49 pages • 1 hour read
NoViolet BulawayoWe Need New Names
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2013A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 16-18Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary: “How They Lived”
The narrator describes how immigrants from Africa try and adjust to their lives in America, and how people seem to know about the injustices in African countries but don’t know much of anything else about these countries. Hearing about their countries also causes grief: “And when these words tumbled from their lips like crushed bricks, we exchanged glances again and the water in our eyes broke” (240). Because of opportunity, however, and the abundance of food, people begin to think again of hope and God, beliefs that had been thrown away back in their homeland because there was never any hope. Moreover, it was hard for immigrants to communicate in English, and they often said what they didn’t mean and didn’t say what they truly wanted. Those who left prayed to their old gods, but their old gods, too, were famished. These gods were critical of America, and of a journey that would take their sons and daughters away from their homelands. But people left anyway, and though they had dreams of being students or doctors, they ended up working illegally just to survive: “And because we were breaking the law, we dropped our heads in shame; we had never broken any laws before. We dropped our heads because we were no longer people; we were now illegals” (244).
They also met other immigrants, so many and from so many places that they called each other by their country name. They also took the jobs that no one else wanted, degrading jobs that made them tired and sick, and some that often hurt or killed people due to unsafe working conditions. They sent money back to relatives, and in a way, they became parents because they looked after their own parents now. They also sent back pictures and tokens of America to show those back home and to encourage the youth of their country to come to America as well. Instead of fixing their own countries, they thought, “Leave, abandon, flee, run—anything. Escape” (247).
They also called home, only to find that old friends were now grown and had kids of their own. They also had their own kids in America but didn’t name them traditional names or use traditional practices, so their kids weren’t connected to the earth like they’d been. Their kids thought their stories and homelands weird and strange. Parents back home begged for their children to visit, and though they promised repeatedly, they never did. Their sadness continued as well because their kids would never see their homelands and never know how to mourn them properly. The chapter ends as such: “Because we will not be proper, the spirits will not come running to meet us, and so we will wait and wait and wait—forever waiting in the air like flags of unsung countries” (252).
Chapter 17 Summary: “My America”
Darling describes her working experience. She’s been working since the tenth grade. She works at a store where she bags groceries, in addition to sorting recyclables and cleaning toilets. When a cockroach crawls out of a can, Darling screams. Her boss kills it but berates her. Her boss, who is seeing a mistress, annoys her because “he always speaks as if Africa is just one country, even though I’ve told him that it is a continent with fifty-some countries” (255). Darling talks about the gross things that she’s found in the cans and bottles and is relieved when she’s called to help out inside the store. When she clocks out later, she waits for Uncle Kojo to pick her up in the parking lot, where she sits with a coworker, Megan, who’s angry that her boyfriend is late and that another coworker wanted to leave early. Darling barely responds, and she finds herself imagining them in old age doing the same thing.
Uncle Kojo picks her up, but they don’t go straight home. Ever since TK was sent to Afghanistan, Uncle Kojo hasn’t been the same. He takes long road trips, which causes Darling to nickname him Vasco da Gama. They drive through old neighborhoods, where the people are as beat down as the buildings: “If these walls could talk, the buildings would stutter, wouldn’t remember their names” (261-62). While driving, a beautiful woman stops them and asks for a quarter, then begins repeating Darling’s name over and over until Uncle Kojo drives off. When they get home, Uncle Kojo watches the news. Darling knows that he’s really looking for TK’s face among all the soldiers. He had even stopped eating for a while, until Aunt Fostalina found recipes from his home country and he began eating again.
Darling begins cleaning Aunt’s Fostalina’s old boss’s house. The house is massive, and Eliot, the old boss, leaves the house a mess. He’s going to Africa again soon, so he wants Darling to teach him her language, though he only ever talks about shooting things and visiting parks while in Africa. He comes home one day with his daughter who is in college. Darling has read the girl’s journal so knows that she is anorexic, and that she tried committing suicide because her boyfriend left her. They also have a little dog that wears clothing more expensive than Darling can afford, and the dog has its own room. Darling tries to engage the girl one day, but then she finds herself laughing at the girl because she has “a fridge bloated with food so no matter how much you starve yourself, you’ll never know real, true hunger” (270).
Uncle Kojo picks Darling up later, and just when they’re about to go on one of their long road trips, Aunt Fostalina calls and tells them to go to Shadybrook. Tshaka Zulu is acting up, and Aunt Fostalina can’t go. When they get there, Darling is alarmed because she’s never seen Tshaka Zulu like this before: “There is a strange look in his eyes, like they are not eyes but maybe a pit and something fierce is raging inside. I don’t need anyone to tell me that this is proper craziness” (272). Tshaka Zulu also has real spears somehow and is dressed up. He then sees white boys on bikes and begins talking about not letting colonizers settle. He takes off running, and Darling sees that he’s about to attack a pizza delivery guy. Just as the guy manages to get inside his car, the police arrive. Darling takes off running toward Shadybrook and knows that Tshaka Zulu will not surrender to the policemen.
