49 pages • 1 hour read
NoViolet BulawayoWe Need New Names
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2013A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Real Change”
The men and women of Paradise prepare to vote. The mood is different in town, as if real change is coming. The men no longer play draughts but are dressed and speak with conviction. They even greet the kids, though the kids are weary as they’ve been beaten by the same hands that now greet them. The women, seeing the men, make themselves look pretty with clothing and accessories. Darling and her friends go around and put up the “Change, Real Change” posters like Bornfree and Messenger instructed them to. They converse about what actually happens when the adults go to vote, though none of them really know. They also don’t know what the change is they’re putting up posters for, but they put the posters up on every door but Mother of Bones’s (she said she’d kill them if they did) because Messenger and Bornfree said they’d give them Chinese money for doing so. They then get into another argument because Bastard thinks he will be president one day, but the others know you have to be old to be president. They then sing and dance, while mocking American accents.
Darling pretends to sleep at night while her mother paces. She mentions how they used to have a real house made of brick instead of the tin one they now live in. Her mother often paces and is sad about this, especially as Darling’s father doesn’t send aid for their wellbeing. Someone knocks on the door, and Darling knows it’s a man that sometimes visits her mother. The two whisper like sharing secrets, and then they have sex. But the man always leaves before morning. Darling always pretends to be asleep during these encounters. Often, she can’t sleep due to bad dreams: “Even if I want to sleep I cannot because if I sleep, the dream will come, and I don’t want it to come […] I dream about what happened back at our house before we came to Paradise” (66-67). One day while she was playing with her old friends, bulldozers came to her neighborhood and razed the place. Everyone panicked, and a soldier almost killed an elderly woman. The houses were demolished with all their things still inside, and in one of them, a woman who’d been at work had left her young son Freedom asleep. Freedom perished in the demolition. This is how Darling and her family end up in Paradise.
When the adults all go to vote, the children remain and watch them leave. The adults are all silent as they leave. Darling and her friends don’t run to Budapest to steal guavas; they remain and wait for the adults to return. After a while, Godknows thinks that perhaps the adults won’t return, and a sense of worry fills the children. Although they take no notice of the adults when they’re around, they know they love their parents and want adults around. Eventually, the adults begin to return, and the children run to their parents, elated. The parents, too, are excited. No one sleeps that night as all are dreaming of change: “Get ready, get ready for a new country, no more of this Paradise anymore, they say when they steady us on our feet” (73).
Chapter 5 Summary: “How They Appeared”
The chapter describes the formation of Paradise: “They did not come to Paradise. Coming would mean that they were choosers” (75). The people who make up Paradise are essentially refugees from their old homes. Their arrival in Paradise means that they lost something somewhere else. One example is a man looking for a black stool that was meant to be passed down to the men in his family. It’s obviously been lost or left during the relocation, and he’s angry at this. His wife, however, explains that they don’t even have enough clothes for their child. People talk about how horrible the times are and liken it to before independence when whites put them in reservations. Others note that it’s worse than before independence because it’s blacks—their own people—who are now doing unspeakable things to them. The narrator explains how the people in Paradise arrived with what little they could save, and that they “appeared broken—shards of glass people” (76).
Chapter 6 Summary: “We Need New Names”
Darling and two other girls have determined to get rid of Chipo’s baby. They haven’t told the boys about this, as it’s a female thing, and head to a place behind Heavenway to perform their task. Sbho is assisting, and they’ve also brought along Forgiveness, who isn’t “a friend-friend because her family only just recently appeared in Paradise—this makes her a stranger” (80-81). They don’t really have a plan, or know what they’re doing, but they know that another young girl in Paradise died in childbirth, and they don’t want this to happen to Chipo. Darling collects stones, though she doesn’t know why. She thinks perhaps that they can crush Chipo’s stomach with them. Meanwhile, Forgiveness has found a rusty clothes hanger and sets about straightening it. Darling gives them all new names, like Dr. Cutter and Dr. Roz. They do what they see on TV, but other things as well. For instance, Sbho pees in a cup and mixes it with dirt, and Chipo drinks it. Although Forgiveness is ostracized by Darling and Sbho, she informs the two that she knows how to get rid of stomachs and that it must be done with a clothes hanger to reach up and pull the baby out. She also tells Chipo to take off her underwear. Chipo becomes frightened at the thought of the hanger, and she doesn’t want to take her underwear off.
Right when Chipo and the others contemplate continuing with their method of getting rid of Chipo’s pregnancy, MotherLove arrives and demands to know what they’re doing. Forgiveness eventually confesses that they were trying to remove Chipo’s stomach. Instead of being angry or yelling at them, MotherLove has “tears in the eyes and she is clutching her chest like there’s a fire inside it” (90). Darling looks at MotherLove’s face and sees “the terrible face of someone I have never seen before, and on the stranger’s face is this look of pain, this look that adults have when somebody dies” (90). Then Chipo cries in MotherLove’s arms, until the girls get up and chase after a lucky purple butterfly.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
Despite the hardships evidenced in the first few chapters, the narrative takes a hopeful turn as the adults in Paradise prepare to vote. This vote is in hopes of bringing about change to their lives. It’s later revealed that the current government displaced Darling and her family, like so many others. Darling’s home was razed, as well as her neighborhood, and so she ended up in Paradise as she had nowhere else to go. Bornfree and Messenger have been hanging signs up about change, and this change is the hope for a government change. The background of this centers around President Mugabe and his harsh rule of the people. This rule by an iron fist is all the more shocking because, as someone mentions in these chapters (in reference to the black government), “Aren’t these black people evil for bulldozing your home and leaving you with nothing now? You are all wrong. Better a white thief do that to you than your own black brother” (77). Hope for change is an important concept for people all over Zimbabwe. It’s something to believe in despite the harshness of the realities they face, realities made clear in the poetic prose of Chapter 5: “They appeared with the dust from their crushed houses clinging to their hair and skin and clothes, making them appear like things from another life” (75-76).
Adding to their harsh realities, Darling and her friends decide to get rid of Chipo’s baby. The girls don’t understand the concept of abortion properly, but they do know that young mothers can die from pregnancy and they don’t want their friend to die: “Nosizi is dead now, from giving birth. It kills like that” (80). Although they don’t know exactly how abortion works, one of the girls, Forgiveness, finds a rusty wire hanger and begins straightening it. Hangers are often used in makeshift abortions, and it is a dangerous, painful process. The reader understands that if Chipo goes through with this, she will more than likely die. Chipo is saved by MotherLove suddenly appearing. MotherLove ends up holding Chipo in her arms, in an act that shows the vulnerability of MotherLove and adults, and the precariousness of women in this society. MotherLove arrives, as does a lucky butterfly, symbolizing hope and luck for them all.
