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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's We Need New Names

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In “Explanation and Culture: Marginalia” of 1979, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak writes that “the will to explain is a symptom of the desire to have a self and a world. In other words, on the general level, the possibility of explanation carries the supposition of an explainable (if not fully) universe and an explaining (even if imperfectly) subject”. Darling, the main character of “We Need New Names”, tells her life in an attempt to explain a home that never existed in the first place, and the descriptions of the different homes are a way to make sense of her own self and to try to understand her identity. Darling is a girl whose absent parents make her the daughter of the community. The real family of Darling is Mother of Bones and her friends, with whom she wanders around her village. The link between them is extraordinary, and they play, eat and even defecate together. There are no adults to teach them anything, and even religious authorities are strange figures living in a world of their own, incapable of seeing what is happening to the children. When the father of Darling appears very ill with AIDS, she doesn’t care about his situation, although at the end she manages to reconcile with him. To sum up, adults are absent figures from …show more content…

“There are two homes inside my head: home before Paradise, and home in Paradise... There are three homes inside Mother's and Aunt Fostalina’s heads: home before independence, before I was born when black people and white people were fighting over the country. Home after independence, when black people won the country. And then the home of thing falling apart... There are four homes inside Mother of Bones’s head: home before the white people came to steal the country, and a king ruled; home when the white people came to steal the country and then there was war; home when the black people got our stolen country back after independence; and then the home of now" (Bulawayo

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