We Need New Names
NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names - Review Essay by Michael Etherton
Introduction
NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel, We Need New Names, is a first-person narrative of a young girl from Southern Zimbabwe. Darling grows up here until about the age of 10, when she goes to the USA, to live with her Aunt Fostalina, first in Detroit, Michigan [‘DestroyedMichygen’] and then in Kalamazoo. The first half of the book, in Zimbabwe, is in the region called Matabeleland, the capital city of which is Bulawayo, Elizabeth Tshele’s pen-name and the setting for the story. Neither Zimbabwe nor Bulawayo are mentioned by name in the book, nor is the President, Robert Mugabe, but there are very obvious references to him and to the country over the first decade of the twenty first century, the period of Darling’s growing up.
Surviving the Great Robbery
Mukai No 67, August/Sept 2014
We Need New Names, by NoViolet Bulawayo, Weaver Press, 2013, pp 294.
Reviewed by Oskar Wermter SJ
I see in the main characters, young street children in Bulawayo, a reflection of their elders; their poverty is an indictment of those who robbed them. The world that comes to light in this narrative has many dimensions, by no means all in harmony with one another, because it is complex and contradictory, and the writer did not simplify it into a political pamphlet or reduce it to an ideological thesis. She managed to let the real Zimbabwe with all its crazy contortions appear on the pages of this book.
We Need New Names - by Associated Press
Zimbabwe author shortlisted for Booker literature prize, reflects on the woes of her homeland
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/zimbabwe-author-shortlisted-for-booker-literature-prize-reflects-on-the-woes-of-her-homeland/2013/09/23/ff00b58c-245f-11e3-9372-92606241ae9c_story.html
By Associated Press, Published: September 23
Review of We Need New Names - by Daniel Mandishona for the Harare News
Reviewed by Daniel Mandishona for the Harare News, September, 2013
www.hararenews.co.zw
We Need New Names is a truly remarkable debut novel by a talented young writer. No Violet Bulawayo has produced a well-crafted narrative with faint echoes of other coming-of-age novels - Philip Roth’s ‘Goodbye, Columbus’, Jeffrey Eugenides’ ‘The Virgin Suicides’ and J. D. Salinger’s ‘The Catcher in the Rye - to name but a few. Like Roth’s ‘Goodbye, Columbus’, Bulawayo’s novel explores similar themes of ethnicity and assimilation in a strange country. Themes like alienation, displacement and infidelity are handled with a dispassionate candour by a master story teller.
Web / Blog sites - We Need New Names
1. http://mg.co.za/article/2013-07-23-noviolet-bulawayo-makes-the-cut
2. http://www.themanbookerprize.com/news/longlist-2013-announced
3. http://www.hararenews.co.zw/?p=1188&preview;=true
4. http://herzimbabwe.co.zw/noviolet-bulawayo-pays-tribute-to-father-at-zimbabwe-book-launch#.UiBUPuAzmZg
5. http://herzimbabwe.co.zw/noviolet-bulawayo-revealing-societys-ghosts-through-words#.UiBV9uAzmZg
6. https://soundcloud.com/#herzimbabwe/noviolet-bulawayo-at-zimbabwe
7. http://blog.britishcouncil.org/2013/09/20/interview-with-zimbabwean-booker-nominee-noviolet-bulawayo/
8. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDngH5nUOtk
9. http://britishcouncilblogs.org/africa/2013/09/23/we-need-new-names-launched-in-bulawayo/
10. Zimbabwe author shortlisted for Booker literature prize, reflects on the woes of her homeland
Review of We Need New Names - by Memory Chirere
Reviewed by Memory Chirere
http://memorychirere.blogspot.com
NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel, We Need New Names confirms the existence of a certain special tradition in the literature of Zimbabwe which cries for adequate recognition and evaluation.
We Need New Names - The Standard by Tendai Huchu
Published by Weaver Press.
Reviewed in The Standard by Tendai Huchu
28th July, 2013
Darling and her friends spend their days stealing guavas from the plush neighbourhood of Budapest. They are not in school because their teachers emigrated and the forlorn adults in their shanty town, Paradise, take little interest in their antics. This is the world of NoViolet Bulawayo’s stunning debut, We Need New Names. Bulawayo, like her contemporaries, Brian Chikwava and Binyavanga Wainaina, delights in playing with the English language, bending it, distorting it, hammering it into the shape of a uniquely Zimbabwean novel, with Shona and Ndebele in the text.
Review of We Need New Names - The Standard
The Standard May 5, 2013 in Life & Style
We need New Names: a story well-crafted
Title: We Need New Names
Writer: NoViolet Bulawayo
Reviewer: Tinashe Mushakavanhu
Review of We Need New Names - New York Times by MICHIKO KAKUTANI
New York Times
May 15 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/16/books/we-need-new-names-by-noviolet-bulawayo.html?ref=books&pagewanted=all&_r=2&
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
A Child of Two Lands
‘We Need New Names, ’ by No Violet Bulawayo
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: May 15, 2013
Review of We Need New Names - The Guardian by Helon Habila
We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo – review
Source: We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo – review | The Guardian
NoViolet Bulawayo has extended her Caine prize-winning short story about a Zimbabwean girl coming of age in the US into a novel. But has the prize created an African aesthetic of suffering?
Bulawayo on snowflakes … 'So big they shroud everything but you don't even hear them coming'.
Helon Habila
The Guardian, Thursday 20 June 2013