Not at Home in the World: The Home, the Unhomely, and Migrancy in NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names

ABSTRACT

The notion of home has become a popular topic across various disciplines. Literary and cultural studies have also engaged with this concept in different ways including how fictional texts represent it. This paper explores the notion of home in relation to identity in NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel, We Need New Names (2013). Bulawayo tells the story of 10-year-old Darling, who together with her friends have a yearning to move away from their shantytown in Zimbabwe, ironically named Paradise, to any place that would adequately meet their physiological needs. The narrative is set in the context of the post-2000 economic/political crisis in Zimbabwe that saw many Zimbabweans migrating to other countries in search of greener pastures. In the second part of the novel, Darling eventually migrates to America and experiences the new space in complicated ways that she never imagined. Using transnationalism as a theoretical lens, this article argues that cultural and linguistic forces shape the experiences of migrants in their new homes. Migration is a complex phenomenon that brings serious identity challenges for migrants. In this analysis, we appropriate transnationalism to analyze transnational identities in relation to physical movement and homemaking as portrayed in We Need New names.

Disclosure statement

This project was funded by NRF's postgraduate scholarship.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nonki Motahane

Nonki Motahane is a PhD student in the Department of English at the University of the Free State. Her research focuses on migration, migrancy and transnationalism in postcolonial African literatures.

Rodwell Makombe

Rodwell Makombe is a Senior lecturer in the Department of English at the University of the Free State, South Africa. His areas of research interest include postcolonial literary studies, social media discourses and cultural studies.