These are slides of the novel We Need New Names written by Bulawayo. The slides were compiled by Ms. R.A Adonis who is a lecturer at the university of Johannesburg

1. WE NEED NEW NAMES
NoViolet Bulawayo
Identity, Self-naming and the Meaning of Names in We Need New
Names

2. • Ms. R.A Adonis (B-Ring 721)
• Consultation Times
• Monday 10:30 – 12:30
• Tuesday 13:00 – 14:30
• Wednesday 11:30 – 13: 30

3. NoViolet Bulawayo
Retrieved from http://aerodrome.co.za/outside-voice/

4. About the author
• Zimbabwean author
• Born 10 December 1981 in the Tsholotsho district of Zimbabwe
• She is currently a Stegner fellow at Stanford University in California
• Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
• In 2011 she won the Caine Prize for African Writing
• NoViolet Bulawayo – Elizabeth Zandile Tshele. NoViolet is a name she
adopted to honour the memory of her mother, Violet, who died when
Bulawayo was 18 months old. The prefix “no” denotes the feminine in
Nguni languages. The surname Bulawayo celebrates the writer’s
hometown

5. About the novel
• The novel is about memory and the construction of identity
• It is a bildungsroman – development of a child protagonist
• To “self-anthropologize” – to take one’s self as a topic of interest
• Literary agency
• The depiction of postcolonial suffering
• The lure of first world countries

6. About the novel (continued)
• Link between the identity of the protagonist, Darling, to the state of
Zimbabwe
• Pressure on the migrant to assimilate
• Memory is a significant trope in the novel – tied to identity, power,
nationalism,

7. About the novel (continued)
• Zimbabwean children’s literature has witnessed considerable
expansion since its attainment of independence in 1980
• A focus on the development of the girl child
• Darling, the novel’s 10 year old narrator, functions, to some degree,
as a social commentator in the first half of the narrative
• The first half of the narrative is set in an informal settlement named
“Paradise”. The second half is set in Detroit, Michigan in the USA

8. The author’s name
• Having grown up in Zimbabwe under the name Elizabeth Tshele, the
author relocated to America and renamed herself NoViolet Bulawayo
• She symbolically adopts the surname Bulawayo – the name of
Zimbabwe’s second largest city - where she spent most of her
childhood. NoViolet, adopted in honour of Violet – her late mother.
The prefix ‘No’ means with ‘with Violet’ in the author’s mother
tongue isiNdebele (Northern Ndebele/Matabele)
• The author’s own renaming suggests that the act of self-naming
forms an integral part of one’s self-definition

9. • Names are used to anchor the story in a Zimbabwean location:
• Chimurenga Street - a Shona word that denotes an ongoing struggle
– Zimbabwe’s nationalist struggle for independence
• Mzilikazi Road – references the founding father of the Ndebele
nation, King Mzilikazi

10. • The names that the author gives to certain spaces in the narrative
depicts the character of that space
• Budapest - a European city (the capital of Hungary) - the name of a
neighbouring suburb in the novel – far removed from Paradise – it is
the children’s ‘paradise’ in the novel
• The children refer to the Chinese construction site as ’Shanghai’ - the
site is described as though it is a different country altogether
• “We build you nice big mall. All nice shops inside, Gucci, Louis
Vuitton, Versace…” (46) – the children’s exposure to Shanghai creates
a material imperative to immigrate

11. • The novel illustrates how names give a form of agency to those who
do the naming – the act of naming is tied to self-definition and
identity
• “Because we were not using our languages we said things we did not
mean; what we really meant remained folded inside” (Bulawayo
2014: 140)
• Naming is reflective of the life stories of a people
• The country-game – reveals the relative power of the names of places
and the material – international country names hold more weight in a
socio-economic society

12. • Naming and self-naming as a form of agency – identities can be
stolen, traded, suspended, erased through the name
• Zimbabwean naming practices – names like Darling, Chipo, Godknows
are not unusual
• A mixture of Africanized names such as MaBetina, MaDube,
MaDumane, MaMoyo, MotherLove and Mother of Bones – ‘Ma’
meaning “Mother of”
• Southern African naming traditions through which children are
sometimes named after events

13. • E.g Bornfree – would suggest a child born during the liberation era
• Nomviyo’s son named Freedom – irony – he is killed when the
government bulldozes his mother’s home in 2005
• NaBetina’s grandson named Nomoreproblems – would suggest that
the birth of the child signifies change and hope
• Messenger - Bornfree’s best friend - his name signifies a call for
change: “I turn to look and I see everybody has abandoned Andy-over
and is now running after Bornfree and Messenger. Fists above their
heads. Running and jumping and chanting, the word change in the air
like it’s something you can grab and put in your mouth and sink your
teeth into” (Bulawayo 2014: 29)

14. • The children are ‘porous’ beings who absorb all that is said and done
around them, and as a result they try to make sense of the combined
influences that surround them through fantasy, e.g they use words
such as ER and zhing-zhongs
• They dramatise a scene from the American TV series ER
• Darling’s friend Sbho says they will need new names in order to ‘do it
right’ – the girls rename themselves Dr Bullet, Dr Roz and Dr Cutter
• Their transition from a space characterized by lack to a televised land
of plenty– this scene is ironic: Globalization has ‘shrunk’ the world yet
widened the gap between the haves and the have-nots

