65
" In America, the fatness is not the fatness I was used to at home. Over there, the fatness was of bigness, just ordinary fatness you could understand because it meant the person ate well, fatness you could even envy. It was fatness that did not interfere with the body; a neck was still a neck, a stomach a stomach, an arm an arm, a buttock a buttock. But this American fatness takes it to a whole ’nother level: the body is turned into something else—the neck becomes a thigh, the stomach becomes an anthill, an arm a thing, a buttock a I don’t even know what. "
― NoViolet Bulawayo , We Need New Names
70
" Father comes home after many years of forgetting us, of not sending us money, of not loving us, not visiting us, not anything us, and parks in the shack, unable to move, unable to talk properly. unable to anything, vomiting and vomiting, Jesus, just vomiting and defecating on himself, and it smelling like something dead in there, dead and rotting, his body a black, terrible stick; I come in from playing Find bin Laden and he is there. "
― NoViolet Bulawayo , We Need New Names
72
" At first it comes in small drops; that's how pee does, if somebody is watching, then it just won't come. I get more tiny drops, like I'm squeezing a lemon, so I close my eyes tight and concentrate.
Why are you taking so long? Forgiveness says, irritated-like, like she is somebody.
Leave her alone, is she peeing with your thing? Sbho says. Then when I'm beginning to think the pee is really not coming, it comes, so I turn around and give Forgiveness a talking eye that says Say something, uh-uh, uh-uh. "
― NoViolet Bulawayo , We Need New Names
79
" Good, good, now say cheese, say cheese, cheese, cheeeeeeese - the woman enthuses, and everyone says cheese. Myself, I don't really say, because I am busy trying to remember what cheese means exactly, and I cannot remember. Yesterday Mother of Bones told us the story of Dudu the bird who learned and sand a new song whose words she did not really know the meaning of and who was then caught, killed, and cooked for dinner because in the song she was actually begging people to kill and cook her. "
― NoViolet Bulawayo , We Need New Names