We Need New Names: A Novel

by Noviolet Bulawayo

  At JCPenney we head straight to the Juniors section. We pick out jeans, T-shirts, dresses, sweaters, just pick and pick whatever we want. We don’t talk that much because we don’t want anybody following us or asking why we’re not in school and where our mothers are and that kind of stuff. Sometimes we lose one another for minutes but then we run into one another again because we’re circling and circling. When our arms are full we go to the fitting rooms. There are some stores where they’ll tell you to take just five or maybe six things to try at a time, but JCPenney is not like that; here, you can take even a mountain to the fitting rooms if you want and nobody will bother you.

  Let’s dress for a party, Marina shouts from her room.

  Shhhh, don’t be so loud, fool, Kristal says.

  What kind of party? I say.

  Sweet sixteen, Marina says, keeping her voice low.

  When we come out, Marina is in a strapless black dress with sparkling thingies at the bust going all the way down to the stomach. A lace-like thing covers the skirt part. Kristal is in a red dress with frills; it’s sleeveless and has a deep cut that leaves her big boobs in your face, just the way she likes, and right now she has her chest pushing out to exaggerate the boobs. And me, I’m in a long cream one that sweeps the ground. We stand there like models, staring at our reflections.

  You need boobs to wear a strapless like that, Kristal says, looking at Marina in the mirror. I giggle, but not too much, since my boobs, too, are small-small; sometimes I don’t know why I even wear a bra.

  Whatever, Marina says, and rolls her eyes.

  After we agree that Kristal has the best dress, we go back to the dressing room to change for a dance party. When we come out we are looking like whores: skimpy skirts where you can’t even bend without showing your panties, and tight tops we almost cannot breathe in. We don’t spend that much time in front of the mirror, maybe because we are a little embarrassed. We hurry back to change for a girls’ night out. When we look at one another we laugh because we are all wearing the same skinny jeans, and Marina and Kristal are even wearing the same sleeveless lace shirt. Since I am the one wearing something different, a V-neck with a French flag on my stomach, I win the round, but when I turn around to go back to my fitting room, Marina says, You could have at least wore something with an African flag.

  We change for prom, for church, for the red carpet, for a blind date; we just change and change, meeting for every round to admire and compare. We have just changed for a football game when this small woman comes into the fitting rooms wearing scrubs and carrying a couple of dresses. She doesn’t say anything to us, just passes and heads for the handicapped fitting room at the end of the row. Kristal laughs for no reason in particular, but after the woman shuts her door, Marina says, I’m changing, I’m going home now, and I say, Why? right at the time Kristal says, Are you for real?

  We change and leave everything in messy piles.

  Let’s see who gets to the car first without running, I say, and we take off. We power-walk out of JCPenney like we’re trying to lose weight, past the jewelers and the diamonds, down the escalator, past the booths, the old men sitting in the massage chairs. I am at the front and when I glance behind me Marina is dangerously close so I pump my hands and count four-five-six, and walk, and walk. We tear through Borders, and by the time we get to the doors I can’t bear it so I push them open and break into a run. Kristal overtakes me and gets to the car first, and I hear Marina screaming behind me, Not fair, guys, it’s not fair, you broke the rules.

  Inside the car, it feels like the devil is grilling sinners; we roll down our windows and fling our arms out. Then we see her; in the car directly facing us, a woman in a black hijab sitting behind the wheel and rummaging in her purse, maybe looking for keys. She looks at us, smiles briefly, then goes back to her purse, but we just keep staring at her like we are maybe at the zoo. We don’t say anything, but we know it’s because of her dress and the things we see on TV that we stare—if she were wearing jeans or anything else we wouldn’t even look at her.

  Kristal starts the car but then just keeps sitting there like she’s forgotten how to drive.

  What’s wrong with my mother’s car? Marina says. I lean forward, put my head between the front seats to see what is going on.

  You know George, right? Kristal says.

  Who’s George? Marina says.

  The little motherfucker who brought the gun to school, Kristal says.

  What about him? I say, and start waving because the woman is now waving, maybe because we are still staring. Then Marina waves, and we are still waving when the woman’s car starts pulling away.

  Never mind, Kristal says, and she starts reversing the car.

  When I get home, Aunt Fostalina’s car is pulling out of the driveway. She rolls down the window and tells me she is on her way to Shadybrook, so I get into the car, throw my book bag in the back seat. Every so often, Aunt Fostalina is summoned to Shadybrook nursing home to pacify Tshaka Zulu. When his craziness starts, Tshaka Zulu will threaten the other residents and staff with the assegai he claims is hidden somewhere inside his room. I have seen the short stabbing spear; it is not real, but nobody knows this. Tshaka Zulu showed it to me one day; it’s just a drawing of a spear that he keeps folded and hidden away among the pictures of himself when he was a young boy, back in our country.

