We Need New Names

by NoViolet Bulawayo

we see the big NGO lorry passing Fambeki, headed towards us. We immediately stop playing and start singing and dancing and jumping. What we really want to do is take off and run to meet the lorry but we know we cannot. Last time we did, the NGO people were not happy about it, like we had committed a crime against humanity. So now we just sing and wait for the lorry to approach us instead. The waiting is painful; we watch the lorry getting closer and closer, but it seems far away at the same time, like it’s not even here yet but stuck somewhere else, in another country. It’s the gifts that we know are inside that make it hard to wait and watch the lorry crawl. This time the NGO people are late; they were supposed to come on the fifteenth of last month and that month came and went and now we are on another month.

The NGO people step out of the lorry, all five of them. There are three white people, two ladies and one man, whom you can just look at and know they’re not from here, and Sis Betty, who is from here. Sis Betty speaks our languages, and I think her job is to explain us to the white people, and them to us. Then there is the driver, who I think is also from here. Besides the fact that he drives, he doesn’t look important. Except for the driver, all of them wear sunglasses. Eyes look at us that we cannot really see because they are hidden behind a wall of black glass.

the man starts taking pictures with his big camera. They just like taking pictures, these NGO people, like maybe we are their real friends and relatives and they will look at the pictures later and point us out by name to other friends and relatives once they get back to their homes. They don’t care that we are embarrassed by our dirt and torn clothing, that we would prefer they didn’t do it; they just take the pictures anyway, take and take. We don’t complain because we know that after the picture-taking comes the giving of gifts.

Who will look at your picture? I ask. Who will see our pictures? But nobody answers me.

We push and we shove and we yell and we scream. We lurch forward with hands outstretched. We want to grab and seize and hoard. The NGO people just stand there gaping. Then the tall lady in the blue hat shouts, Excuse me! Order! Order, please! but we just laugh and dive and heave and shove and shout like we cannot even understand spoken language.

We are careful not to touch the NGO people, though, because we can see that even though they are giving us things, they do not want to touch us or for us to touch them.

The adults have come from the shacks and are standing slightly to the side like they have been counted out of country-game. They don’t order us to stop pushing. They don’t look at us with talking eyes. But we know that if the NGO people were not here, they would seize switches or pounce on us with their bare hands, that if the NGO people were not here, we would not even dare act like we are d...

Thank you much, I say to the pretty lady who hands me my things, to show her that I know English. She doesn’t say anything back, like maybe I just barked.

After we get our things, it’s the adults’ turn. They stand in their own line, trying to look like they don’t really care, like they have better things to do than be here. The truth is that we hear them all the time complain about how the NGO people have forgotten them, how they should visit more often, how NGO this and NGO that, like maybe the NGO are their parents. Soon the adults get small packets of beans and sugar and mealie-meal but you can see from their faces that they are not satisfied. They look at the tiny packages like they don’t want them, like they are embarrassed and disappointed by them, but in the end they turn and head back to the shacks with the things.

Hawu, MotherLove! Sis Betty shouts in a silly voice like she is coaxing a stupid child. Please come, bantu, can’t you see we’ve brought you gifts? she says. The NGO people hold out more little packages to MotherLove, and the two white women even bare their teeth like grinning dogs. Everybody is waiting to see what MotherLove will do. She turns and strides away, head held high, the bangles on her arms jingling, the stars on her dress shining, her scent of lemon staying in the air even after she is gone.

Now that the lorry is gone-gone, we do not scream anymore. We are as quiet as graves, sad like the adults coming back from burying the dead. Then Bastard says, Let’s go and play war, and then we take off and run to kill each other with our brand-new guns from America.

