VOICE OF AFRICA
Zim writer in running for Booker award
NOVIOLET Bulawayo is slight, graceful and very smart. Born and brought up in Bulawayo, and the winner of the 2011 Caine Prize for African writing, she is halfway through a two-year writing fellowship at Stanford University in California. Last week she was shortlisted for the Man Booker, the first Zimbabwean to make it.
She is just 31 years old, but that’s “old enough”, she said cheekily when we met after a panel discussion during last week’s Open Book Festival.
She’s “over the moon” at making the cut, but also scared. If you win the Booker with your debut novel, how do you top that? The novel is called WeNeedNew
Names, and is about Darling, one of a bunch of kids living in a squatter camp called Paradise. Life is hard, but Bulawayo does not succumb to what one of the panelists referred to as poverty porn.
Darling and her friends – Bastard, Godknows – steal fruit, play games and wonder how on Earth the baby is ever going to get out of Chipo’s stomach. And they dream of leaving Paradise for places like the US, Dubai or Europe.
After independence in Zimbabwe, life becomes tougher. Darling’s family lose their house, and her school closes as teachers leave the country.
Eventually Darling achieves her dream of going to the US, but she discovers climbing on an aircraft doesn’t mean leaving the past behind.
Bulawayo knows all about that. At 18 she left Zimbabwe to study law in the US, and found herself in a very different world.
Last week she took part in an Open Book Festival panel discussion on the subject of location, or the role that place plays in the novel. She shared the stage with Nigerian-American Teju Cole, author of the acclaimed Open
City; another Nigerian-American, Tope Folarin, winner of this year’s Caine Prize; and Kenyan-American Mukoma wa Ngugi, author of Nairo
biHeat.
All four discussed the experience of growing up in one country, living in another, and the impact that straddling two continents and cultures has had on their writing.
Bulawayo said she was a little like her character Darling, seeing herself in two halves.
“The first is my Zimbabwean self. I never accepted to myself that I was black, I’d never had the need to cross racial boundaries or force myself to look at my racial identity.
“Then I moved to the US, a place – as someone put it – that’s a melting pot where nothing melts. It became urgent to look at my Zimbabweanness and my blackness, because the US is a very racial space. It is also a place where blackness is not a single concept – are you, for instance, an ‘African-American’ or an ‘African’? At 18 I had to ask, where do I fit it in?”
There was also the matter of language – in Zimbabwe, English had been a school language, now she was speaking English all the time. “In finding myself in the US I was forced to understand a self I didn’t have at home. I found the experience both affirming and destabilising.”
She mentions a character in her novel who lives in America illegally and who can’t leave because he would be unable to return. When he knows he’s dying he asks a friend to have him cremated, and to take the ashes home to be buried in his grandfather’s kraal. But the friend can’t return the ashes – she too is illegal and can’t go home either.
Bulawayo was supposed to be studying law in the US, but took classes in creative writing every semester, keeping the news from her father.
But when she won the Caine Prize it all came out.
“We’re not a bookish family,” she said. “My sister Googled ‘Man Booker’ and said it seemed a pretty prestigious prize.”
Her father has come round – he attended the launch of We Need New Names in Harare.
And the name? It’s a pen name – NoViolet after her mother, Violet, who died when she was 18 months old, and Bulawayo which is home.
For now Bulawayo’s plans are to finish her fellowship at Stanford, and the collection of Aids stories she is working on which are, she says, very slow going.
After that she hopes to split her time between Africa and the US, matching geophysical space with the split in her soul.
The other novels shortlisted for Man Booker Prize are: two-time Booker nominee and Irish writer Colm Toibin for TheTestamentof Mary; English writer Jim Crace for
Harvest; New Zealander Eleanor Catton for TheLuminaries; IndianAmerican writer Jhumpa Lahiri for
TheLowland; and Canadian Ruth
Ozeki for ATalefortheTimeBeing.
The winner of the £50 000 (about R800 000) prize – open only to Commonwealth and Irish writers – will be announced in London on October 15.