The Poignancy of Displacement in We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo

Introduction

Historical Context

I- Disillusionment in the Homeland and The Myth of the West

II- Disappointment and Homesickness
III- Health Issues and the Sufferings of Migrants
IV- Integration Issues
V- Fragmentation of the Identity and Dividedness between Two Worlds

Introduction:

In the aftermath of independence, Zimbabweans were waiting for a new area with new leaders. An
area of prosperity that could help them forget their long period of hardships that they went through
in the process of liberating themselves from the colonial power but unfortunately those leaders
became worse than their former White masters. They use any means to subjugate their people.
This postcolonial period has been marked by corruption and socio-economic crisis. This situation
becomes unbearable for the people, and the only way out them to escape this social injustice is to
move from their country to other lands where they could have a safe place and descent life.

For these people in total despair, migration turns out to be the only outlet to put up an end to
their ever-lasting sufferings, that is, eradicating their pauperization and reaching the life they have
always yearned for. In other words, they see in leaving the only possibility of realizing their long-
held dreams and tasting this ideal happiness that they long lost. This is illustrated by the
unthoughtful decision of Darling’s father to depart for South Africa in the quest for a better life
not only for himself but also for his family and also the strong desire of Darling and her friends to
leave the country at all costs at the risk of their lives; for they see immigration as the only response
to their hardships. But their expectations are not always met because of the difficulties and
unexpected situations they get confronted to once they are in those countries. However, in the
process of searching for better opportunities elsewhere, they hopelessly engage in journeys
ignoring the challenges awaiting for them ahead. Bulawayo in We Need New Names tries to vividly
capture the experiences of the different characters like Fostalina, Darling, Kodjo, Darling’s father
etc. by focusing more on the multiple obstacles these characters have to overcome on a daily basis
during their long stay in faraway countries. Finally, she also sort of addresses the identity
transformation that occur in the process of their displacement and also the undecidability of these
immigrants to choose between “home” and “over there”.

I- Disillusionment in the Homeland and The Myth of the West

The complex and tense political situation in Zimbabwe and the inefficiency of the different
economic policies implemented by the government in lifting people from poverty and bettering
their living conditions lead them to look at elsewhere to quench their thirst. In referring to Achebe’s
masterpiece titled Things Fall Apart, Bulawayo seeks to shed light on the acuteness of the political
turmoil and economic decay that shakes off her country to its core the years following the
independence. The repetitive repressive actions of the government against the civilians
characterized by the destruction of their houses and the killing of innocent people like Bornfree
frustrate people and get them to have recourse to other alternatives. As an illustration, Darling’s
house and the houses of their neighbors are in a state of ruin after the passage of the bulldozers
accompanied by the soldiers. Can also be added to this the economic stagnation, the constant
hunger that the people from Paradise suffer from. For instance, Darling and her friends Bastard,
Chipo, Sbho living in extreme poverty adventure in a White neighborhood Budapest to steal
guavas because of the inability of their parents to provide them with enough food. All these bad
living conditions coupled with total hopelessness coerced thousands of people into leaving the
country unwillingly in spite of being conscious of the many challenges awaiting for them in the
country they are heading to.

When things fall apart, the children of the land scurry and scatter like birds
escaping a burning sky. They flee their own wretched land so their hunger
may be pacified in the foreign, their tears wiped away in strange land, their
blistered prayers muttered in the darkness of queer lands. (148)

In addition to the difficulties existing in Zimbabwe, another important factor that kindles the
longing of Darling and her friends to go outside of their land by any means necessary was due to
the internalization of the success stories around those places that are thought to be paradise-like.
As kids, they visualize them as the “el dorado” where everything is perfect. In other words, in their
mind, they picture these countries, mainly the Western ones as the place of all possibilities
meaning countries that will allow them to achieve their goals and realize their dreams. It is in the
light of this that Darling said to her friends that: “I’ll not be here; I will be living in America with
Aunt Fostalina, eating real food and doing better things than stealing” (p. 12). This feeling also
manifests when Darling and her peers are playing a game called “country-game” during which
each of the players has to choose a country, and they all rush and fight over choosing the names
of the Western countries that they call “country-countries” and refer to other countries as not
“country-countries” enough. All these images that these kids have in mind about the US and other
Western countries reinforce their determination to join those countries.

