Feature on NoViolet Bulawayo

When NoViolet Bulawayo's novel begins, a group of children is leaving Paradise to pick guavas in Budapest.
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Sort of. The names don't give the whole story, which is what you might expect from a novel called "We Need New Names."

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In Ms. Bulawayo's debut novel, Paradise is a shantytown in Zimbabwe, and Budapest is a wealthier neighborhood where the hungry children go to steal guavas.

Ten-year-old Darling narrates "We Need New Names." It's through a child's eyes that we see some of the most turbulent moments of postcolonial Zimbabwean history: whites forced off the land by mobs; the effects of migration, poverty and HIV on the family; and the displacement of hundreds of thousands when President Mugabe ordered the bulldozing of urban slums and shantytowns.

Ms. Bulawayo will speak at Oakland's Frick Fine Arts Auditorium at 8:30 p.m. Thursday as part of the University of Pittsburgh's Contemporary Writers Series. The event is free and open to the public.

"We Need New Names" won the 2013 Hemingway/PEN award and the Etisalat Prize for Literature. Ms. Bulawayo was selected by Junot Diaz for the National Book Award's "5 under 35," and she is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Ms. Bulawayo grew up in Zimbabwe and came to the United States at age 18. She explained that featuring a child narrator was a natural choice.

"That's how I remembered my country. I didn't know what it was like to be an adult, because that's when I left," she said on the telephone from Oakland, Calif.

"I also felt the kind of issues that I was dealing with, the child's voice allowed me to express what I could not necessarily get with an adult's voice. With an adult's voice, my own politics came too much into the project, but when worked with a children's [voice], I was able to step back and let the story unfold," she said.

Another tactic that Ms. Bulawayo employs is the use of perspective. In their search for guavas, which the author says are the fruit of her childhood, the children climb trees. It's from the top of a tree that the children witness many historical events.

"We used to climb trees all the time and hang out and eat the fruit from the trees, but I was most interested in the perspective aspect, because it asks: What does it mean to view something undetected, and then watch it happen down below?" she said.

Other events are put into much closer perspective. When Darling's father returns to Zimbabwe from South Africa, the family tries to hide the fact that he is dying of AIDS.

"I lost siblings to HIV/AIDS," Ms. Bulawayo said. "I was also moved by how the AIDS narrative played out when the country was coming undone."

The second half of "We Need New Names" is set in "Destroyed, Michigan," which describes the way Detroit feels to Darling and cleverly reflects the phonetic sounds of the word. Readers follow Darling to the American Midwest, where she braves racial, cultural and linguistic barriers.

Ms. Bulawayo's writing is emotionally intense, pulling the reader between funny and painful episodes. Her language is both poetic and innovative for its unique use of English.

"I do things to the English language said. "I break [the English language]. "I don't always observe the rules [of sense to me. I do import a lot of my English in a way that corrupts syntax.

"I think it does something to readers, she said.

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