  The thing with Tshaka Zulu’s madness is that when it comes, when the medicines they keep him on stop working, he refuses to speak in English, and then Claudine, the quiet, pretty lady who runs the nursing home, will call Aunt Fostalina to talk to Tshaka Zulu in our language. This seems to be the only medicine that works, but what Aunt Fostalina has discovered is that when Tshaka Zulu is supposedly crazy, he doesn’t really need calming but listening to. His appears to be the madness that makes him talk, and Aunt Fostalina brings me along because she gets bored listening.

  Today we park the car on the quiet street, rush through the boiling blanket of air and into Shadybrook. The door is opened before we ring the bell by a grinning crazy with blond hair. His name is Andrew. Something is wrong in his head but he is also very smart. Two months ago, for example, the police came to get him because he was said to have hacked into some websites and posted bad pictures of himself. Aunt Fostalina breezes past him toward the basement, which is where Tshaka Zulu’s room is.

  Hi, I say to Andrew, because I have a hard time just pushing past the guy like he doesn’t exist, even though he is a crazy. Shadybrook always smells like a hospital, and already I can feel my stomach clenching.

  Hi, Peter, Andrew says to me. Do you have a cigarette? Which is the question he always asks, and I shake my head no, like I always do. I have stopped correcting him when he calls me Peter. In the common room I wave at a woman I have never seen before. She is seated next to a walker, staring listlessly into the air like she is waiting for something, for an angel to come and bless her, while the TV is on. I quickly look away; I always feel guilty around sick people because there is nothing I can do for them.

  Tshaka Zulu is wearing his traditional dress and standing on the bed. Claudine is pacing up and down the basement, crossing and uncrossing her arms.

  Thank God you’re here, she whispers to Aunt Fostalina. I don’t know how long I can do this, she says.

  It’s okay, I came as soon as I could, why don’t you get some rest, Aunt Fostalina says.

  Tshaka Zulu picks up his shield, raises it above his graying head, and shouts, Bayethe, I welcome you to my kraal, do you want to see my spear? And I have to try hard to suppress a laugh. I know he is not himself and all, but this is something else. The good thing, though, is that he is not really dangerous. He gets down from the bed and proceeds toward his wooden stool, the kind that old men used at home, and sits under the poster of a topless Masai girl, crazy beads all over her body.

  Being in Tshaka Zulu’s room is like being in a museum of remembrance or something—the walls are choking with things: newspaper clippings of Nelson Mandela w
hen he came out of jail and stuff, pictures of our country’s president when he first became president and he had all his hair, a picture of Kwame Nkrumah, Kofi Annan, a big picture of Desmond Tutu, pictures of Miriam Makeba, Brenda Fassie, Hugh Masekela, Lucky Dube, a newspaper clipping of Credo Mutwa, framed pictures of Bébé Manga, Leleti Khumalo, Wangari Maathai, and so on.

  The family pictures are put separate and they take up an entire wall. On days that he is himself, Tshaka Zulu will go over the pictures, point out his sons and daughters and nieces and nephews and grandchildren. He will tell you the jobs they do, the kinds of things they like, where they live, who they are married to, and I am always surprised by how he remembers every detail, like he lives with all these people. He has named all his children and grandchildren, given them names like Gezephi, Sisa, Nokuthula, Nene, Nicholas, Makhosi, Ophelia, Douglas, Sakhile, Eden, Davie, Ian, each name carefully thought out and finally given over the phone.

  It’s how I get to touch them, Tshaka Zulu said to me one day when we were going over the names.

  You see, every time they are called by name and they answer, I am the invisible hand touching them and calling them my own, he said.

  I don’t know exactly what kind of craziness Tshaka Zulu suffers from; Aunt Fostalina told me the name one time but I have forgotten it because it was a complicated name, but I think it’s far much better than some kinds I have seen. Once, when we were coming from hitting Budapest, a crazy man chased us all the way home, half naked. And at one wedding, before we moved to Paradise, a groom just upped and picked up a log and started clobbering people, including his own bride. He never got better; wherever he went, people were always fleeing for their lives.

  How They Lived

  And when they asked us where we were from, we exchanged glances and smiled with the shyness of child brides. They said, Africa? We nodded yes. What part of Africa? We smiled. Is it that part where vultures wait for famished children to die? We smiled. Where the life expectancy is thirty-five years? We smiled. Is it there where dissidents shove AK-47s between women’s legs? We smiled. Where people run about naked? We smiled. That part where they massacred each other? We smiled. Is it where the old president rigged the election and people were tortured and killed and a whole bunch of them put in prison and all, there where they are dying of cholera—oh my God, yes, we’ve seen your country; it’s been on the news.

  And when these words tumbled from their lips like crushed bricks, we exchanged glances again and the water in our eyes broke. Our smiles melted like dying shadows and we wept; wept for our blessed, wretched country. We wept and wept and they pitied us and said, It’s okay—it’s okay, you are in America now, and still we wept and wept and wept and they gave us soft little thingies and said, Here is some Kleenex, here, and we took the soft thingies and put them in our pockets to look at later and we wept still, wept like widows, wept like orphans.

