The Intersection of Earth, Gender and the Sacred in NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names: Eco-critical African Feminist and Social Semiotics Perspectives

Taking the novel, We Need New Names as a framing reference in this study, I pay exceptional attention to NoViolet Bulawayo’s treatment of Earth, gender dialectics and the sacred. These three motifs feature conspicuously in Bulawayo’s literary oeuvre to shed light on profound impacts of othering rational and abusive gendered culture on one’s sense of being, (un)belonging and identity in contemporary times. Without downplaying, the dystopic and melancholic aspects of the novel which have attracted a good deal of scholarly attention, I want to slightly shift my analytical gaze to foreground the urgency of transformations in conceptions of class, earth, femininity, masculinity and race which are entangled in discourses of differentiation and dominance. I treat the focalised female narrator and profound landscape imagery or nature writing in We Need New Names as the writer’s deliberate effort to foreground the African female experiences, the female body politics and ecological subservience which together have given birth to manifold complications threatening humanity today. I further discuss the writer’s feminist stance that interjects fresh Othering logics and toxic masculine scripts which victims both male and female subjects. I find insights from both eco-critical African feminist and social semiotics theories quite relevant in my reading of cartographic semiotics and spatial aesthetics which articulate moments of (dis)connections with the land and imaginings of home. Arguably, such moments in the novel, mark the relegated characters’ self-abasement in their imaginary architectures of home. Sadly, anorexia nervosa and nervous conditions are manufactured by the deep feelings of unhomeliness and unbelonging. The title of the novel is a telling metaphor of these characters’ pursuit of new becoming in both local and diasporic geophysical sites.