II- Disappointment and Homesickness

Hardly being in the US, Darling starts to strongly think about home due to the newness of her new
environment that is quite different from home. When Darling arrives in Detroit, it is winter and
the snow is everywhere preventing her from going to outdoor activities. The snow imprisons
people into their houses, depriving Darling of its liberty of movement back home. At first the snow
was fascinating but became boring as time goes on because of the stillness of weather. In addition,
Darling’s disappointment intensifies when she realizes that the house in which they live in the
United States is not actually better off than the one she had back home. Darling’s surprise to find
out that America is not as she thought it would be like is expressed in the following words.

“In the beginning, during the first few month of my arrival, I did write. In
those letters I told them about America, the kinds of things I was eating,
the clothes I wore, the music I was listening, the celebrities and the stuff.
But I was to leave out something as well, like how the weather was the
worst because there was almost always something wrong with it, either too
hot or too cold, the hurricanes and stuff. The house we live in wasn’t even
like the one we’d seen on TV when we were little. How it wasn’t made of
bricks by planks, a house made of planks in America, and how when it
rained those planks got mold and smelled (189).
Worse, it is breathtaking and inconceivable for Darling to see poor and homeless people in the
street begging for money. This specific instance was disappointing for her because of the reading
they have about America back in Paradise, that is, an America devoid of beggars and people, who
barely make the ends meet. Witnessing this scene is shocking for her on the one hand but it also
allows Darling to discover another face of America on the other.

Darling gradually discovers the harshness of life in America when she is asked by her aunt
Fostalina to work so as to pay part of her tuition fees at college. At first, she is taken back by the
offer of her aunt, for she could not think of a child working to cover her school fee but she later
understands this is what it takes to live in America. As a result, Darling suddenly finds herself
doing odd jobs here and there. Her job consists in sorting out the trash in search of used dirty
bottles and clean them. The following except clearly exemplifies this:

In the footsteps of those looted black sons and daughters, we were going,
yes, we were going. And when we got to America we took our dreams,
looked at them tenderly as if they were newly born children, and put
them away; we would not be pursuing them. We would never be the
things we had wanted to be: doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers. No
school for us, even though our visas were school visas. We knew we
did not have the money for school to begin with, but we had applied
for school visas because that was the only way out.

Furthermore, despite the good life in America, the abundance of food, something still remains
uncomplete for Darling. To put things differently, she feels an emptiness in the depths of her being
in spite of the beautiful life and privileges she has access to. Everything that surrounds her sort of
reminds her of home and her friends. For example, each bite of the guava that is sent to her by her
friends in America recalls her her childhood memory and her difficult but happy life back home.
In short, there are many instances that make Darling long for home.

III- Health Issues and the Sufferings of Migrants

Bulawayo in introducing Darling’s heavily sick father seeks to bring into light the possible dangers
that the migrants might be exposed while migrating. In the hope of making a living in South Africa,
Darling’s father catches the dreadful AID and comes back home emptied-handed and deadly sick
on the brink of despair. The fate of this man shows how leaving can be dangerous physically but
also how it could distance oneself from one’s family, and turns an individual into a stranger among
his own people. So, Darling being a child and seeing nothing that could relate her to her father
even wishes that he died.

In the same vein, Makhosi, Darling’s cousin, who also joined his father narrates the unhuman
conditions in which they work in the Mandate diamond mine in South Africa. He describes all the
risks that the migrants working take in going into the bowels of the earth in the pursuit of diamond.
“He told us about Madante between bad bouts of raw, painful coughs, how when he was under the
earth he forgot everything. He said all he knew inside that mine was the terrible pounding of the
hammer around him, sometimes even inside him, like he swallowed it.”

Bulawayo, besides depicting the lives of the migrants-workers in neighboring countries, also casts
a critical look on the unhuman working conditions of migrants in America with all the dangers
they run. In drawing this comparison, she shows that the migrants, no matter where they are, share
the same fate and do engage in activities that jeopardize their lives and worse sometimes cost them
their lives. She tries to create a collective migrant suffering experience when she used “we”. And
she describes this in the following words:

“We worked with dangerous machines. (…) Adamou got murdered

by that beast of a machine that also ate three fingers of Sudan’s left
hand. (…) We got skin diseases. We inhaled bad smells until our
lungs thundered. Ecuador fell from forty stories working on a roof
and shattered her spine, screaming, Mis hijos! Mis hijos! On his way
down.” (246)

This quotation hints at the dangerous and unhealthy nature of most of the jobs done by the migrants
in order to survive.

