folks,
i'd like to share briefly my impressions of We Need New Names.
it is really an impressively written account. it gives two worlds: that of the young, wise-guy narrator as a young girl living in a slum called "Paradise" in someplace like Bulawayo, a place close to the border with south africa, clearly located in ndebeleland, where the people are presented as victims of mugabe's brutal repression of the MDC and its ndebele supporters. The heart of this section, the first half of the book, lies in the ways the protagonist, a 10 yr old girl named Darling, sees the world. She runs with a band of about 6 kids, who are really best described as wiseass. This is vaguely like many texts/movies/novels set in the ghetto, where kids are both streetwise and naive, both petty criminals and victims of adults' abuse. and they are vehicles for presenting a world in which the adults are beaten (like those in nganang's Dog Days), and where they appear in the eyes of their children as such.
The second half takes us to the states (to Destroyedmichigan, and eventually Kalamazoo) where she encounters and lives with black america. there are some whites who appear, both in zim and in michigan, but marginal, and always focalized through the eyes of this child who is now turning into an adolescent.
the value of any novel lies in its act of telling, not in the information it provides. if you want info, google for it, wiki for it; if you want a novel, read the words as words, not simply as signifying something else besides the language itself. her language strikes me as typical of what i think of as "World Literature," and especially World Literature as written by african authors today. who comes to mind? Wainaina, Adesanmi,� Cole, Adichie... and by adichie, i don't mean early adichie, but the adichie of The Thing Around My Neck. Also abani, somewhat, oyeyemi, somewhat.� mbanckou, somewhat.
creative, striking styles, self-conscious writing, marked by a million similes or extended metaphors, by a certain self-reflexiveness, by an accent, as in a narrator striking a pose and a language that at times verges on the affected.
At times Bulawayo's writing struck me as crossing that line of affectation--but i am not sure. i read and then reread it for class; i saw its true brilliance at times, as when she describes children interacting with NGO personnel, or when they create their games that mimic the violence of the world around them. most brilliant, she evokes the encounter of zimbabwe and america when she calls home, speaks with her old friend chipo, and demonstrates her anguish in confronting the reality that she can't really lay claim to being a zimbabwean any more, while also not quite really, entirely being an american, not to say an african american. she isn't between two worlds; she is in a real world, but it is doubled, at the least; and so is she.
Bulaywayo pulls that doubling off; and i think it is time to revise dubois's double consciousness and now see how it is also, and especially, a double-discourse, doubling of perspective, of subject position and subjectivity--all of which are somehow consciousness but also the expression of that consciousness.
bulawaya pulls that off with her language. in the same page where she describes imagining the penis of the mail carrier (she and her friends had just been watching porno on her aunt's computer), she calls it a "thing" in the initial lines describing her reaction. a page later, it is a "penis."� The african reticence to refer directly to the "thing" (in french "chose" used the same way, the bangala, etc), becomes, directly, in the mouth of this young girl the word "penis."
African
American
African-American
Michigander
someone without a real name, or who has and has long a real name and who "needs a new name"--or, as my students pointed out, someone among many who "need a new name" since the title isn't "I need a new name" but "We need new names."
the more i talked about the novel, the more i liked it--and i'm sure it was true of our class as well. a real novel of our times. and also, for a list that calls itself USA and also AFrica
ken
Bravo!
Cheers.
Funmi Tofowomo Okelola
-The Art of Living and Impermanence
No comments:
Post a Comment