Quest for Regeneration: Discoursing Women’s Power and Agency in Bulawayo’s We Need New Names

Abstract

NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names illuminates Zimbabwe’s post-2000 socio-political and economic crises through the perspective of Darling, a young female protagonist whose voice captures the fragility of collapsing systems and the yearning for renewal. The novel foregrounds contemporary power dynamics and hierarchies, particularly the intersections of political authority, poverty, displacement, and gender politics. Through a blunt and naive child narrator, Bulawayo unmasks the realities of abjection, marginalisation, patriarchal dominance, and authoritarianism while simultaneously gesturing towards the quest and possibility of personal, communal, and national regeneration. The story prompts us to reimagine how deeply entrenched culture and power systems hinder alternatives to sustainable development and nation-building.  Regeneration in the text is portrayed as a quest for the nation’s socio-economic and political transformation. Bulawayo’s narrative underscores the gendered dimension of this quest, as women inhabit precarious yet potentially transformative spaces. This article employs the Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA) and the regeneration theory to examine how the novel represents Zimbabwe’s socio-economic and political struggles while opening discursive sites for counter-narratives of women’s agency and regeneration. In doing so, it situates Bulawayo’s work within broader debates on leadership, gender, and the reimagining of futures in African literature.