The Heart-Wrenching Reality of Leaving Home: What “We Need New Names” Teaches Us About Migration
When I first read NoViolet Bulawayo’s “We Need New Names,” I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was reading someone’s diary—raw, honest, and painfully real. Here was Darling, this spirited kid from Zimbabwe, living in a place called Paradise (which, ironically, was anything but paradise), and then suddenly finding herself in America, completely lost between two worlds that both felt foreign to her.
The book hit me hard because it captures something we don’t talk about enough: what migration actually does to your head and your heart. Not the sanitized version we see in movies, but the messy, complicated reality of what happens when you’re forced to rebuild yourself from scratch in a place that doesn’t quite get you.
When You Don’t Know Who You Are Anymore
Let’s be honest—most of us have never had to question our entire identity. We wake up, we know our name, we know where we belong, we speak our language without thinking about it. But Darling? She gets to America and suddenly everything she thought she knew about herself gets turned upside down.
Back in Paradise, despite all the chaos and poverty, Darling knew exactly who she was. She was part of a crew—Bastard, Chipo, Godknows, Sbho—and they had their own world, their own rules, their own way of making sense of things. They were poor, sure, but they were them. They belonged somewhere, even if that somewhere was falling apart.
Then America happens. And slowly, bit by bit, Darling starts losing pieces of herself. Her accent changes first—you know how that happens when you’re desperate to fit in. Then her way of thinking shifts. She starts seeing her old life through American eyes, and suddenly Paradise doesn’t look the same anymore. Her friends back home start feeling like strangers.
This isn’t just about adapting to a new place. This is about your entire sense of self getting scrambled. Psychologists have fancy terms for it—”cultural dissonance” and “acculturation stress”—but really, it’s just the devastating experience of not knowing who you are anymore. You’re not quite American, but you’re not quite Zimbabwean either. You’re stuck in this weird limbo, and it’s lonely as hell.
I remember reading about Darling’s Skype calls with her friends and feeling my heart break. Here she is, trying to connect with the people who used to know her better than anyone, and she can’t. She’s changed too much. They look at her and see someone who’s become foreign. She looks at them and realizes she can’t relate to their problems anymore. It’s like watching someone grieve their own identity while they’re still alive.
The Weight of Leaving Everyone Behind
Here’s something that really gets to me about migration stories: the guilt. Darling makes it to America, right? She gets opportunities her friends back home can only dream of. She should be grateful, happy, celebrating. Instead, she’s carrying around this crushing weight of survivor’s guilt.
Every time she sees her friends on that computer screen, she’s reminded that she escaped and they didn’t. She’s safe while they’re still dealing with the same problems. She has food while they’re still struggling. She has a future while theirs remains uncertain. How do you live with that?
The book shows us that migration isn’t just about the person who leaves—it’s about everyone who gets left behind. Those relationships don’t just pause; they start dying. Not because anyone wants them to, but because the person who left is becoming someone else, someone their friends and family don’t recognize anymore.
Darling’s memories of home start getting fuzzy and romanticized. That’s what happens when you’re dealing with loss—your brain tries to protect you by making the past seem better than it was. But this creates its own problems because now she’s not just disconnected from her current reality; she’s disconnected from her actual past too. She’s living in this bubble of nostalgia that makes it even harder to figure out where she belongs.
When Your Language Betrays You
One of the most heartbreaking parts of the book is watching Darling lose her language. Not just her ability to speak it, but her connection to it. Language isn’t just words—it’s how we think, how we understand the world, how we connect with people who share our experiences.
When Darling starts speaking with an American accent, she’s not just changing how she sounds. She’s changing how she thinks. The rhythm of her thoughts starts following American patterns. The way she understands relationships, time, humor, even love—it all starts shifting to match her new language.
This hits different when you realize that language carries culture inside it. When you lose your native way of speaking, you lose access to ways of understanding the world that only exist in that language. Certain jokes don’t translate. Certain emotions don’t have English words. Certain ways of showing love or respect get lost.
