I’ve learned to take notes during these things because it’s easy to let the experience rush past you and carry you for a little while, but when trying to think of things to write the review about, you can remember nothing but the shivers the author’s voice sent down your spine–you can’t even remember the words. But looking over my notes from this reading, I find that they fall flat in an unexpected way. I enjoyed the reading immensely, but looking back at my notes, looking at things that I wrote down thinking this is it, this is what I like, I find something lacking about them, as if they were random, tangential scrawls with little discernment. Whatever it was that roused my interests during the reading is not there.
I think this has to do with the voice of NoViolet Bulawayo. When she speaks, she speaks knowingly, confidently. Her words fell from her lips heavy and assured, as if the way they would land upon ears was predetermined. It was an enchanting certainty–there was nothing hesitating, nothing nervous about it and that lack of a quaver, that calmness–well, it made her words seem true in a nothing-but-the-truth kind of way.
And that really describes Bulawayo’s work and book We Need New Names: true and truth. She has a way of writing about things that one knows to be true but does not think to be true. The kind of things that you wouldn’t come up with on your own, but when spoken aloud, seem like a truth that has always been lurking in the back of your mind. This was noticeable particularly in the second section she read. That section described Darling (the narrator) in Detroit after her move from Zimbabwe. First, she is sitting there thinking about home and what home means to her different family members–they have many homes, according to her, and even though some of them are the same homes, they all describe them differently. Most of these are “before” and “after” kind of descriptions–descriptions less about the homes themselves and more about the events surrounding them, their occupancy and vacancy. Bulawayo does not describe such things with verbose, complicated language–her voice is simple and straight and sufficient for the task at hand. Later, this section transitions to the phone call Darling’s aunt is making. Her aunt is trying to place an order with Victoria Secret but the woman on the other end of the line is having trouble understanding her accent. Readers are given a taste of the frustration, a sip of the embarrassment and the degradation of being accused of not speaking (or knowing) a language that you can speak, and speak well. The words Bulawayo uses to describe the competency of the aunt’s English are particularly precise: “like it was the only language she has ever known.”
The other two portions of her book she read were equally weaved with simple truths. In the first, she talked of how people came to live in Paradise, the shantytown where Darling and her friends reside. They were desolate, they were desperate, but these were not things explicitly stated–like any good author, Bulawayo brought these words to your head by describing their possessions (or lack thereof), their families, or perhaps their children’s fearful eyes. And for the last part of her reading, Bulawayo read from a scene involving Darling, older now, calling her friend Chipo who was still in Zimbabwe. Darling found out, when she attempted to speak of it, that she no longer has the right to speak of the suffering and the turmoil going on in her home country–she is not there, she left. It is no longer her country, her home.
I highly recommend that everyone pick up a copy of We Need New Names. It is touching, insightful truth.
