New names, translational subjectivities: (Dis)location and (Re)naming in NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names (original) (raw)
Related papers
Migration and Its Discontents: A Postcolonial Rendering of NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names
This research paper is my attempt, through a blow-by-blow analysis of a fictional work of a rising star in postcolonial writing, to grapple with the manifold discontents that attend the event of migration. Migration is an astoundingly painful experience to go through, whose multifaceted toll on the subject may be beyond repair. Using NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New names as a stepping-stone, I argue that migration, albeit a time-honoured phenomenon has picked up speed in the twentieth-century and continued into the twenty-first century with a most heavy human toll. The paper emphasizes that even though the act of migration is underpinned by a hope for betterment, it may turn out to be a damp squid. No end of landmines and hiccups dot the migratory journey. The long-suffering postcolonial subject, hallmarked by the stifling strictures of marginality owing to a long history of race-based oppression that stretches back to the gruesome eras of the transAtlantic slave trade and colonization, is on the receiving end of the horrors of migration. I tap into key terms in postcolonial theory cum sociology-informed perspectives to make a valid point about the dehumanizing fallout from the migratory experience.
Research Ethics: Journal of Multidisciplinary Research, 2024
Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo's novel We Need New Names notably deals with many of the themes and issues such as migration, political instability, poverty, famine, identity crisis, and xenophobia. Migration is one of the major themes of African Postcolonial literature. It is an experience to go through, which comes as an aftermath of colonialism in many cultures, and it impacts different people differently. This paper will discuss how migration affects people in postcolonial locales. The hope for a 'better life', which instigates the will soon leads to alienation of the self as that person does not feel any sense of belonging from any place. This feeling of dislocation and 'otherness' will be probed into in light of the critical postcolonial theories, through the life and journey of the central character, Darling. how the xenophobia present in the postcolonial African society owes entirely to the white colonial masters (here shown through the characters like the Assistant Police Commissioner). The dominant European (English) culture and its impact on the central character will also be seen as a result of a colonial hangover. This constant need to be one with the dominant English culture and not of the 'self' and dehumanising the migratory experience of the characters.
Imbizo
Literature is one of the arenas of discourse where the meaning potential of language can be explored. Interestingly, literary language is more figurative than denotative. One of the functions of language in literary discourse is to represent reality. The reality literature represents varies, depending on the historical time and social events a writer focuses on. Some aspects of global reality captured in current literature include transnational migration, border crossing and how migrants negotiate their identities in new cultures and spaces. For the African writer, the foregoing is a source of inspiration for what has become known as the African migrant novel. Against this background, this paper explores the representation of migrant experiences with particular attention paid to the use of language. An aspect of language explored in this paper is the use of deictic words in NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names and the deployment of deictic forms, such as pronouns, verbs, and adverb...
Identity and the Language in NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names
The Creative Launcher
Humans have been migrating for centuries. This paper tries to delineate the formation of hybrid identities using the transnational theory of migration in a postcolonial context. Throughout the colonial and the postcolonial history, the voices of migrant experiences have been overlooked. They had accepted their position as silent spectators to their own stories without a voice, without opinion and without choice. Their Silence was being read as a form of acceptance and approval without delving much into the social, political and economic milieu of the era. This paper aims at understanding the dynamics of language and the choice of the migrant community to rise above their status as silenced subjects and oppressed people and share their experiences. It intends to explore the language differences and the search for an identity in NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names which tells the story of a diasporic African teenager who tries to grapple with the host country culture while still hol...
No Sacred Cow Spared: An Exploration of the Polemics in NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names
2015
This paper examines the polemics in NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel We Need New Names, which is a development from ‘Hitting Budapest’ a short story written earlier and entered for the Caine Prize for writing. Reader response literary lenses are used to analyse the work of art. This was chosen mainly because of the open cheque approach it affords the critic who has the license not only to read the lines but also to read between and beyond them unfettered by the barricades some literary theories erect. Any human decoder of signs in whatever form is a ‘reader’ and that reader brings with him or her a unique ‘literary capital’ which influences, consciously or unconsciously the appreciation of the work at hand. The book looks at the need for ‘us’ to assume new names. The conclusion from the transaction between this reader and the text under scrutiny is that no one is spared in Bulawayo’s rebuking of how human beings across the globe (mis)manage their affairs whether in environments of material...
Postcolonial Text 10.1 (2015)
The theme of mobility recurs frequently in the works of third-generation novelists. This article focuses on two recent Africa-affiliated novels, namely We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo and Trois femmes puissantes by Marie NDiaye. While these two texts employ very different narrative and stylistic means, they both explore the thematic of mobility with pronouncedly abject connotations. In Bulawayo’s novel, abjection is the condition of the crisis-ridden postcolonial nation-state and it also marks the characters associated with this abject context through national affiliation. NDiaye’s approach to abjection focuses on the psychological and the private, but the roots of abjection in her novel can be traced back to the multivalent aftermath of the colonial enterprise in Africa and the contemporary mobilities it has generated. Both novels draw attention to the complex reasons behind abject African mobilities and why they become defined as such in the first place.
We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo. Paradigms of Migration: The Flight and the Fall
Le Simplegadi
This essay analyses paradigms of migration in We Need New Names (2013) by NoViolet Bulawayo (b. 1981, Zimbabwe), a recent example of new African (or 'Afropolitan'?) literature. A teenager idealises migration to the United States as a flight to emancipation, if compared to internal flows of forcedly removed people, or unsuccessful flows to South Africa, or even to Britain. As a counterpoint, a downfall follows the flight. The first American experience is a snowfall, then stumbling on the English Language is compared to a fall; physical as well as psychic downfalls send illegal migrants into the invisibility of undesirable jobs and into lying (Mehta 2016) but also into a mental condition. This final outcome of migration has been approached with the tools of ethno-psychiatry (Beneduce 2016-2018) and the recently published short story about migration by Maaza Mengiste, "This is What the Journey Does" (2018).
The Process of Becoming Black in Noviolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names
International Journal of Arabic-English Studies, 2021
The bruised voices of African immigrants in America have been portrayed in contemporary African literature, such as NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names (2013). According to Bulawayo's depiction, Darling is among those who are subjected to racial discrimination which was never an issue for them back in their countries. This article attempts to bridge the literary field with social psychological theories by examining the influence of African immigrants' social identifications and categorizations, using Tajfel and Tuner's Social Identity Theory. Moreover, the concept of individual mobility is explored as a coping mechanism by the immigrants to deal with their negative social identity. The second objective is the identification of the various phases that African immigrants go through during the process of becoming black. This can be achieved through the use of William Cross' Nigrescence Theory. A significant contribution of the present paper lies in analyzing African immigrants from a different perspective, focusing more on the journey of self-acceptance and the process of becoming black through the Nigrescence theory. The inclusion of these theories, namely Social Identity and the Nigrescence theory, is a broadening input in literary analysis since they have not been applied in previous literary studies.
2015
This paper takes a close look at the language used by Zimbabwe writer NoViolet Bulawayo in her first novel, We need new names. The novel charts the emotional, cultural, and linguistic growth of its teenage protagonist Darling in the move from Paradise, a shanty town somewhere in Zimbabwe to Destroyedmichygen (= ‘Detroit Michigan’) in the US. An underlying but central theme of the novel seems to be the tension between the global language English, and Darling’s nevernamed vernacular; a tension which emerges both in the non standard forms of the extended monologue (which oscillates between controlling pronouns I, and we), the numerous reflections on language use made by the characters, the freshness and vibrancy of the imagery, and, not least, as the title suggests, in the novelist’s never-ending quest for new ways of representing reality through language.