We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo
NoViolet Bulawayo came to attention with her win for the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing for her short story Hitting Budapest. That short story detailed the lives of street children in a Zimbabwean shantytown. We Need New Names, the debut novel from Bulawayo, expands that short story. Darling and her friends live in a place called Paradise. It is a messy sort of place, impoverished, rural, the sort of places that breeds boredom in its children. Darling and her friends make up games to pass the time – Find Bin Laden, for instance – or steal guavas from their neighbours. Then one day, the adult residents of places like Paradise and its surrounding shantytowns decide to reclaim their country from the white men that live there too and Paradise soon descends into violence. Violence is omnipresent in the first half of Bulawayo’s novel. The violence is often seen by Darling and her friends in brief snapshots – they never truly u...