ABSTRACT
Despite the legacies of such traumatic experiences, Darling and her friends are happily engrossed in their games as they are too young to fully understand the appalling atrocities. The symptoms of migration trauma are manifest both in physical and psychological lives of the immigrants. Jolie A. Sheffer states that migration brings along "the loss of physical and psychological moorings" because "the immigrant is no longer treated as human". Similarly, Gillian Beer describes romance 150 years later as follows: "It absorbs the reader into experience which is otherwise unattainable". The chapter locates We Need New Names mainly within recent theories of diaspora and unbelonginess, exploring the function of diaspora narratives in understanding the predicament of Zimbabwean female immigrants in the US. It focuses on the role of unbelonginess to the host country and/or homeland in defining the identity of diasporic self, moving thereafter onto the role of romance in narrating such pain.