The adults are preparing to vote and so for now everything is not the same in Paradise. When we wake up, the men are already parked under the jacaranda, but this time they are not crouching over draughts, no. They sit up straight, chests jutting out, and hold their heads high. They have their shirts on and have combed their hair and just look like real people again. When we pass, they smile and wave like they can actually see us, like maybe they like us now, like we are their new friends. We are surprised that they still remember how to smile, but we don’t smile back. We just stand together and carefully look at them, at the hairs peeping through the tops of their shirts, at the foreheads that we know can turn to ridges anytime, at the eyes that we have seen become lightning whenever they’re angry, at the bricks in the arms that have clobbered us before, and we know that this smiling at us means nothing.

The women, when the women hear the men, they giggle. Now there is something almost lovely in the women’s eyes, and from the way they are looking, you can tell that they are trying to be beautiful. Painted lips. Made-up hair. A pink ribbon pinned to the dress, just above the left breast. A thick figure belt. A bangle made from rusty, twisted wire. A fur coat, most of the fur fallen off. A flower tucked behind an ear. Hair straightened by a red-hot rock. Earrings made from colorful seeds. Bright patches of cloth sewn onto a skirt. We haven’t seen the women look like this in a while and their beauty makes us want to love them.

You know, one day I’ll become president, Bastard says. We have put up most of the posters and we’re now doing the last of the shacks, towards Heavenway Cemetery. President of what? I say. President of a country, this country, Bastard says. What do you think I’m talking about, you dumb donkey? But you have to be an old, old man to become president, Stina says. Who told you that? How do you know?

We didn’t always live in this tin, though. Before, we had a home and everything and we were happy. It was a real house made of bricks, with a kitchen, sitting room, and two bedrooms. Real walls, real windows, real floors, and real doors and a real shower and real taps and real running water and a real toilet you could sit on and do whatever you wanted to do. We had real sofas and real beds and real tables and a real TV and real clothes. Everything real. Now all we have is this small bed that sits on some bricks and poles. Mother made the bed herself, with the help of Mother of Bones. The inside of the mattress is made of plastic and chicken’s and duck’s feathers and old pieces of cloth and all sorts of things. That’s our parents’ bed, but Father is not home to sleep on it because he is in South Africa. He does not return to see us or bring us things, which is why Mother is sometimes worried and sometimes mad and sometimes disappointed in him. Because Father does not do anything for us, Mother complains. About our tinned house, Paradise, the food that is not there, the clothes she wants, and everything else.

Now I am counting inside my head; this way I will not sleep. Nobody knows that sometimes I do not sleep. I am the hare. Even if I want to sleep I cannot because if I sleep, the dream will come, and I don’t want it to come. I am afraid of the bulldozers and those men and the police, afraid that if I let the dream come, they will get out of it and become real. I dream about what happened back at our house before we came to Paradise. I try to push it away and push it away but the dream keeps coming and coming like bees, like rain, like the graves at Heavenway.

later the people with cameras and T-shirts that say BBC and CNN come to shake their heads and look and take our pictures like we are pretty, and one of them says, It’s like a tsunami tore through this place, Jesus, it’s like a fucking tsunami tore this up. I say to Verona, What is a fucking tsunami? and she says, A fucking tsunami walks on water, like Jesus, only it’s a devil, didn’t you see that time on TV, how it came out of the water and left all those people dead in that other country?

By the time the adults return we are dizzy from waiting. We see the first ones appear from behind Fambeki and we stand up. They are walking like floating and speaking with their hands, and we can tell, even though they are so far, that they are happy. We forget they are not really our friends and take off to meet them. We collide with their bodies and they catch us with those hands with black ink on them, because that is how they have voted, with their fingerprints, they tell us. They catch us and toss us in the air, toss us so far up we see the blue so close we could stick our tongues out and taste it.

Get ready, get ready for a new country, no more of this Paradise anymore, they say when they steady us on our feet. They say Paradise like they will never say it again: the Pa part sounding like it is something popping; letting their tongues roll a while longer when they say the ra part; letting their jaws separate as far as possible when they say the di part; and finally hissing like a bus’s wheels letting out air when they say the se part. And once they say it like that, Pa-ra-di-se, we know that it is a place we will soon be leaving, like in the Bible, when those people left that terrible place and that old man with a long beard like Father Christmas hit the road with a stick and then there was a river behind them.