  In America we saw more food than we had seen in all our lives and we were so happy we rummaged through the dustbins of our souls to retrieve the stained, broken pieces of God. We had flung him in there way back when we were still in our own country, flung him during desperate, desperate moments when we were dizzy with hunger and we thought, How come he will not pity us, how come? Thought, Why does he not hear us, why? Thought, How come we ask and ask and ask and still are not given even a morsel, how come? And blind with rage we flung him away and said, Better no God, better no God than live like this, praying like this for things that will never come. Better no God.

  But then when we got to America and saw all that food, we held our breath and thought, Wait, there must be a God. So happy and grateful, we found his discarded pieces and put them together with Krazy Glue bought at the dollar store for only ninety-nine cents and said, In God We Trust too now, In God We Trust for real, and began praying again. At McDonald’s we devoured Big Macs and wolfed down fries and guzzled supersized Cokes. At Burger King we worshipped Whoppers. At KFC we mauled bucket chicken. We went to Chinese buffets and ate all we could inhale—fried rice, chicken, beef, shrimp, and as for the things whose names we could not read, we simply pointed and said, We want that.

  We ate like pigs, like wolves, like dignitaries; we ate like vultures, like stray dogs, like monsters; we ate like kings. We ate for all our past hunger, for our parents and brothers and sisters and relatives and friends who were still back there. We uttered their names between mouthfuls, conjured up their hungry faces and chapped lips—eating for those who could not be with us to eat for themselves. And when we were full we carried our dense bodies with the dignity of elephants—if only our country could see us in America, see us eat like kings in a land that was not ours.

  How America surprised us at first. If you were not happy with your body you could go to a doctor and say, for instance, Doctor, I was born in the wrong body, just make me right; Doctor, I don’t like this nose, these breasts, these lips. 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?

  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, staggered like drunken men. Because we were not using our languages we said things we did not mean; what we really wanted to say remained folded inside, trapped. In America we did not always have the words. It was only when we were by ourselves that we spoke in our real voices. When we were alone we summoned the horses of our languages and mounted their backs and galloped past skyscrapers. Always, we were reluctant to come back down.

  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. Perseverance had to take his sister Netsai out of school. Nqo worked the fields of Botswana for nine months. 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.

  To send us off properly, our elders spilled tobacco on the dry earth to summon the spirits of the ancestors for our protection. Unlike in years long gone, the spirits did not come dancing from the land beneath. They crawled. They stalled. They were hungry. They wanted blood and meat and millet beer, they wanted sacrifices, they wanted gifts. And, save for a few grains of tobacco, we had nothing to give, absolutely nothing. And so the spirits just gazed at us with eyes milked dry of care. Between themselves they whispered: How will these ones ever be whole in that ’Melika, as far away from the graves of the ancestors as it is?

  Do people not live in fear in ’Melika, fear of evil?

  Do they not say it is like a grave in that ’Melika, that going there is like burying yourself because your people may never see you again?

  Is not ’Melika also that wretched place where they took looted black sons and daughters those many, many years ago?

  We heard all this but we let it enter in one ear and leave through the other, pretended we did not hear. We would not be moved, we would not listen; we were going to America. In the footsteps of those looted black sons and daughters, we were going, yes, we were going. And when we got to America we took our dreams, looked at them tenderly as if they were newly born children, and put them away; we would not be pursuing them. We would never be the things we had wanted to be: doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers. No school for us, even though our visas were school visas. We knew we did not have the money for school to begin with, but we had applied for school visas because that was the only way out.

  Instead of going to school, we worked. Our Social Security cards said Valid for work only with INS authorization, but w
e gritted our teeth and broke the law and worked; what else could we do? What could we have done? What could anybody have done? And because we were breaking the law, we dropped our heads in shame; we had never broken any laws before. We dropped our heads because we were no longer people; we were now illegals.

  When they debated what to do with illegals, we stopped breathing, stopped laughing, stopped everything, and listened. We heard: exporting America, broken borders, war on the middle class, invasion, deportation, illegals, illegals, illegals. We bit our tongues till we tasted blood, sat tensely on one butt cheek, afraid to sit on both because how can you sit properly when you don’t know about your tomorrow?

  And because we were illegal and afraid to be discovered we mostly kept to ourselves, stuck to our kind and shied away from those who were not like us. We did not know what they would think of us, what they would do about us. We did not want their wrath, we did not want their curiosity, we did not want any attention. We did not meet stares and we avoided gazes. We hid our real names, gave false ones when asked. We built mountains between us and them, we dug rivers, we planted thorns—we had paid so much to be in America and we did not want to lose it all.

  When they talked about employers checking on workers, our hearts sank. We recalled the tatters of our country left behind, barely held together by American dollars, by monies from other countries, and our blood went cold. And when at work they asked for our papers, we scurried like startled hens and flocked to unwanted jobs, where we met the others, many others. Others with names like myths, names like puzzles, names we had never heard before: Virgilio, Balamugunthan, Faheem, Abdulrahman, Aziz, Baako, Dae-Hyun, Ousmane, Kimatsu. When it was hard to say the many strange names, we called them by their countries.