THE FALLING APARTNESS

REFLECTIONS ON LARB

DAVID PALUMBO-LIU

Iam 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

betrayed by their own, through failure of leadership, and I was interested in how this affects what happens when a country starts unraveling, and what happens to its most vulnerable citizens.

As I look back at that moment, I note that the students who took that class would have graduated in 2017, a year into the Trump administration. I cannot help but wonder how they will tell the story of that period.

All the interviews I have done for LARB have been done with the aim to extend the classroom into the public sphere, and to expand both the duration and space of learning. It is no accident that I choose people to interview whose work I admire greatly, and I hope in each interview to both bring out the artists’ perception of aspects of their work I am most intrigued by and to learn myself new things that feed back into my appreciation of their work, and into the ways I teach.

I have been immensely grateful for all LARB has done and continues to do. It is a rare gem — a vibrant, compelling, creative open space that has allowed me to do my thing, and others theirs as well. One way to put this: It’s a wonderful common reading room.

THE FALLING APARTNESS OF THINGS

NOVIOLET BULAWAYO

INTERVIEWED BY DAVID PALUMBO-LIU

Literature circulates in such unpredictable manners, flows amongst people of diverse backgrounds, changes hands between strangers, and from that moment on they are no longer as unknown to each other than formerly.

Last summer, I met a young woman from CCNY who was visiting Stanford and who was working with me in a summer mentorship program. She was entranced by a book I had not heard of, We Need New Names, by the young Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo. The student was from Ghana, and felt strongly that what Bulawayo wrote of — the postcolonial world of Zimbabwe and then her relocation to Detroit — spoke to her life in important ways. As we read through the text together, I found it a remarkably

Asuka Anastacia Ogawa, Ovo, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 80 x 90 1/8 x 1 3/4 inches (203.2 x 228.9 x 4.4 centimeters). © Asuka Anastacia Ogawa, Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo.

powerful novel. Not only does it connect with a tradition of African writing, it also seemed to echo in different ways the work of Sandra Cisneros, Junot Díaz, and Toni Morrison. Each of these authors of course comes from a particular time and place, yet there is no doubt that they too are part of this unpredictable circulatory system.

I was fortunate to have the chance to sit down and talk with Bulawayo recently, and asked her more about her background, writing, and outlook in this extensive interview. I was especially interested in how she locates her writing in a tradition of storytelling and literary narrative, and also within the context of African literature, culture, and politics.

As her website states,

NoViolet Bulawayo is the author of We Need New Names (May 2013) which has been recognized with the LA TimesBook Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Pen/Hemingway Award, the Etisalat Prize for Literature, the Barnes and Noble Discover Award (second place), and the National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” Fiction Selection. We Need New Names was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Guardian First Book Award, and selected to the New York Times Notable Books of 2013 list, the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers list, and others. NoViolet’s story “Hitting Budapest” won the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing.

NoViolet earned her MFA at Cornell University where she was a recipient of the Truman Capote Fellowship. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, where she now teaches as a Jones Lecturer in Fiction. NoViolet grew up in Zimbabwe.

DAVID PALUMBO-LIU: First, thank you so much for speaking with me. I know you are busy on a writing project and have been touring extensively. It must be very different writing under these circumstances, compared to your first book. Or is it? Can you tell us a bit about what has perhaps changed in your approach to writing?

NOVIOLET BULAWAYO: Thank you David. It’s definitely different from when I was writing Names; there wasn’t a book to travel for then, along with the attached hecticness — I mean I just had all the solitude and stillness I needed. Perhaps most importantly, nobody cared, and there were no expectations, and I absolutely loved just being left to my own devices. The solitude and stillness are not always readily available now, I have to actively fight for them, sometimes fake them, work a bit to channel my energy and give myself room to create, work even more to honor and protect the time and process of writing. Thankfully I’m back at work, doing what I need to be doing, and quite excited to be writing the way I need to be again. But, really, I can only complain with restraint — Names is such a lucky book from all that has happened to it, and it’s still great to share it with readers everywhere.

Many interviewers have spoken to you about your use of a young girl as the narrative voice, which you do with such authenticity and sensitivity. You are able to tackle tremendously complex and

difficult subjects through this voice, and have them appear both as they might appear to a young girl, but also in a way that reveals their rather deep significance. The question of hunger, for example, appears as a gut-level experience which most of us can only vaguely and distantly relate to, and use those sensations to get at the reality of Zimbabwe at that time; you attach that felt experience to rather profound political and historical insights that go well beyond that girl’s conscious understanding. Why was it important to tell the story in this way?