They appeared one by one, two by two, three by three. They appeared single file, like ants. In swarms, like flies. In angry waves, like a wretched sea. They appeared in the early morning, in the afternoon, in the dead of night. They appeared with the dust from their crushed houses clinging to their hair and skin and clothes, making them appear like things from another life. Swollen ankles and blisters under their feet, they appeared fatigued by the long walk. They appeared carrying sticks with which they marked the ground for where a shack would begin and end, and these, they carefully passed around, partitioning the new land with hands shaking like they were killing something. Squatting to mark the ground like that, they appeared broken—shards of glass people. They appeared with tin, with cardboard, with plastic, with nails and other things with which to build, and they tried to appear calm as they put up their shacks, nailing tin on tin, piece by piece, bravely looking up at the sky and trying to tell themselves and one another that even here, in this strange new place, the sky was still the same familiar blue, a sign things would work out. But far too many appeared without the things they should have appeared with.

They shouldn’t have done this to us, no, they shouldn’t have. Salilwelilizwe leli, we fought to liberate this country. Wasn’t it like this before independence? Do you remember how the whites drove us from our land and put us in those wretched reserves? I was there, you were there, wasn’t it just like this? No, those were evil white people who came to steal our land and make us paupers in our own country. What, but aren’t you a pauper now? Aren’t these black people evil for bulldozing your home and leaving you with nothing now? You are all wrong. Better a white thief do that to you than your own black brother. Better a wretched white thief.

And the parents held their children close to their chests and caressed their dusty, unkempt heads with hardened palms, appearing to console them, but really, they did not quite know what to say. Gradually, the children gave up and ceased asking questions and just appeared empty, almost, like their childhood had fled and left only the bones of its shadow behind.

Generally the men always tried to appear strong; they walked tall, heads upright, arms steady at the sides, and feet firmly planted like trees. Solid, Jericho walls of men. But when they went out in the bush to relieve themselves and nobody was looking, they fell apart like crumbling towers and wept with the wretched grief of forgotten concubines. And when they returned to the presence of their women and children and everybody else, they stuck hands deep inside torn pockets until they felt their dry thighs, kicked little stones out of the way, and erected themselves like walls again, but then the women, who knew all the ways of weeping and all there was to know about falling apart, would not be deceived; they gently rose from the hearths, beat dust off their skirts, and planted themselves like rocks in front of their men and children and shacks, and only then did all appear almost tolerable.

Forgiveness is not a friend-friend because her family only just recently appeared in Paradise—this makes her a stranger. On top of that, she is not even like us; if you look at her really closely you’ll see her skin is too light, and her hair almost wants to be curly. Maybe she was born just different, maybe God couldn’t decide to make her black or white or even albino.

In order to do this right, we need new names. I am Dr. Bullet, she is beautiful, and you are Dr. Roz, he is tall, Sbho says, nodding at me. You said he, I don’t want to be a man, I say. Well, that’s who I remember, either you are that or you are nothing, Sbho says, making a cutting motion across Chipo’s stomach. And you, you are Dr. Cutter, Sbho says to Forgiveness, and Forgiveness spits and ignores Sbho. Who am I? Chipo says. You, you are a patient. Patients are just called patients, Sbho says.

