We Need New Names

by NoViolet Bulawayo

I am thinking I want my mother too, we all want our mothers, even though when they are here we don’t really care about them.

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.

I would rather anybody, even Satan himself, wallop me instead of my mother.

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.

They are people, you asshole!

There is just no sense being afraid when you live so near the graves; it would be like the tongue fearing the teeth.

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.

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 and hunger in their stomachs and grief in their footsteps. Leaving their mothers and fathers and children behind, leaving their umbilical cords underneath the soil, leaving the bones of their ancestors in the earth, leaving everything that makes them who and what they are, leaving because it is no longer possible to stay. They will never be the same again because you just cannot be the same once you leave behind who and what you are, you just cannot be the same.

We looked at people sending their aging parents away to be taken care of by strangers. We looked at parents not being allowed to beat their own children. We looked at strange things like these, things we had never seen in our lives, and said, What kind of land is this, just what kind of land?

How hard it was to get to America—harder than crawling through the anus of a needle. For the visas and passports, we begged, despaired, lied, groveled, promised, charmed, bribed—anything to get us out of the country. For his passport and travel, Tshaka Zulu sold all of his father’s cows, against the old man’s wishes.

Nozipho, like Primrose and Sicelokuhle and Maidei, slept with that fat black pig Banyile Khoza from the passport office. Girls flat on their backs, Banyile between their legs, America on their minds.