David Coltart Blog – In praise of NoViolet Bulawayo
By David Coltart
16 October 2013
NoViolet Bulawayo got rave reviews last night when the BBC interviewed literary critics prior to the award of the Man Booker Prize. In fact the one person interviewed, when asked who he thought would win, said NoViolet Bulawayo.
NoViolet did not win the Prize last night but she has taken the world by storm. I recently finished reading her book, “We need new Names”, and it is not only a very powerful literary work but, perhaps more importantly from a Zimbabwean perspective, is a stunning review and expose of so much of the abuse which has taken place in Zimbabwe during the last few decades. Although it is written from the perspective of a child, its simplicity and directness enables her to tackle issues like Gukurahundi, Murambatsvina, child abuse, the universality of human rights abuses, corruption, the terrible destruction of families and the corrosive effects of pornography in a compelling and poignant manner.
Some of my favourite lines:
1. Talking about corruption and Chinese “investment” in Zimbabwe –
“Look at that drum of a stomach, it’s like he has swallowed a country”.
2. On “land reform” and Murambatsvina –
“And like that, they mourned perished pasts. There were some who appeared speechless, without words, and for a long while they walked around in silence, like the returning dead. But then with time, they remembered to open their mouths. The voices came back like tiptoeing thieves in the dark, and this is what they said:
They shouldn’t have done this to us, no, they shouldn’t have. Salilwelilizwe leli, we fought to liberate this country. Wasn’t it like this before independence? Do you remember how the whites drove us from our land and put us in those wretched reserves? I was there, you were there, wasn’t it just like this?
No, those were evil white people who came to steal our land and make us paupers in our own country.
What, but aren’t you a pauper now? Aren’t these black people evil for bulldozing your home and leaving you with nothing now?
You are all wrong. Better a white thief do that to you than your own black brother. Better a wretched white thief.
It’s the same thing and it isn’t. But what’s the use, we are here now. Here in Paradise with nothing. And they had nothing, except of course memories, their own and those passed down by their mothers and mothers mothers. The nation’s memory.”
3. On the universality of human rights abuses and their consequences –
” The others spoke languages we did not know, worshipped different gods, ate what we would not dare touch. But like us, they had left their homelands behind. They flipped open their wallets to show us faded photographs of mothers whose faces bore the same creases of worry as our very own mothers, siblings bleak-eyed with dreams unfulfilled like those of our own, fathers forlorn and defeated like ours. We had never seen their countries but we knew about everything in those pictures; we were not altogether strangers.”
Sadly I suspect that because it is such a searing indictment of so much that has gone wrong in our beloved Zimbabwe, NoViolet Bulawayo will not get the accolades she deserves at home. But one thing is clear – she has made a profound mark on the literary world and in that has demonstrated the enormous talent Zimbabwe has.
Amhlophe NoViolet Bulawayo.