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REFLECTIONS ON LARB D A V I D PA LU M B O - L I U
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am honored and delighted that LARB has decided to feature this piece in its retrospective. As I began to reflect on our interview, I note that it was done in 2015. It seems so much longer ago than six years plus a few months. At that time, I had gotten to know NoViolet fairly well — she was a visiting writer here at Stanford, was involved in various projects that I was also interested in, and she had been kind enough to visit an undergraduate seminar I was teaching. Among the books we were reading were both We Need New Names, and Sandra Cisneros’s text The House on Mango Street. In class, NoViolet spoke about how as a young girl she was taken by the narrative center of Cisneros’s book — another young girl named Esperanza. We had a long discussion both in class and during our interview about how Bulawayo’s narrator, Darling, is given a similar task — that of trying to understand the world, interpret it, and tell a story. While The House on Mango Street tackles a number of very dark and troubling issues — misogyny, sexual violence, abuse, poverty, racism among them — We Need New Names added another dimension, one which in retrospect eerily anticipated the US presidential election of 2016. Bulawayo told me that the task she set before herself in writing We Need New Names was “to map a vulnerable young girl’s experience against a background of a country coming undone.” She added, “which is a story that can happen anywhere really.” In the case of Zimbabwe, we had, in Bulawayo’s words, a situation where things were falling apart in the recognizable ways of non-functional governments — political unrest, repression, economic collapse, et cetera. The tragedy of Darling’s generation is that they are 213
