By Sabine Peschel:
Ms. Bulawayo, you teach fiction at Stanford University. How do your colleagues and students address you?
NoViolet. That’s the name I go by. Elizabeth Tshele, even though it’s my birth name, is the name that is just in my official documents. I like to remind people that I come from a culture where you grow up with quite a bunch of names.
Why did you choose this name, NoViolet Bulawayo?
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It’s from my mother’s name, actually. My mother was named Violet. She passed away when I was 18 months old, and she wasn’t really spoken about that much. I grew up with a sense of something missing. I decided when I was at a certain age to honor her. “No” in my language means “with.” Of course Bulawayo is my city, my hometown. And being in the US for about 13 years without being able to go home made me very homesick. So it was my way of staying connected.
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Many readers think your novel We Need New Names is strongly autobiographical. Or is it not?
Not as much as most people think. There are parts of me as in most of my work. I like to write from the bone. Even if it’s just a small part I feel like it gives my work the certain charge. The first half of the novel does not have much of me. Darling, the narrator and main protagonist in Zimbabwe, does not have a strong connection with me. My childhood was very normal and beautiful. Zimbabwe in the 80s was this land of promise. We grew up as kids in working countries grow up — because the country at that time was really functional.
But as Darling does not know the stability my generation enjoyed and experienced, her childhood is really under pressure. So it is when she crosses the border to the US that our stories started to sort of intersect. I actually allowed her to borrow from mine, because I kind of know what it is like to be an outsider. To be an immigrant, to struggle with fitting in, find my way in a new space. But even in that part of the novel I didn’t set out to write an autobiographical text.
The language you chose for your protagonists, the children who live in Paradise, is a mixture of African and English vocabulary, neologisms, incantations, curses. How did you find this strong and colourful language?
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I’d say I’m indebted to my culture. I grew up in a space where language was alive. Language was currency. I wanted to write a book that captured that, that would resonate especially with readers coming from that space. And a part of it also came from the fact that I was raised by storytellers, especially my father and my grandmother, of course the women who stayed home when I was growing up, they talked, they gossiped. So I was very conscious of language as a living beast. I wanted the book to be a celebration of that. I wanted that color and that texture and that pulse present.
What language did you grow up with?
I grew up with Ndebele, and then English was there, somewhere, it’s a language that we encountered in school. I wouldn’t bring English home; my father would not allow it. And looking back now as an adult I think it is a good thing because it cemented my relationship with my language.
Now, when it comes to me writing I’m juggling two languages, obviously, Ndebele is my ancient language, the language of intimacy. And as much as I’m fine with communicating in English it doesn’t have that weight for me. But of course I have to produce a book that looks like English on the page. So it takes me back to that point of negotiating. And of course there is the love of language. I really want my language to be in my work. So I come to it through a process of translation.
In the second part of your book, when your protagonist Darling is in the United States, the language is pale, less colorful, and to describe the life she leads you make use of stereotypes and clichés. Is this an expression of that she loses her identity, or part of it?
Whenever somebody crosses geographical spaces, whenever we cross cultures, something is lost. I remember just from my own experience that I spent the first year in the US in silence. I moved from being one of the noisiest kids in class to being the quietest. And I was dealing with all kinds of things, especially culture shock and failure to access the language. So that is exactly what is happening to Darling. Part of her identity is tied to space. So without her language and without the specific group of people she interacts with, she has to become a different person.
And I know readers complain about that, but I feel like they sort of need to think deeper about what’s happening to Darling. Language is one way that disconnection kind of manifests itself. And I hear this from immigrants that I meet in the US, even older ones who have been in the US for so many years, that they are struggling with language.
This naturally leads to the question: Are you a Zimbabwean, an African or an American author?
I’m a Zimbabwean author, and by extension I’m an African. So that makes me an African author, just like I’m an African woman. But of course we have to add that Africa is a big monster of space. It’s not singular in any way. So as much as we claim some of these identities, they are also not small. When I think about those identities, especially as somebody who is writing outside, I’m thinking in terms of representation, in terms of how important it is for the young generation of would-be writers, the ones who are going to be writers in the next 10, 15 years, to face the fates like mine in a space that has been dominated by other races and other cultures. That’s why I’m quite comfortable claiming those identities.
You mention “Shitty former Rhodesia” and late in the novel “Zim,” but you never clearly say that Paradise, the slum the children you write about live in, is in Zimbabwe. Why don’t you address Zimbabwe and its political problems directly?
I felt it wasn’t necessary. I felt the context was there. We all know that it is Zimbabwe. Part of why I left it like that is it’s not specifically a Zimbabwean story. It has happened in a lot of places in the world and is going to happen. So I wanted it to have this kind of universal aspect to it. Sometimes when you name a thing it arrests people’s imagination and perceptions.
I’ll mention, though, that the first drafts of the novel were actually naming Zimbabwe, and they addressed Mugabe. The draft was not in Darling’s voice, it was in an older peasant’s voice. So you can imagine it was very political. There was a lot of an angry NoViolet in there. It started to kill the story after a while, and I sort of had to pull back and introduce a young narrator and also take the politics out of it. In this version I think the politics are still there, but this is not blocking the story.—DWS
