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 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “Shhhh”
Darling’s father returns home after spending so long away, but he’s very sick. He’s so ill that he defecates and throws up on himself. He looks monstrous, and nothing like Darling remembers, so much so that she runs from the house. She’s forced back in by her mother, but she is afraid of the man whose “voice sounds like something burned and seared his throat” (92), and who, in his delirium, mistakes her for a boy. Darling’s mother tells her that she can’t let anyone know that her father has returned and is sick. Darling hates this because when her mother or Mother of Bones isn’t around, she has to watch her father, and when this happens, she can’t play with her friends. Darling also has to lie to her friends, something that is easy at first but becomes harder. She tells them she’s sick or not feeling well, but then eventually says that she has measles.
Darling’s father is too sick to go to the church atop Fambeki, so Prophet Mborro visits the father and prays for him. He demands for the demon to come out of the father, and he mentions to them all that the spirit which was once in Darling is no longer there but that it’s most likely now in the father. When he says he can heal the man for $500, Darling’s mother leaves angry. There’s no way for them to get that much money. Prophet Mborro says that Darling’s mother also has demons in her, but they must first deal with the husband.
Darling’s friends know she’s lying, and one day they push past her into the house after they hear someone cough and moan. Darling knows she will get in trouble, and she’s embarrassed about them seeing her father. Her friends tell her that everyone already knows her father is sick with AIDS, which is the official name for what everyone calls “the Sickness.” Bastard takes her father’s hand and talks to him nicely, startling Darling. The kids then contemplate life after death. No one really wants to go to heaven because it sounds boring. Then Stina begins singing a song and moves Darling’s father’s hand along to the melody. Bastard takes the other one and does the same. Darling, too, touches her father as the kids all sing a song. As they do this, Darling notes that “he feels like dry wood in my hands, but there is a strange light in his sunken eyes, like he has swallowed the sun” (105).
Chapter 8 Summary: “Blak Power”
Guava season is coming to an end, and Darling and her friends now roam Budapest desperately searching for guavas: “We don’t really talk about it but I know all of us are thinking of the end of the season, when Budapest will have nothing for us anymore, of the long, boring months before the next season starts” (106). Bastard again suggests that they start stealing from inside homes, but no one else wants to do this. While searching, they run into a guard, something they haven’t seen before in the city. The guard is comical to them because his clothes don’t fit and he speaks in English, using big words to sound important. He tells them to leave Budapest and never come back, and after Bastard mocks him, he tries to hit Bastard but can’t catch him. They tease the guard while asking how he will arrest them. When a nice red convertible arrives, the guard leaves and lets the car in to a gate. Darling and her friends then leave and find a tree with some guavas.
While the friends are harvesting guavas up in a tree, they hear a loud commotion and see a large mob of angry blacks with weapons flooding the streets. The mob shouts slogans about getting rid of whites and farmers and about making Zimbabwe their country again. The group of friends realizes they are in trouble, and Sbho thinks the mob will kill them. They convince Sbho to stop crying for their safety, and the mob passes under them without noticing. The mob goes to the house where the red car entered and disarms the guard, who now look afraid. They bang on the door and demand for the owners to come out. When they break the window and begin knocking down the door, it opens, and a fat white man comes out, followed by a thin woman and, later, a small dog. No one knows what the dog is at first because it is so small, and they all laugh—including Darling and her friends who are watching events from the tree.
Although they are afraid, Bastard says he isn’t afraid of the mob. Someone from the mob then grabs the dog and kicks it over the gate. The mob then demands for the man and woman to leave, handing them papers to this effect. The man argues with them, further angering them. He too was born in the country and considers himself African, but the mob pays his claims no attention. They storm the house and destroy everything, then take the man and woman, and the guard, away. The woman sees Darling and her friends up in the tree. Although she doesn’t say anything, her eyes do: “We know from the look, because eyes can talk, that she hates us, not just a little bit but a whole lot” (124).
Darling and her friends wait until it’s clear and enter the house. They are shocked at how cold it is inside the house, and then are shocked at the level of destruction. The mob has smashed everything nice and beautiful. They see pictures on the wall, and Darling recognizes a picture of the Queen of England. At one point, the phone rings, exciting the kids. They find it and hand the phone to Darling because she has the best English. She gathers that the woman and man calling are the children of the man and woman who the mob took away. The man on the phone demands that they leave the house because it isn’t theirs. Darling translates, but she doesn’t tell them about the man demanding them to leave. Then they notice that the refrigerator has been untouched and devour all the food they can.