By the end of the book, Darling can barely communicate with her own people in the way she used to. It’s not that she’s forgotten the words—it’s that she’s forgotten how to be in that language. She’s lost the cultural knowledge that makes the language alive and meaningful.
Family Dynamics Gone Wrong
Migration doesn’t just mess with individuals—it destroys family systems too. Look at Darling and her Aunt Fostalina. Here’s a woman who’s been in America longer, who’s supposed to be the guide, the one who helps Darling navigate this new world. But the truth is, everyone’s migration experience is different. What worked for Fostalina might not work for Darling.
This creates this weird dynamic where the older generation can’t really mentor the younger one because the world keeps changing. The advice doesn’t translate. The strategies don’t work the same way. Each person has to figure out their own way of being an immigrant, which means each person has to figure out their own way of managing the psychological fallout.
And then there’s the different ways family members experience migration. Some people come for opportunities, some come as refugees, some come for family reunification. Some are excited, some are traumatized, some are just trying to survive. All of these different experiences create different psychological needs, but families often don’t know how to support each other through such different challenges.
Darling’s relationship with her mother gets complicated by distance and change. Her mother sees her daughter getting opportunities she never had, which should be good, right? But she also sees her daughter becoming someone she doesn’t recognize, someone who might not need her anymore. That’s terrifying for a parent.
The Myth of Going Back
Here’s something that really messed me up about this book: the realization that you can’t really go home again. Not because home doesn’t exist anymore (though sometimes that’s true too), but because you don’t exist anymore. The person who left is gone, replaced by someone who’s been fundamentally changed by the experience of living elsewhere.
Those Skype conversations Darling has with her friends aren’t just awkward because of the distance—they’re awkward because she’s literally not the same person who left. She can’t relate to their concerns anymore. She can’t understand why they’re worried about things that seem small to her now. She can’t fake caring about gossip that used to be the center of her world.
And her friends? They see right through her attempts to connect. They know she’s changed. They know she’s become American in ways that matter. They’re not wrong to feel like she’s abandoned them, because in a very real sense, she has. Not intentionally, not maliciously, but inevitably.
This creates what I think of as existential homelessness. You don’t belong in your new country because you’re foreign. You don’t belong in your old country because you’ve become foreign there too. You’re floating between worlds, fully accepted by neither.
The Community You Lose vs. The Community You Can’t Find
In Paradise, Darling had something that’s actually pretty rare: a tight-knit community where everyone knew everyone, where your problems were everyone’s problems, where you were never really alone even when you were struggling. That kind of community support is psychologically huge. It’s what gets people through trauma, poverty, uncertainty.
In America, that community structure doesn’t exist for her. American culture is more individualistic, which has its benefits but also means you’re more on your own. Making friends is different. Building trust is different. The social safety net is different.
Darling struggles to create meaningful connections in America partly because she’s an outsider, but also because the whole approach to relationships is different. The depth of connection she had with her friends in Paradise came from shared struggle, shared culture, shared understanding of how the world works. In America, she has to build relationships from scratch with people who don’t share any of that background.
The book shows us that this isn’t just about making friends—it’s about finding people who can hold space for your full self, including the parts of you that are foreign, confusing, or painful. That’s incredibly hard to find, especially when you’re still figuring out who your full self even is.
Growing Up Female Between Cultures
Being a young woman navigating migration adds another layer of complexity that Bulawayo handles really well. Darling is coming of age while moving between cultures that have very different ideas about what it means to be female, what opportunities are available to women, what’s expected of them.
In Zimbabwe, she had certain expectations about her future, her role, her possibilities. In America, she’s exposed to completely different ideas about what she can be and do. This is exciting but also psychologically overwhelming. She has to figure out not just who she is, but who she wants to be when the options have suddenly expanded dramatically.
This is complicated by the fact that her family and community back home are watching her transformation through a gendered lens. Her adoption of American culture might be seen as rebellion, abandonment of values, or forgetting where she came from. The pressure to represent her culture well while also taking advantage of her new opportunities creates this impossible balancing act.