MotherLove shakes her head, and then her body heaves downward, like she is a sack falling. But she is not angry. She doesn’t yell. She doesn’t slap or grab anybody by the ears. She doesn’t say she will kill us or tell the mothers. I look at her face and see the terrible face of someone I have never seen before, and on the stranger’s face is this look of pain, this look that adults have when somebody dies. There are tears in the eyes and she is clutching her chest like there’s a fire inside it. Then MotherLove reaches out and holds Chipo. We are all watching and not knowing what to do because when grown-ups cry, it’s not like you can ask them what’s wrong, or tell them to shut up; there are just no words for a grown-up’s tears. Then Chipo stops crying and wraps her arms around MotherLove, even though they don’t really reach around. A purple lucky butterfly sits at the top of Chipo’s head and when it flies away, Forgiveness chases it. Then Sbho and I take off after Forgiveness, and we are all chasing the butterfly and screaming out for luck.

Yes the wife is right it will get better my son and the Lord God is here he will not forsake us he will not for he is a loving God, Mother of Bones said, rubbing her hands together like she was washing them, like she was apologizing for something, like it was cold outside. Mother of Bones said God like she knew God personally, like God was not even something bigger than the sky but a small, beautiful boy with spaced hair you could count and missing buttons on his Harvard shirt, who spoke with a stammer and played Find bin Laden with us. That’s how it felt, the way Mother of Bones said God.

Father left not too long after that. And later, when the pictures and letters and money and clothes and things he had promised didn’t come, I tried not to forget him by looking for him in the faces of the Paradise men, in the faces of my friends’ fathers. I would watch the men closely, wondering which of their gestures my father would be likely to make, which voice he would use, which laugh. How much hair would cover his arms and face.

It’s not the lying itself that makes me feel bad but the fact that I’m here lying to my friends. I don’t like not playing with them and I don’t like lying to them because they are the most important thing to me and when I’m not with them I feel like I’m not even me.

I have decided that praying to God is a waste of time. You pray and pray and pray and nothing changes, like for example I prayed for a real house and good clothes and a bicycle and things for a long, long, time, and none of it has happened, not even one little thing, which is how I know that all this praying for Father is just people playing. I’ve thought about it properly, this whole praying thing, I mean really thought about it, and what I think is that maybe people are doing it wrong; that instead of asking God nicely, people should be demanding and questioning and threatening to stop worshipping him. Maybe that way, he would think differently and try to make things right, like he is supposed to; even that verse in the Bible says ask for anything and you shall receive and, I mean, whose words are those?

He goes on to tell Mother of Bones that it doesn’t mean the spirit is gone because it has now got into Father and is devouring his blood and body, making him all bony and sick and taking his strength away. In order to avenge the spirit and heal Father, Prophet Revelations Bitchington Mborro says, we need to find two fat white virgin goats to be brought up the mountain for sacrifice, and that Father has to be bathed in the goats’ blood. In addition, Prophet Revelations Bitchington Mborro says he will need five hundred U.S. dollars as payment, and if there are no U.S. dollars, euros will do. When he says this, Mother gets up angry-like and boils out of the shack, slamming the door behind her.

It’s no use hiding AIDS, Stina says. When he mentions the Sickness by name, I feel a shortness of breath. I look around to see if there are other people within earshot. It’s like hiding a thing with horns in a sack. One day the horns will start boring through the sack and come out in the open for everybody to see, Stina says.

I keep expecting for somebody to laugh at Father’s bones but nobody makes a sound; it is all quiet like we are maybe at church and Jesus just entered and coughed twice. 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.

I know Father is sick but the thought of him dead and gone-gone scares me. It’s not like he’ll be in South Africa, for example, where it is possible to tell yourself and other people that since that’s where he went then maybe one day he will return. Death is not like that, it is final, like that girl hanging in a tree because as we later found out from the letter in her pockets, she had the Sickness and thought it was better to just get it over with and kill herself. Now she is dead and gone, and Mavava, her mother, will never ever see her again. To heaven. My father is going to heaven, I say, even if I don’t really think there is a heaven; I just don’t like the thought of him not going anywhere. I hear myself saying my like he is maybe my favorite thing, like he is mine, like I own him. He is looking like a child, just lying there, unable to do anything, and then I’m wishing I were big and strong so I could scoop him up and rock him in my arms.

reach out and touch him too because I have never really touched him ever since he came and this is what I must do now because how will it look when everybody is touching him and I’m not? We all look at one another and smile-sing because we are touching him, just touching him all over like he is a beautiful plaything we have just rescued from a rubbish bin in Budapest. He feels like dry wood in my hands, but there is a strange light in his sunken eyes, like he has swallowed the sun.

