We Need New Names is a fictional novel by NoViolet Bulawayo. The novel is told by the narrator, who is a 10 year-old girl named Darling. Darling takes the reader on a journey from her life before it fell apart to the times when she lives in a shantytown called Paradise in Zimbabwe, Africa. Darling travels to America to escape the run-down life she lives there, only to find that she has lost a piece of who she is. Some interesting recurring themes that occur during Darling’s journey include her changing idea of home and sickness. A prevailing theme in We Need New Names is what home means to a person. In Darling’s case, she feels where she came from influences how she is. She always feels as if she’s doing the wrong thing when she moves to
…show more content…
In Zimbabwe, Darling experiences many accounts of sickness all around her. The children find a woman who hung herself. Eventually, they find out that this woman killed herself because she would rather go quickly than have AIDS make her weak and in pain. Later on, her father comes back from South Africa with the AIDS virus and she is very ashamed of it. She doesn’t tell her friends and makes many excuses to keep them away. When her friends finally do come in to see her father, Darling thinks to herself, “I am careful not to look anyone in the face because I don’t want them to see the shame in my eyes, and I also don’t want to see the laughter in theirs” (Bulawayo 103). Despite the fact that many have died from the illness, there is a stigma of shame around it because it is sexually transmitted. In America, Darling cleans the house of a rich man and finds out that his daughter is bulimic. Darling has an entirely different reaction that shows when she says, “I just kill myself with laughter, Because, Miss I Want to Be Sexy, there is this: You have a fridge bloated with food so no matter how much you starve yourself, you’ll never know real, true hunger” (Bulawayo 270). Darling does not understand how the girl can have real issues when she has money, education, and
In Zimbabwe, Darling experiences many accounts of sickness all around her. The children find a woman who hung herself. Eventually, they find out that this woman killed herself because she would rather go quickly than have AIDS make her weak and in pain. Later on, her father comes back from South Africa with the AIDS virus and she is very ashamed of it. She doesn’t tell her friends and makes many excuses to keep them away. When her friends finally do come in to see her father, Darling thinks to herself, “I am careful not to look anyone in the face because I don’t want them to see the shame in my eyes, and I also don’t want to see the laughter in theirs” (Bulawayo 103). Despite the fact that many have died from the illness, there is a stigma of shame around it because it is sexually transmitted. In America, Darling cleans the house of a rich man and finds out that his daughter is bulimic. Darling has an entirely different reaction that shows when she says, “I just kill myself with laughter, Because, Miss I Want to Be Sexy, there is this: You have a fridge bloated with food so no matter how much you starve yourself, you’ll never know real, true hunger” (Bulawayo 270). Darling does not understand how the girl can have real issues when she has money, education, and