Don’t miss We Need New Names. Enough said, but here are some quotes and why writers can learn from her brilliant voice and kaleidoscopic point of view. Not quite as wild as Eve Ensler’s (see last week’s blog), but unsettlingly dramatic.
The novel is written in first person present – which I find an engaging voice that puts the reader inside the character’s experience. And painful experience at times, as well as awed, smartass, and funny. And the character, Darling, a ten year old Zimbabwean girl, is constantly musing. The point of view and the musing provide a great model for anyone writing memoir – for the power in memoir is often in the evolution of the character that shows up through reflection on the experiences described.
The book is magnificent for the quality of the ten-year-old girl’s voice. Pay attention to your gut response that comes of first person present point of view. I’m quoting a lot in this blog in order for writers to be able to sink into the power of a distinctive and coherent voice. (I would have added a lot of commas as the editor, but I’d also be willing to be told that without them, though the reading is a little more effortful, they keep the stream of vocalization flowing unobstructed.)
Childhood in Zimbabwe: She and a few friends leave the shanty town out of hunger and climb guava trees in the white neighborhood:
If you’re stealing something it’s better if it’s small and hideable or something you can eat quickly and be done with, like guavas. That way, people can’t see you with the thing to be reminded that you are a shameless thief and that you stole it from them, so I don’t know what the white people were trying to do in the first place, stealing not just a tiny piece but a whole country. Who can ever forget you stole something like that?
Bam! This jump in perspective works because you didn’t see it coming. The scale of the perspective shifts so dramatically, I had to stop and regroup. The naïveté of the ten year old voice is convincing with the unbounded curiosity and logic that make ten year old girls so magnificent when they speak Truth. The writing is delightful and easy – but the content is not, being more condemnatory than delightful. But always in the stunning flavor of stolen guavas.
At church under the trees:
Now Prophet Revelations Bitchington Mborro is busy thundering about Judas and Golgotha and the cross and the two thieves next to Jesus and things, making he was there and saw it all. He paces up and down like there are hot coals under his feet. He flails his arms, sometimes waving his stick at the sky, sometimes jumping around as if he is itching where nobody can see.
How cool is that phrasing!
At the funeral of an activist:
The mourners stop and form a circle. The coffin has just been set in the grave.… A tall man with big hair … begins to speak. The mourners hush, but still you can hear that there is something underneath the silence. Like anger….His voice rises like smoke, past us, towards God. The man speaks about country and runoff and heroes and democracy and murder and freedom and human rights and what-what. The sound of it maddens the mourners; it’s as if they’ve just been insulted. The BBC man clicks and clicks away at his camera like he is possessed….The Prophet Revelations Bitchington Mborro raises his Bible and starts saying holy things. The mourners quiet. He keeps going and going until I begin to wonder if he doesn’t get tired of talking to a god who doesn’t even do anything to show that he is a god.
Are you as stunned as I at her capacity to tell a story in the immediacy of the Now, but thrust you into the context of our post-colonial world without any preparation? Does that make you take stock of your own reality in the midst of the empathic response to hers?
And then there is the grating of one culture against another: At a wedding in US of a man from Zimbabwe to a Caucasian woman: in the ladies room:
I am washing my hands and admiring my interesting face when a voice says: Are you from Africa too? I look in the mirror, and this woman in a blue dress is standing there smiling at me. I notice the smell of her sweet perfume is all over, like a living thing. I smile back. it’s not exactly a smile-smile just the brief baring of teeth. That’s what you do in America: you smile at people you don’t know and you smile at people you don’t even like and you smile for no reason…. Can you just say something in your language? she says. I laugh a small laugh, because what do you say to that?…
At the wedding feast:
[Mandla, a young child, throws the ball] and it hits an old lady in a pink dress on the breast. I stop breathing, but the old lady just smiles like nothing’s happened, picks up the ball from her lap, and holds it out to Mandla.
Isn’t he a sweetheart? she says …
He had too much candy earlier, [the groom, his new stepfather] says, his voice explaining-like, and I want to laugh because what has candy really got to do with a spoiled kid?
That’s when Mandla throws the ball at me, and by the time I see it, it has already hit my right eye, one of the spike thingies [on the ball] jabbing the inside. The pain is something else. Before I know it, I have forgotten that I’m at a wedding, in a hall full of people, forgotten that I’m in America. Just before Aunt Fostalina sharply tells me to sit down, I grab the little brat, go pha-pha-pha with three quick slaps, and rap his head with my knuckles, twice.
It’s only when I sit back down and look around that I reaize what I have done The white people have already gasped…and the silence has already descended. It stays in the air like a stain. Tshaka Zulu… shouts…Do not to fear. This is just how we handle unruly children in our culture….Nobody laughs with him; there is this hot fire of silence.
Does that conjure your own social blooper? And magnify it?
With two girlfriends driving into the mall parking lot in Michigan:
I see my car. I don’t even hesitate, I run to it yelling, My Lamborghini, Lamboghini, Lamborghini Reventón! Maybe I start freaking out, I don’t know, but Marina is pulling me away and asking what’s wrong with me.
Do you know how much that car costs? she says.
How much? I say.
Almost a couple of million dollars, she says.
You’re lying. Millions? For that little car? I say.
Duh Kristal says.
You can Google it; that little car is actually one of the most expensive cars out there, Marina says.
Well, I say, and leave it there. I stop to let a car pass before I cross over to the mall. The thing is, I don’t want to say with my own mouth that if the car costs that much then it means I’ll never own it, and if I can’t own it, does that mean I’m poor, and if so, what is America for, then?