Chapter 9 Summary: “For Real”
Darling and her friends hide in a tree in Heavenway to watch the funeral for Bornfree. They aren’t allowed inside the graveyard; the adults, too, have been warned that they will face harm if they are found burying Bornfree. Despite this, most of the village arrives for the funeral. Of Bornfree’s coffin, Darling notes: “We have seen quite a few coffins like that lately; it’s the Change people, like Bornfree, in the coffins” (135). The mourners are angry, especially the ones with Change shirts on. When the adults first voted, everyone was ecstatic, until one day men came for Bornfree, and the adults no longer talked about change after that. Messenger is there, his face contorted with anger. Bornfree’s mother, MaDube is also there. She’s being held because she’s wallowing in pain. Prophet Mborro and the people dance and shout, and he gives a small sermon. As they lower Bornfree into the ground, Bastard cries. MaDube takes off running, and some people chase after her. Others leave. The kids are left wondering again what happens when you die. Stina says that people like Bornfree come back as ghosts with unfinished business, and Godknows wonders if Bornfree will return and go after all the people who killed him.
The kids then play a new game. Bastard pretends that he is Bornfree, and Godknows is the lorry carrying the mob to Paradise to kill Bornfree. The kids ask questions about Bastard’s allegiance, like who’s paying him for his dissent—America or Britain? They then all begin attacking Bastard. From their play, the reader understands that the mob asked Bornfree about his allegiance, attacked him brutally, then stopped. They then chide him and tell him to go vote, and then set about attacking him again. His mother tries to intervene, but the townspeople warn her that they will kill her too. They continue beating him until he dies, and then they leave. A camera crew has been watching Darling and her friends. They ask them what game they are playing, and Bastard says, “Can’t you see this is for real?” (146).
Chapters 7-9 Analysis
A major behind-the-scenes issue affecting many in Zimbabwe, and throughout Africa, is AIDS. In the narrative, this devastating disease is called “the Sickness,” and it hits close to home when Darling’s father returns from South Africa and is dying from AIDS. The disease has hit him so hard that he is no longer the father Darling remembers: “I don’t even know it’s Father […] He is like a monster up close and I think of running again” (92). Although Darling must keep quiet about him being sick, news travels and her friends find out about her father. They want to see him up close, and even though Darling is ashamed and thinks they will make fun of her, the kids enact one of the most poignant scenes in the narrative when they sing and dance over Darling’s ailing father. Darling’s father can barely move his muscles, yet when the kids sing and touch him, “he is a beautiful plaything we have just rescued from a rubbish bin in Budapest” (105). Their childlike approach to the concept of death, sickness, and shame underscores the humanity that those who are sick or dying want and deserve.
An earlier theme of displacement is revisited in this section, thus fleshing out the tumultuous events surrounding blacks seizing white-owned lands under Mugabe’s government. When Darling and her friends venture to Budapest at the end of guava season, they witness a mob of angry blacks seizing a large house from a white couple. The event is traumatizing for some, like Sbho, who cries and thinks that they will all be killed (they are hiding up in a tree). Despite the tense situation, the confrontation is a microcosm of the relationship between blacks and whites in both the fictional and real-life world of Zimbabwe (as well as other countries). The black mob, which calls itself “Sons of the soil” (120), informs the white couple that they must give up their property. The white couple, however, shows nothing but hatred for the mob, and seemingly for blacks in general: “We know from the look, because eyes can talk, that she hates us, not just a little bit but a whole lot” (124). The mob eventually storms the house, and later takes the whites away. It is suggested that they might be let go or perhaps killed in the forest, events that often happened in real life during this time in history.
Although change is something that blacks thought they’d get once the country went back into black hands, this wasn’t the case. Moreover, when people voted for change and new leadership, they were met with resistance and violence by the government in power. An example of this is Bornfree’s murder at the hands of a mob. They singled Bornfree out because of his leadership role in opposition against Mugabe, using his murder as an example. Darling and her friends watch his funeral, and they later play a game that re-enacts his murder (so that readers understand what happened). Acting his murder out as a game, but then saying later that it isn’t a game (Bastard tells BBC reporters that it’s not a game but real life), highlights how life for many is a gamble and that many lose at the hands of the government.