IV- Integration Issues: Language Barriers

One of the toughest stages migrants face in the host countries is undoubtedly that of finding their
place and being accepted by the people of that new unknown land. Bulawayo, through the
characters of Darling and Fostalina, addresses the barriers that the migrants hit in their attempts to
find their place in the host countries. The first barrier they have to overcome is the language one,
an obstacle that prevents them from feeling at home or their belongingness to those countries even
after years of settlement there. Bulawayo depicts this phenomenon through the gaze of Darling as
well as her movement from one place to another. The paramountcy of this movement lies behind
the fact that it helps situate this linguistic barrier at many levels. During the first day of Darling at
school, she gets confronted to the mockery of her friends due to the way she speaks English and
all her manners. The situation reaches a point until she wishes to die just to escape all these
attempts to inferiorize her. Furthermore, she constantly gets remembered by her friend Marina
about the strangeness and wildness of her English. Marina in referring to her English sort of
underlines her otherness, that is, showing her that she is and cannot be true American as she is.

Besides, Fostalina, who has been living and working in America for a couple of years, also
witnesses the linguistic barrier when she was buying from a store. Her interlocutor, a White young
lady, pretending not to have understood the English spoken by Fostalina makes her repeat her
words many times and finally asks her to spells her words. This kind of racist practice is common
in America and is meant to dehumanize the other.

Apart from the linguistic barrier, Bulawayo lays emphasis on another crucial aspect like the
difficulties of the migrants in entering into possession of the legal papers that allow them to stay,
study and work in the host countries. The lack of required legal papers makes them live in total
uncertainty knowing that they could be sent back home at any time. It also makes them shrink and
bow their heads invaded by an indescribable shame. This feeling eats their self-esteem up and even
makes them question their own humanness, that is, they feel less human and guilty of breaching
the laws. The worst of all is that they are most often coerced to hide their names, meaning who
and what they are because the name is a crucial component of one’s identity. So, the use of the
impersonal pronoun “we” to address this issue by the author is to demonstrate that it is a problem
that face almost all the migrants. “And because we were breaking the law, we dropped our heads
in shame (…) We dropped our heads because we were no longer people; we were illegals (244).”
In this respect, the migrants constantly lives in fear; the fear of being able to realize their dreams,
the fear of being deported, the fear of being accepted in the new environment, and the fear of
getting legal papers. This is the case of Uncle Kodjo who has been living in America for years but
does not still have the required papers. In the same vein, Darling is also confronted to the same
problem because she is unable to return home when she desires and also unable to attend the
funerals of some of their closest relatives. This lack of legal documents not only makes them
unwanted people in America but also takes away their freedom of movement by confining them
in this space.

V- The Fragmentation of the Identity and the Dividedness between Two Worlds

“Leaving their umbilical cords under the soil, leaving the bones of their ancestors in the earth,
leaving everything that makes them who and what they are. They will never be the same again
because you just cannot be the same once you leave behind who and what you are, you just cannot
be the same (148).”

Going off this excerpt, it is clear that displacement entails a lot of transformation and changes.
These changes are most often occur with the displacement of an individual from their original
place to a new space that is dissimilar to where he left. Since identity is dynamic and shaped
through social interaction or based on the one’s milieu, the dislocation of the migrant from his
roots causes an identity crisis that plunges the latter in a dilemma, that is, choosing between home
and there, adopting the culture and lifestyle of the host country and having the feeling of belonging
to nowhere. It is this in-betweenness between different identities and the struggle of the migrants
to find their place between home and that Bulawayo is addressing through different characters
such as Darling and Fostalina.

Darling after spending some time in America sees herself conforming and internalizing the new
culture that at some point makes impossible for her to engage in conversation with her friends back
home in Zimbabwe. She sees herself disconnected and distanced from them because of who she
became. She no longer feels that connection that linked her to her people or not identify with their
stories. The new environment has taken over her identity and she is invaded by a feeling of
strangeness whenever she talks to her mom and friends over the phone. At the same time, she longs
for home that is out of her reach and that she can no longer claim for. Darling’s experience in
searching for her own identity in the midst of this chaos encompasses the migrants’ difficulties in
reconciling the two identities in general.

Conclusion

In way of conclusion, We Need New Names has extraordinarily depicted, defined and drawn
awareness about the most problematic issue of the 21st century that is migration. To put it another
way, Bulawayo through the experiences of her characters helps understand the different
psychological and physical troubles that displacement entails.