Kill the Boer, the farmer, the khiwa! Strike fear in the heart of the white man! White man, you have no place here, go back, go home! Africa for Africans, Africa for Africans! Kill the Boer, the farmer, the khiwa!

The gang has spread out in packs now, and they go about kicking down gates or jumping over Durawalls to get into yards, where they pound on doors, shouting for the people to come out. They are wild, chanting and screaming and yelling and baring teeth and waving weapons in the air, and I’m reminded of the gang that came for Bornfree; that is how they did.

He is barefoot, which is the first time I’m seeing a white person going barefoot like he is trying to say he can’t afford shoes.

But it doesn’t look like a dog, it looks like a plaything and it can’t even bark. How will it bite and kill anybody? How will it hunt? Godknows says. It’s a white people’s dog, it’s supposed to be strange, Bastard says.

And you, stupid white man, we don’t care, you hear me? If you didn’t bring this land with you on a ship or plane from wherever you came from, then we don’t bloody fucking care, says the boss.

Just like a white man! He has the testicles to tell a black man to listen in his own country. Somebody please tell this white man here that this is not fucking Rhodesia!

Know this, you bloody colonist, from now on the black man is done listening, you hear? This is black-man country and the black man is in charge now. Africa for Africans, the boss says to thunderous applause.

What exactly is an African? Godknows asks.

They are people, you asshole! Sbho says in this hard, hot voice we have never heard before, and I almost fall out of the tree because nobody has ever called Bastard that. Never ever. I wait to see what he will do but he is looking at Sbho with confusion on his face.

When the group passes under our tree, the woman looks up like God whispered to her to look up, like something told her we were up here. I see a black shadow flash over her kind of beautiful face; it’s like she’s a chameleon trying to change color and take ours. I cannot look away from the woman’s eyes, but I’m ashamed that she is seeing us up in her tree, ashamed for her that we are seeing them being taken away like that. The black shadow remains on her face, and she keeps looking, like maybe she wants to pluck us out of the tree with her eyes, and I begin to think we will fall out from being looked at like that. We know from the look, because eyes can talk, that she hates us, not just a little bit but a whole lot. She doesn’t say anything; they move her past, and we exhale.

And on the red mounds, the artifacts memorializing the dead: Smashed plates. Broken cups. Knobkerries. Heaps of stones. Branches of the mphafa tree. Everything looking sad and clumsy and ugly. I don’t know why people don’t try to make the place look pretty—for example, by painting the crosses and weeding the khaki grass and planting nice flowers—since the dead cannot do it themselves. That is what I would want if I were dead. For my grave to look nice, not this kaka.

When you look at the names together with the dates you see that they are really now names of the dead. And when you know maths like me then you can figure out the ages of the buried and see that they died young, their lives short like those of house mice. A person is supposed to live a full life, live long and grow old, like Mother of Bones, for example. It’s that Sickness that is killing them. Nobody can cure it so it just does as it pleases—killing killing killing, like a madman hacking unripe sugarcane with a machete.

But these ones are not like the mourners we have seen before. These ones do not cry; they do not wail. They do not lower their eyes to the ground; they do not cross their hands behind their backs. They do not measure their footsteps. These ones rush after the coffin. They whistle; they raise their fists. They chant Bornfree’s name like they want him to appear from wherever he is. These mourners are angry.

We’ll start living. It won’t be the same again. Come, change, come now. They talked like that, stayed up night after night and waited for the change that was near. Waited and waited and waited. But then the waiting did not end and the change did not happen.

He says more holy things and 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.