Money Can’t Buy You Belonging
One thing that really struck me about the book is how it shows that economic improvement doesn’t automatically equal psychological well-being. Darling’s material circumstances are definitely better in America. She has food, safety, educational opportunities. But she’s also more isolated, confused, and disconnected than she ever was in Paradise.
This challenges the narrative we often hear about immigration success. We measure success by economic indicators—did you get a good job, did you buy a house, did you achieve the American Dream? But the book shows us that you can check all those boxes and still feel like you’re dying inside because you’ve lost your sense of self and belonging.
The pressure to be grateful for these opportunities makes it even harder to acknowledge the psychological costs. Darling is supposed to be happy, supposed to be grateful, supposed to be thriving. Admitting that she’s struggling feels like betraying everyone who sacrificed to get her there.
Technology: Connection or Torture?
The way Bulawayo writes about technology in the book is brilliant because it captures something really specific about modern migration. Darling can see and talk to her friends back home anytime she wants. Previous generations of migrants had to deal with complete disconnection—letters that took weeks, phone calls that cost a fortune, years between visits.
But does this constant connection make things better or worse? The book suggests it might actually make things worse in some ways. Every Skype call is a reminder of how much Darling has changed, how much distance has grown between her and her friends. She can see them but can’t reach them. She can talk to them but can’t really communicate with them.
It’s like being haunted by your own past self. The technology keeps her connected to who she used to be, but it also makes it impossible to forget or move on. She’s stuck in this constant state of comparison and loss.
What This Means for All of Us
Reading “We Need New Names” made me think about how little we understand about what migration actually does to people psychologically. We talk about immigrants in terms of policies, economics, statistics. But we rarely talk about the profound identity crisis that comes with leaving everything you know and trying to rebuild yourself somewhere else.
The book shows us that successful migration isn’t just about learning English or getting a job. It’s about somehow integrating multiple versions of yourself into something coherent. It’s about finding ways to honor your past while building your future. It’s about maintaining connections that matter while accepting that some things will inevitably be lost.
Most importantly, it shows us that there’s no “right” way to be an immigrant. Darling’s struggles aren’t signs of failure—they’re normal responses to an abnormal situation. The psychological work of migration is ongoing, complex, and deeply personal.
The Gifts and Costs of Leaving
What I love about Bulawayo’s approach is that she doesn’t present migration as either purely positive or purely negative. It’s both. Darling gains opportunities, perspectives, and possibilities she never would have had in Zimbabwe. But she also loses community, identity, and connections that can never be fully replaced.
The book suggests that maybe the goal isn’t to choose between these two realities but to find ways to hold both. Maybe successful migration means learning to carry your losses alongside your gains, to honor what you’ve left behind while embracing what you’ve found.
Darling’s story doesn’t end with her fully integrated into American society or with her returning to Zimbabwe. It ends with her still figuring it out, still navigating the complex reality of living between worlds. And maybe that’s the most honest ending possible, because the psychological work of migration isn’t something you complete—it’s something you live with.
In a world where more people are migrating than ever before, “We Need New Names” offers crucial insights into what we’re really asking of people when we expect them to successfully integrate into new societies. It’s not just about learning new skills or following new rules—it’s about reconstructing your entire sense of self while grieving the person you used to be.
The book reminds us that behind every immigration statistic is a human being dealing with profound psychological challenges that most of us can’t imagine. It asks us to consider not just whether immigrants are contributing to their new societies, but whether those societies are creating space for the full complexity of the immigrant experience.
Most importantly, it shows us that the immigrant experience isn’t just about immigrants—it’s about what it means to be human in a world where belonging is increasingly complicated, where home is increasingly fluid, and where identity is increasingly something we have to actively construct rather than passively inherit.
Darling’s story is ultimately a story about resilience, about the human capacity to adapt and survive even when everything familiar is stripped away. But it’s also a story about loss, about the things we sacrifice when we’re forced to choose between survival and belonging. It’s a story that asks us to see migration not as a policy issue or an economic phenomenon, but as one of the most profound human experiences possible—the experience of leaving everything you know in search of something better, and discovering that “better” is far more complicated than you ever imagined.
