We Need New Names

by NoViolet Bulawayo

you have to be able to return from wherever you go.

She sings it wrong because she doesn’t know all the English words because she doesn’t speak the right English because she didn’t go to school, but I don’t correct her since you can’t tell an adult nothing.

When nothing happens, he wipes his forehead with the back of his sleeve, throws the stick to the side, and leaps onto the woman like maybe he is Hulkogen, squashing her mountains beneath him.

It’s Sis Betty who finally gets us to stop by screaming at us, but she does it in our language, maybe so that the NGO people do not understand.

Then 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,

I saw it on TV in Harare when I visited Sekuru Godi. ER is what they do in a hospital in America.

The guard is already at the gate of the cream house with the big satellite dish and massive grounds.

Can’t you read? You brung English to this country and now you want it explained to you, your own language, have you no shame?

What exactly is an African? Godknows asks.

When he starts speaking to me in my language I laugh; I have never heard a white person speak my language before. It sounds funny, but I’m a little disappointed because I want to keep speaking in English.

Can you just say something in your language? she says. I laugh a small laugh, because what do you say to that?

She is speaking in our language now, which means the conversation is over. When Aunt Fostalina switches languages like that, you know whatever was being talked about is finished.

The problem with English is this: You usually can’t open your mouth and it comes out just like that—first you have to think what you want to say. Then you have to find the words. Then you have to carefully arrange those words in your head. Then you have to say the words quietly to yourself, to make sure you got them okay. And finally, the last step, which is to say the words out loud and have them sound just right.

And because you are speaking like falling, it’s as if you are an idiot, when the truth is that it’s the language and the whole process that’s messed up. And then the problem with those who speak only English is this: they don’t know how to listen; they are busy looking at your falling instead of paying attention to what you are saying.

I also have my list of American words that I keep under the tongue like talismans,

English is like a huge iron door and you are always losing the keys.

America has taught you to speak English to your mother, and with that accent.

Mother had said to see about sending money to buy a satellite dish from her neighbor’s son who was importing the dishes from China.

Well, make sure you tell her again. We need the dish, why do you want to enjoy the fine things all by yourselves in that America?

I heard all that talk from your mother’s TV.

First of all, it’s called Ebonics and it be a language system, but it be our own, naamean, ’coz we ain’t trynna front.

Because we were not in our country, we could not use our own languages, and so when we spoke our voices came out bruised. When we talked, our tongues thrashed madly in our mouths,

I’m supposed to start teaching him my language because he says he and his brother are going to my country so he can shoot an elephant, something he has dreamed of doing ever since he was a boy. I don’t know where my language comes in—like, does he want to ask the elephant if it wants to be killed or something?

ever since that Kony video came out,

His language is deepening now and I’m having a hard time understanding everything;