Chapter 18 Summary: “Writing on the Wall”
Instead of studying for her bio test, Darling messes up her bedroom wallpaper. The pictures in the book upset her, so she busies herself instead with writing things on the wall while she texts with Marina. Marina has gone on to an expensive school, and she and Marina hardly talk anymore. The text conversation is increasingly strained, though Marina admits that she and her boyfriend had sex, and Darling says that she made out with a guy (he really just began kissing her on a dancefloor and she let him). Darling hears the door open and knows that it’s Uncle Kojo. He’s been taking longer trips, and he drinks copiously without hiding the bottles. Now he and Aunt Fostalina are no longer together; they simply live together as roommates. Moreover, Darling found out that Aunt Fostalina and Eliot are sleeping together.
In the morning, Darling realizes that she needs to clean the wall before Aunt Fostalina comes home. She goes through decorations in the basement and sees a cloth that reminds her of home: “Looking at the cloth I’m remembering how beautiful it felt to be in a real scene like that, everybody just there together, mingling together, living together, before things fell apart” (285). She collects a few things, including a mask, and decorates her wall. She’s also stolen something from Eliot’s house and decorates her room with it, as well as with other items.
Feeling nostalgic, Darling calls her mother, but Chipo answers. They make small talk, though Darling is amazed that Chipo sounds like a grown woman now and that she’s in her mother’s house. Chipo explains how Bastard went to South Africa and Godknows to Dubai. Sbho is in an acting troupe touring the world, and Stina comes and goes. When Darling tries to say it must be awful in Zimbabwe, Chipo laughs and confronts her about her feelings, saying, “[Y]ou are not the one suffering” (287). She chides Darling for thinking that she can understand the suffering when she left the suffering and her country behind. Although Darling protests, Chipo is adamant about it, and furthers her critique by asking, “[I]f it’s your country, you have to love it to live in it and not leave it. You have to fight for it no matter what, to make it right” (288). Darling, angry, throws the computer against the wall, breaking it.
Darling flees to TK’s room to calm down. There, she touches Tshaka Zulu’s urn and tries to calm down. Uncle Kojo rushes in to tell her that Osama bin Laden has been killed. It reminds Darling of when she was younger and playing “Find bin Laden.” They would go around shouting for bin Laden to come out of hiding. One day, they saw Bornfree’s dog Ncuncu. The dog had one day just stopped being Bornfree’s dog and began roaming around, no longer responding to his name. As they began calling the dog “bin Laden,” a Lobels bread lorry came barreling down the road. The dog didn’t bother moving, and though Darling and her friends shouted out to the dog that it was in danger, the lorry killed Ncuncu. To the kids, “the delicious, delicious smell of Lobels bread” (292) was more important than the dog’s mangled body.
Chapters 16-18 Analysis
The last three chapters highlight the stark contrast between what immigrants imagined of America before arriving and what they endured—willingly and unwillingly—once they arrived: “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” (243). Many are forced to endure dangerous and demeaning jobs just to make enough money to get by. In addition to getting by, they are also trying to send money back home to relatives. Darling, for instance, works a demeaning job at a grocery store. When she’s not bagging groceries, she’s sorting disgusting recyclables. The tone of the later chapters is different as well, as if to match Darling’s change in demeanor from hope and possibility to the drudgery of routine and abandoned dreams. Darling even has a horrible thought about her and a coworker being elderly and still working for scraps at the same job.
Other realities that come to surface are the fact that Aunt Fostalina is having an affair with her former white boss, and that Uncle Kojo is sliding into depression because TK is stationed in Afghanistan. Also, Tshaka Zulu, an elder from Zimbabwe who performs at events, goes insane and is killed by police. These life events all happen around Darling and add to her realization that, like the snow she first witnessed in America, America is often a monster that destroys those who believe in it. In this sense, though people once again believe in God after arriving, America is symbolic of the young Darling’s sense of God as an entity that ignores people’s prayers, hopes, and plights. When Darling speaks again with a now adult Chipo, her worldview is again altered when Chipo accuses her of being removed from the everyday plights of Zimbabweans. Darling gets so angry that she throws her laptop against a wall. The final image of the book, however, underscores that Darling, like others, has in fact changed. The image is of a dog that has forsaken its home and former life. Although the dog dies in front of the children, they are more concerned with the smell of bread from the truck. The takeaway is that hunger for better life is often more important than what once was, and it is a hunger that drives people into dangerous and defeatist situations.
