The Masks of African Identity: Understanding Displacement in We Need New Names

Lecture Center 20

Two discourses have sculpted conceptualizations of the African continent and its people, most predominantly after colonization: Afro-pessimism and Afro-optimism. Afro-pessimism asserts that Africa is incapable of succeeding in the global climate due to African’s futility and inability to self-govern and repair damages due to colonization. Hence, the African continent is a lost cause to these theorists, and subsequently its people are subject to demise. This discourse has two sides primarily, one coming from the Western point of view and the other coming from the African themselves. In reaction and contention to this ideology, different forms of Afro-optimism have developed, the most contemporary form being Afropolitanism. Afropolitanism strives to highlight Africans scattered around the Western world with ease and mobility that allows them to obtain cosmopolitan status. They are distinguished as intelligent entrepreneurial African immigrants that debunk the tropes of “war [and] hunger” portrayed by the media and instead embody success in all their economic endeavors. In essence, they are the prominent symbol of African prosperity in the Western world. But each of these discourse, by itself, is inadequate. In these extremist views and discourses about the African continent and in extension African people, there seems to be missing elements from both sides that ultimately undermines the experiences and recognition of those that lie in between. These discourses become Single Stories for Africans which is problematic not because they are untrue, but because they are incomplete. This project will dive into the missing stories discarded because of these polar extremes and therefore shed light on the identity crisis that exists for those subject to these ineffectual categorizations. Through close reading NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel, We Need New Names, this project will show how both Afropolitan and Afropessimist discourses limits the reality of the African being to either that of glamour and affluence or that of destitution and impotence. The result of this duality is a feeling of displacement and inefficacy for the African immigrant in the Western world with no ability to claim any place or category as their own. Looking at Darling, the protagonists, life through the lenses that shadowed her experiences, we can see that there truly is a necessity for a new way of thinking of the African being in and out of the global context; one that doesn’t shroud their identity into meaningless displacement.