When the action moves to America, the incidents are more banal but if anything more disturbing: Darling, now a teenager, watches unpleasant porn with friends, runs wild in the mall or goes to clubs where simulated sex on the dance floor is the norm. They went to their computers and googled …they looked at us with something between pity and horror and said, Jeez, you really come from there?”Įach chapter focuses on a dramatic incident: the children find a hanged body NGO workers arrive with food parcels a murdered activist is buried. Sometimes Darling’s story dissolves into a heightened, depersonalised prose the chapter “How They Lived” is a howl of pain for the deracinated immigrant, cut off from parents back home and from their own westernised children, who “did not beg us for stories of the land we had left behind. There is a narrative arc but little plot, as Darling moves from an appalling situation in which she is happy, to a comfortable situation in which she is unhappy from the influence of one group of friends to another, shallower group. While Darling adjusts to her new life with a lack of surface fuss, underneath it she is aware that something has been broken that she will never be able to mend. (Bulawayo herself was born in Zimbabwe and moved to Kalamazoo when she was 18). The second half of the novel sees Darling relocated to America, living first in Detroit and then moving to Kalamazoo, Michigan. The fulcrum of the novel is the short chapter “How They Left”, which circles around the repeated phrase “leaving in droves” in a poetic incantation: “Look at the children of the land leaving in droves, leaving their own land with bleeding wounds on their bodies and shock on their faces and blood in their hearts …” Life, though tough, has a magic and zest, especially when they are playing exciting games such as “Find bin Laden”. The bitterness of the political situation barely impinges on the youngsters. They were not born in poverty their families have been driven from their homes for opposing the regime of Robert Mugabe. Gradually we learn more about the shanty-dwellers.

We need new names by noviolet bulawayo