15. • “I can explain the names because I wrote the book when things were pretty
difficult back home. It’s my own way of saying we need new leadership,
new ways of thinking and so forth” (Obioha, V. 2014. “Africa: NoViolet
Bulawayo – the New African Voice”. In This Day, 15 March 2014)
• The relationship between naming and identity is prevalent throughout the
narrative – our thoughts and lived experiences are influenced and shaped
by names
• Names hold “social value”
• The act of naming tells a story – history, politics
• Individual lives become entangled – through the name – in the life stories
of others

16. • Names and renaming as a form of agency for those who have already
been “defined” and labelled and as a result repressed by these labels
• Self-definition: to make sense of who you are on your own terms
• Self-definition allows for meaning outside of the social and politically
definitive
• Self-defining affords the individual a deviation from society’s fixation
with deriving “meaning” from existence or merely trying to exist

17. • We Need New Names does not mean ”let us change our names”, on
the contrary, it criticises the fact that we are forced to try and make
sense of who we are based on circumstances beyond our control
(political violence, poverty, oppression)
• Our names and our identities do not exist distinctively. We cannot
separate the two – to have a name is to have an identity
• However, it is imperative that we do not impose our own meanings
onto people’s names and what the “purpose” of their names are. By
doing so we perpetuate labelling and try to fit people into our own
‘neat’ categories of understanding and what identity ought to be

18. • ”We need new names” - we need a new way of living, we need a new
sense of humanity
• Diverse identities – diverse names – every name and its meaning has
a place in society
• Reclaiming names and naming is important in a postcolonial society –
it gives the marginalized who are named and/or labelled the agency
to self-define
• Naming relates to the multi-ethnic society that is Africa – it is not an
’either or’ space and the identities of its people cannot be defined as
such

19. • Self-naming as a form of expression and resistance
• migrants are forced to take up other names and assimilate into the
social culture of other countries

20. Chapter One: Hitting Budapest
• “…When we get right to the middle of Budapest we stop. This place is not
like Paradise, it’s like being in a different country altogether. A nice country
where people that are not like us live.” (4)
• The playful invasion of Budapest by Darling and her friends Chipo, Sbho,
Stina, Godknows and Bastard – political
• “Paradise” – ironic because it is does not fit the image of the stereotypical
“paradise” – it is overcrowded, poor living conditions
• How does the economic and political conditions of their environment
affect them? How does the novel portray this?
• The children are influenced by the media and the people around them
• Paradise evokes a desire, a longing to graduate to a suburb that offers all
the amenities and dignity afforded to those who live in Budapest

21. Chapter One: Hitting Budapest (continued)
• The novel interrogates issues surrounding identity, nationalism, the
operational definition of Africa and rigid identity construction
• Identity as linked to the state – identity is shaped by one’s political
and socio-economic environment
• Identity is no longer shaped exclusively by geography or blood or
culture. On the contrary, identity is now relational
• The African identity is multi-ethnic, transcultural

22. Chapter Two: Darling on the Mountain
• In this chapter, Darling accompanies Mother of Bones to church on
the mountain
• Darling’s character is used to express a disapproval of certain forms of
religious expression – she mocks Pastor Revelations Bitchington
Mborro
• The girl child as vulnerable – forced to navigate cultural and religious
ideologies whilst attempting to find her place in the world
• Chipo’s revelation about her rape and impregnation at the hands of
her grandfather. As a result of the sexual violence committed against
her, she loses her speech for months. Darling is shocked by the
brutality of Chipo’s assault

23. Chapter Three: Country-game
• “Me, I’m drawing country-game, Godknows says, and he picks up a fat stick
[…] Each person then picks a piece and writes the name of the country on
there, which is why its called country-game. But first we have to fight over
the names because everybody wants to be certain countries, like
everybody wants to be the U.S.A. and Britain and Canada and Australia and
Switzerland and France and Italy and Sweden and Germany and Russia and
Greece and them. These are the country-countries. If you lose the fight,
then you just have to settle for countries like Dubai and South Africa and
Botswana and Tanzania and them. They are not country-countries but at
least life is better than here. Nobody wants to be like Congo, like Somalia,
like Iraq, like Sudan, like Haiti, like Sri Lanka, and not even this one we live
in – who wants to be a terrible place of hunger and things falling apart”?
(Bulawayo 2013: 40– 41)

24. Chapter Three: Country-game (continued)
• The identities of the children are overlaid with the identities of other
places. Why?
• Notions of national belonging are complicated in the narrative
• The world in which the children live is shaped by crisis
• The reality of Africa’s problems exists as a kind of ”game” – a sense
humanity is ignored
• Darling envisions a different life with aunt Fostalina in the United States –
refers to it as “my America” – perceived to be a place of refuge
• As the narrative progresses, Darling comes to the realization that the USA
is not the new paradise she had imagined

25. • Darling’s home, Paradise, feels more “real”
• Ancestral land as central to the individual identity
• The Diaspora is no longer some faraway place. Bulawayo expresses
this through the issue of names, “children of the diaspora” may no
longer have any spiritual connection to their ancestral homes. They
now have new names and new identities
• Chapter 10, page 146