If NoViolet Bulawayo had been my client, the text would be crisper, more staccato – at least I would have argued with her for that. My guess is she would have answered that her child life, her soul were too soft and fluid for such a tempo. Such conversations are what I love about my work …
As to the insight, does it help you understand what an illegal immigrant from Africa, South America, India, Eastern Europe will wake up to one day?
The next to last chapter: A complete shift of voice – and still a beautiful voice – offers a reflection of the (illegal) immigrant experience:
Because we were not in our own country, we could not use our own languages, and so when we spoke our voices came out bruised. When we talked, our tongues thrashed madly in our mouths, staggered like drunken men. Because we were not using our languages we said things we did not mean; what we really wanted to say remained folded inside, trapped….When we were alone we summoned the horses of our languages and mounted their backs and galloped past skyscrapers. Always, we were reluctant to come back down.
How hard it was to get to America – harder than crawling through the anus of a needle. For the visas and passports, we begged, despaired, lied, groveled, promised, charmed, bribed – anything to get us out of the country….
To send us off properly, our elders spilled tobacco on the dry earth to summon the spirits of the ancestors for our protection. Unlike in years long gone, the spirits did not come dancing from the land beneath. They crawled. They stalled. They were hungry. They wanted blood and meat and millet beer, they wanted sacrifices, they wanted gifts. And save for a few grains of tobacco, we had nothing to give, absolutely nothing. And so the spirits just gazed at us with eyes milked dry of care. Between themselves they whispered: How will these ones ever be whole in that ’Melika, as far away from the graves of the ancestors as it is?…
We would not be moved, we would not listen; we were going to America. In the footsteps of those looted black sons and daughters, we were going, yes, we were going. And when we got to American 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. We would never be the things we had wanted to be: doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers….
And because we were illegal and afraid to be discovered we mostly kept to ourselves…and shied away from those who were not like us…. We did not want their wrath, we did not want their curiosity, we did not want any attention…. We hid our real names, gave false ones when asked. We built mountains between us and them, we dug rivers, we planted thorns – we had paid so much to be in American and we did not want to lose it all….
Here our own parents come to us in dreams. They do not touch us, they do not speak to us…. When we die, our children will not know how to wail, how to mourn us the right way. They will not go mad with grief…. They will not put our plates and cups on our graves…. We will leave for the land of the dead naked, without the things we need to enter the castle of our ancestors. 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.
This makes me realize that all of us come of immigrant roots, that our forebears – often the grandparents who raised us – have not been met, so are waiting and waiting. Remember how they did not understand us, our immigrant parents and grandparents. So even when we arrive, they will not be able to come to us, nor we to comfort them. I wonder if this is what Malidoma Somé, the African shaman who is teaching Americans how to use ritual, means when he sees the ungrieved dead walking the streets of America. Perhaps we have even grieved them, but we have not grieved them in their own cultural modality. And – many of us have not grieved because our culture has not invited us to. (Check out Francis Weller’s two books or these audio interviews: http://tns.commonweal.org/podcasts/francis-weller-mft/#.UlxH2rzSHLk and http://tns.commonweal.org/podcasts/francis-weller/#.UlxHqrzSHLk )
NoViolet Bulawayo concludes with a chapter that falls exquisitely back into her storytelling voice, as she works in a grocery sorting bottles and cans returned for recycling. At home, bin Laden has just been killed which brings the memory of being in Zimbabwe and playing Looking For bin Laden, a game with a tragic end capped by the sweet smell of a passing bread truck.
I have written before of how to consider the ending your story with the question: What flavor do you want to leave on the reader’s tongue? What emotion do you want them to carry into dreams when they turn off the light?
I was left with the question of why (in the next to last chapter) she had left her voice and story to reflect – exquisitely, of course, but in an entirely new voice – on the immigrant experience. Not just her peoples’, but yours and mine as well, no matter where they came from to enter the mêlée of newness and seeming-to-belong in a soul which was cut from the wrong cloth. It felt to me that that chapter would stand alone and superlatively as a short story or creative commentary in a sophisticated magazine like The New Yorker – where it would reach a broader audience and build her a readership.
The flavor I was left with was a struggle to understand why she had ended with such a gorey image after evoking such profound empathy throughout the story. Her brilliance lies in drawing me back to the book three days later because it haunted me. I began to open it at random, to appreciate the stunning voice – or voices, given the next to last chapter – and the arc of the story: establishing the home experience, then contrasting the American experience with it while full of judgment, then the longing for her native ground. In a skype call to one of her friends in Zimbabwe she realizes that she can’t go home again, and if she would be barred from returning to America.
In revisiting, I see that the final image of a mangled body is the feeling of the immigrant soul. And, in truth, it is shrouded in the sweet scent of fresh-baked bread. I wish my grandmother would have spoken of her experience, instead of relegating it to a past of no consequence – which, in fact, she was unwilling to revisit.
Take note that NoViolet Bulawayo will be a featured speaker at the San Francisco Writers Conference February 13-16. And I’ll be there, as usual, offering free 10 minute consultations on your project, whether you’re stuck and need to discern the next step, want a quick critic on structure or writing or voice, or want help preparing to pitch the 30+ agents who will be there looking for clients.
Let me know if posting a blog this long is too much for you. I loved the book and its lessons for writers, so it was hard to stop quoting, expounding, and musing.
Until next time, delight in the process.