In Darling’s cultural context of rural Zimbabwe, naming plays an important role in defining both people and places, and a name often describes that person, sometimes ironically and paradoxically. Darling turns her back on her family, her friends, her country and her past, and in doing so, she erodes a large part of her identity, which, in turn, erodes a large part of Zimbabwe and Africa’s identity. Instead, she finds herself in a perpetual limbo state of ambiguous identity: neither American nor Zimbabwean, she speaks neither English nor her native language, has a permanent home in neither Zimbabwe nor America, and appears to live a shallow and meaningless, almost Kafkaesque existence. Forced to flee that culture to an idealised America during a dangerous period of civil unrest under the Mugabe regime, Darling attempts to reposition her identity as an idealised ‘American.’ She soon finds that an impossible feat, however, and despite her repeated attempts at transformation, fails to to replace her Zimbabwean cultural identity with an American one.
In NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names, the protagonist and narrator, Darling, spends her childhood immersed in a small and poor, yet happy, Zimbabwean community, and her identity becomes a manifestation of that community’s culture. Rather, a “person is a person because of other people” (Bulawayo 292, Acknowledgements), and an individual’s identity is more a complex, experiential chimaera of people, cultures, communities and places from that individual’s past. There is no individual whose will is so strong as to render them capable of fashioning their own identity independent of all external forces.
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