A love letter to all Zimbabweans

NOVIOLET Bulawayo's exquisite debut novel, We Need New Names, has propelled its author into the limelight. Short-listed for the Man Booker prize (which it did not win), this globally relevant narrative of loss, displacement and enduring trauma is told by 10-year-old Darling, who casts her gimlet eye on the world after "Operation Murambatsvina". The ironically named Paradise is the shantytown where she and her friends, denizens of Zimbabwe's "lost generation", steal guavas to appease their hunger and invent games to alleviate the boredom of not going to school.

Bastard, Godknows, the mute and pregnant 11-year-old, Chipo, and others ignore the adults of their world, who are trapped in despair. The vignettes of suffering are simultaneously ghastly and hilarious, told at a slant. Her sensual and embodied style suffuses the reader in the sounds, smells and textures of sweating discomfort or icy indifference. There is an aching and lyrical loveliness to the narrative.

Bulawayo visited Cape Town recently, appearing at the Open Book Festival, where she spoke of the concept of home and belonging, and her own new name. She speaks in a wry, matter-of-fact tone that is poignant and funny. She explains that, while living in Zimbabwe, it never occurred to her that she was black. "Because I was born and raised among black people I never needed to cross racial boundaries in ways that would have forced me to look closer at my identity." While growing up, she was aware of her gender, which was defined by her Ndebele culture and shaped her identity, but the notion of being an African came into focus on moving to the US, that "melting pot where nothing melts".

"It became necessary and inevitable and urgent to look at my blackness, my Zimbabweness in new ways," she says. "It was challenging trying to embrace those ideas within the charged American context where blackness, of itself, isn't a neat category. Consider the differences between African Americans and Africans." The matter of belonging was a vexed issue in that particular black space and she became aware how strongly her identity was tied to the geography of home and its language. After leaving Zimbabwe at the age of 18, the daily matter of speaking English arose. "Although English is the national language of Zim, it was a language I processed through locations. I only spoke English at school. When I left class, I left that useless language and communicated in one that captured my everyday life."

Moving to Kalamazoo, Michigan, brought a marginal existence, where she belonged to neither country. "Having to get in that zone every day, to cross the racial border, trying to fit in a weird teenage culture…. I was caught out for becoming American, yet I never felt I belonged to that space."

This dilemma is powerfully rendered in the second half of We Need New Names, when Darling ridicules her black American friend who speaks in Ebonics, a bastardised English she has never encountered and cannot understand. Soon enough, however, calling home on Skype, she is castigated for her "stupid American accent" that does not even suit her.

The transition to the US catalysed Bulawayo's idea of herself. It also led to her writing. "I was forced to understand myself in ways that I wouldn't have had I stayed at home. That was a positive outcome. I was dislocated, of course, but I was also living at a time when technology was making the world smaller."

The youngest of eight siblings on her mother's side, she was constantly in touch with her family during the worst of times. Her father is an imposing figure who guarded the guavas that grew on his prized tree jealously, driving her to steal from neighbours' trees. It was his ambition for her to become a lawyer, so creative writing classes were done, similarly, on the side, starting with poetry, then expanding to fiction. She does not come from "bookish people". "Writing created a conflict. I couldn't quite tell people I was writing until I won the Caine Prize and then it was all out there. When I was long-listed for the Booker, my sister e-mailed me saying, 'Well, I googled the Booker thing. It sounds prestigious…. Congratulations!'"

She visited Harare in August this year for her book launch. "It was a time for my father to understand what I do, and to appreciate that part of myself that is both private and public, but important."

She pays tribute to the oral culture that birthed her own ear, to "growing up in the location" with women who stayed home telling stories. "Language and stories were the currency rather than books. When I'm writing, I read my work aloud. It's a very slow way of working, but I have to hear it so that I can capture what I'm trying to do."

Reflecting on her literary studies, she says she looks up to African writers who "make sense of our space in the literary universe" but she does not feel a strong sense of positioning herself in the canon. "I feel responsible to the real stories on the ground. That's what I'm doing."

Writing was a cathartic way of coping with alienation in her new country. "There were times, while studying at Cornell, when there was no contact with home. The phone and power lines were down. News of election violence was all over the media. I was not thinking about the publication process and what it would mean to put it out there. I was very conscious of the need to bear witness to what was happening."

The title comes from a scene in which the girls stage an impromptu abortion on their pregnant friend. They recall a medical TV show and declare they need new names for so serious a task. NoViolet Bulawayo is the author's own new name. The suffix "no" in Ndebele means "with". Her mother, Violet, died when she was a toddler. She chose the name so she would always be with her. Bulawayo is home, the birthplace of her stories. And yet it is not. It has changed irrevocably, and so has she.

Bulawayo thinks about belonging and where she will be buried. "When you meet Tshaka, a character in the story, he's old. Illegally in the US, he cannot go home. If he leaves, he can't re-enter. My character dies and is cremated, leaving instructions for his ashes to return to his grandfather's kraal in the village. The new problem is that the person to whom the ashes are entrusted is also illegal. She also can't return home. When you understand how tradition is so intimate a part of culture, the idea of the dead self being dislocated is deeply troubling. Where you're buried defines your reconnection with your ancestors." She describes her book as "a love letter to my people. Zimbabweans tell me I captured their dilemma exactly. They think I wrote We Need New Names for them."

She laughs at this before becoming pensive, reflecting on the weight of a being a social commentator. "Writing is no longer private. You're saying something about real people living real lives. That's a big responsibility."