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 13-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary: “Angel”
Darling feels homesick and asks Aunt Fostalina if she can visit her family and friends back home. Aunt Fostalina finally tells her that it costs too much to just go home whenever she wants, plus she doesn’t have the immigration documents to return to America. Messenger, who is seeking asylum in the US, smuggles guavas as a present from all of Darling’s friends, and she eats them and thinks longingly of home. She’d promised to keep in touch with her friends but lost contact after a while. In the beginning, she wrote all the time, and about everything she could think of, except for crime and other negative things “because they embarrassed me, because they made America not feel like My America, the one I had always dreamed of back in Paradise” (190).
Darling goes to retrieve Aunt Fostalina’s purse so that she can buy a push-up bra she sees on TV, and she looks at a cemetery out of the bedroom window. She notes the beautiful sculptures, most of them angels, all over the place. When she first arrived, she thought cemeteries were museums because of how manicured and beautiful they were. She wishes her father, who is buried now in Heavenway, could be buried in an American cemetery. Darling thinks about the concept of home and notes that there are two homes in her head: home before Paradise and home after it. For others, like her mother, there are three homes. For even older people, like Mother of Bones, there are four homes. She also mentions how, a few days prior, the president of Zimbabwe was on TV. Aunt Fostalina was upset and left the room, while Uncle Kojo was ecstatic because he believes the president is a black man with the guts to reshape the country for blacks and not bow to Europe or America.
Later, Darling listens to Aunt Fostalina as she tries to order her push-up bra over the phone. Darling wonders why Aunt Fostalina never bothered to learn English like Darling did, by watching popular television. It’s almost painful to listen to the interaction of her aunt saying the words wrong and getting even angrier at the woman on the phone’s confusion. Aunt Fostalina finally spells out the item, which is “enjel,” though she says it as “angel.” Darling sees the disappointment, sadness, and embarrassment in Aunt Fostalina’s face from the interaction. She knows her aunt will go down to the basement and practice her speech in the mirror, and to herself, Aunt Fostalina “will be articulate, that English will come alive on her tongue and she will spit it like it’s burning her mouth, like it’s poison, like it’s the only language she has ever known” (200).
Chapter 14 Summary: “This Film Contains Some Disturbing Images”
Darling hangs out with her friends, Kristal and Marina. Marina is from Nigeria, and she thinks she’s important because her grandfather was a chief back home. Kristal thinks she is more important than both Marina and Darling, though Darling confesses that Kristal can’t write or speak English well. They’re all in the eighth grade together at Washington Academy and live on the same street. One of their favorite pastimes is watching pornography on a computer in the basement. They go alphabetically, and even mimic the sounds that the women make while watching. At one point, Darling goes to answer the phone, which has been ringing for some time. Lately, the phone only ever rings unless it’s bad news from home or relatives needing money. It turns out that Darling’s mother is on the phone. Aunt Fostalina has purchased a nice, big house for Darling’s mother, a house that’s even bigger than the house Darling now lives in.
Today, Darling’s mother has invited Darling’s friends into the house so that they can talk to her. Darling is overwhelmed by this:
There is a strange feeling coming over me and I feel this dizziness and I have to sit down. Time dissolves like we are in a movie scene and I have maybe entered the telephone and traveled through the lines to go home (207).
However, they find that they don’t really have anything to say to each other. Darling even gets annoyed at the questions her friends ask and longs to be back downstairs with her new friends. She learns that Godknows is going to Dubai soon, and that Chipo has had her child, which they’ve called Darling. Darling finds it hard to describe what’s happening in America, while Chipo explains beautifully how the wind is messing with people outside. When Stina asks when she’ll visit, Darling hesitates: “I open my mouth and hear Aunt Fostalina’s voice inside my head. I don’t know how to tell Stina that I don’t know when I’m coming home” (212).
When a package arrives, Darling tells her friends to hold on and goes to retrieve it, but she doesn’t return to the phone. She goes downstairs to her new friends instead, and they watch more porn. Then, her friend plugs in a link she’s received, and to the girls’ horror, they begin watching a film that begins with a woman’s inhuman scream. Marina eventually runs upstairs. The woman is being held down, and then she is stabbed in her genitals by a large knife.
Chapter 15 Summary: “Hitting Crossroads”
Kristal, Darling, and Marina drive to Crossroads Mall, even though none of them have a license. The car belongs to Marina’s mother, who sleeps during the day. They almost weren’t going to go, but after Kristal successfully drives the car without killing them, their confidence is boosted and they feel as if “we’d bought the car with our own money as well as paid for the road” (219). Darling gets annoyed at having to listen to Rihanna, and then the girls hear police sirens and realize that they are being pulled over. Panic ensues. Darling thinks back to the last time she was pulled over with Uncle Kojo. When the girls pull over, Darling thinks briefly about running, but she remembers that “the police will shoot you for doing a little thing like that if you are black” (221). Luckily, the cop cars are in pursuit of someone else, so the girls get back on the road. Darling is so happy that she begins singing a childhood song about Vasco da Gama, until her friends tell her to shut up. When the friends begin arguing, Kristal and Darling make fun of Marina for being Nigerian and having horrible music, as well as being a part of e-mail scams. Then Darling makes fun of Kristal for not speaking English properly.
The girls make it to the mall, and Darling describes each section and who hangs out where. They visit stores and then head to JCPenney to try on clothes. They play a game where all three dress up for a specific event, like Prom or Wedding, and then they judge who has the best outfit. They finally tire of the game and leave the mall. In the car again, they see a Middle Eastern woman wearing a hijab and stare: “We don’t say anything, but we know it’s because of her dress and the things we see on TV that we stare” (234). Later, Darling accompanies Aunt Fostalina to Shadybrook to see Tshaka Zulu. Whenever he becomes unmanageable, the caretakers call Aunt Fostalina so that she can speak to him in his language and help calm him down. Darling has noticed that his “madness” is more a desire to talk with someone. Most of the time, she and Aunt Fostalina just listen to him as he reminisces about Zimbabwe. Darling thinks about madness and craziness; she’s been told what Tshaka Zulu suffers from but can’t remember.
Chapters 13-15 Analysis
Darling has been feeling homesick in America, and she eventually asks Aunt Fostalina if she can visit home. Although she knows being in America is better than starving back home, she feels nostalgic, especially when “Messenger came to American seeking asylum and brought me a surprise package […] Even before I finished unwrapping, the smell of guava was all over, delicious and dizzying” (188). Darling is faced with reality, however, due to the fact that it is too expensive to send her back home for a vacation, and also that she doesn’t have immigration documents, meaning she won’t be able to return to America if she leaves. This is the plight of many of the immigrants in the narrative (and these “papers” are suggested as the true reason that Dumi married the overweight white woman in an earlier chapter). Darling also notes the difficulty in learning a new language when she observes Aunt Fostalina trying to order a bra over the phone. Aunt Fostalina struggles with the woman on the phone, and though she is angry about the woman not understanding her, she will later blame herself and practice the conversation over and over.
At the same time that Darling feels nostalgia and homesickness, she is also transitioning into an American, so much so that she begins to feel that she doesn’t have much in common with her friends back home. As such, Darling feels like there are two people inside of her: a person who longs for home, and a person who is comfortable with her new American life and friends. Darling feels “a little guilty but [she] brush[es] the feeling away” (212). Darling is also embarrassed about her new America. She doesn’t want to admit to her friends that there is violence and crime, and in chapter 15, she also notes how, unlike back home, “the police will shoot you for doing a little thing like that if you are black” (221), which references her thought of running from the police when she and her friends think they’re being pulled over.