I wasn’t necessarily pushing for the reader to recognize anything specific, but to map a vulnerable young girl’s experience against a background of a country coming undone, which is a story that can happen anywhere really. I’ll quickly mention that I didn’t always start out with a girl narrator, early versions of Names were told in an adult perspective that ironically ended up falling short in achieving what Darling seems to have, and with less effort. I think to some of my favorite young narrators —Tambu in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, Yunior in Junot Díaz’s Drown, Pip in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, and I remember that I loved them for some of the same reasons you bring up, including their being acute observers and commentators of the world, so perhaps a part of it could speak to the possibilities of this kind of narrator, how sharp and alive and resonant and engaging a child’s gaze can actually be, even as the world is complex. I’d say for me the child narrator also allowed for this giving voice to a marginalized and powerless character, someone we ordinarily wouldn’t hear from, and this on its own is important, in the sense that children are the real victims in a situation like the Zim that inspired Names, which in some ways is different from the Zim of now by the way. The dilemma of children is that they are not really major players in the grand narrative at all, but of course still suffer profoundly as the most delicate members of society, as we know from the general condition of children in times and places of crises all over the world. But still I wanted Darling and her friends to be more than victims, I wanted them to push and direct and illuminate the conversation, and raise hard questions.

You told me you came from a line of storytellers. Could you expand on that a bit? How did that influence you, both when you were very young and heard your relatives tell stories, and then when you began yourself to write?

I do come from a space where stories were told, especially when I was growing up, part of the air we breathed, and I was lucky that my grandmother and my father were some of the most riveting storytellers I have ever known. And, sure enough, their stories were a big part of what sparked and sustained my imagination when I was young (my grandmother’s were mostly fictional, my father was in the nonfiction department so I had a nice balance) and quite inevitably from an early age I became interested in language, character, image, tone, composition, and other components of the verbal arts, though I couldn’t always necessarily name these things at the time. And of course in the everyday, people dealt in language — in my ‘80s, ‘90s Gwanda and Bulawayo, where I grew up, men went to work and a good number of women stayed home, running things and talking neighborhood

truths and lies and hopes and dreams and lives — we even did live Twitter years and years before it came to the US on fancy gadgets. It was beautiful — you woke up everyday to inhale language, and you understood it as currency and character, as something alive, something that made things move.

I loved it all, and I know I would not have become the kind of writer that I am without this specific background, and indeed when I started writing seriously, this influence came out, especially through voice and style, because I don’t necessarily imagine just a reading audience, but a listening one too, so I must actively write for the ear, an ear that also has to see things of course. And, somewhere inside me I suspect is a consideration for a reader who isn’t a reader, you know, someone who has no time for books but might, if you dished it out in a certain way — I’m always figuring out how to write for this type of person as well. And lastly, I’d also say the influence also comes out in my English — it definitely gets its energy from my mother tongue, IsiNdebele, it being the language that all the different storifying happened in, so that my imagination naturally understands it as the language of telling stories. I see its fingerprints in all I do.

Well that leads to an obvious question, so obvious that I didn’t even write it down initially; but I was just wondering, what authors influenced you?

I like the term “spoke to me” better — and my list includes my favorite Zimbabwean writer, Yvonne Vera, who was especially important to me in my early years. There’s Tsitsi Dangarembga, who wrote one of my favorite books, Nervous Conditions, she is another, and so is Junot Díaz. Toni Morrison, Colum McCann, Zakes Mda, Jhumpa Lahiri, IsiNdebele writers Barbara Makhalisa and N.S. Sigogo, and many others. And of course, in the list are the many storytellers I’ve known, two of which I mentioned, they are not writers, but when I think about “influences,” I’d say these are even at the top of my list.

In terms of influences and legacies, I

was also noting how throughout Names

the phrase “things fall apart” recurs, an

obvious reference to Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Can you talk a little about that?

Achebe was certainly in my imagination, and I was interested in continuing the dialogue of the falling apartness of things, but of course in a different context, i.e. a nation not in direct confrontation with the beast of colonialism, but with a different animal, seeing as it is that Names is happening about three decades after the fall of colonialism. The scars are, and will always be there of course, but the beast has changed shape.

That’s exactly what I was going to ask you, Nigeria in the ‘60s and then Zimbabwe after 1980.

The Names’s Zimbabwe is specifically the Zim of the 2000s, which is different from the ‘80s, ‘90s Zim — decades of promise, excellence, and stability for the most part. Enter the 2000s and the beast that is the nation starts eating itself, and selfrule and independence and black power don’t save it, and things do fall 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 betrayed by their own, through

ART TKART TK

Asuka Anastacia Ogawa, Meu Sol, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 84 x 2 1/4 inches (152.4 x 213.4 x 5.7 centimeters). © Asuka Anastacia Ogawa, Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo.