wrenching, naked innocence...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Naomi Benaron).
Aminatta Forna
NoViolet Bulawayo has created a world that lives and breathes - and fights, kicks, screams and scratches, too. She has clothed it in words and given it a voice at once dissonant and melodic, utterly distinct Edwidge Danticat
NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names is an exquisite and powerful first novel, filled with an equal measure of beauty and horror and laughter and pain. The lives (and names) of these characters will linger in your mind, and heart, long after you're done reading the book. No Violet Bulawayo is definitely a writer to watch Junot Diaz
I knew this writer was going to blow up. Her honesty, her voice, her formidable command of her craft -- all were apparent from the first page.How Emmanuel Sigauke Found African Literature and Founded a Magazine
A conversation between Naomi Benaron and Emmanuel Sigauke
Emmanuel Sigauke is a Zimbabwean writer. He is an English professor at Cosumnes River College in Sacramento California and is the editor of the on-line Munyori Literary Journal which has published the work of both NoViolet Bulawayo, author of We Need New Names and Naomi Benaron.
Naomi Benaron: For my first question, I would like to know something of your own history as a writer in Zimbabwe. How did you come to writing? How did politics and writing intersect for you? Who were some of your early influences?
Emmanuel Sigauke: I started writing at thirteen in Mototi, a village in Southern Zimbabwe. ...
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