For as long as I can remember there has been this music category called World Music. More recently there has emerged a genre of novels which might usefully be termed World Literature. Loosely speaking, World Literature includes novels that shine a light on the horrors and misery of corporate globalism, with all the ramifications for people living in both the so-called developing and developed worlds. Such labels have a whiff of Euro-centric paternalism about them but the intention is honest to bring to public attention and to celebrate music and literature that wouldn’t normally end up on the shelves of WH Smith et al. Without wanting to needlessly pigeon-hole it, Bulawayo’s first novel, We Need New Names, comfortably fits into the World Literature category, and for me it is a real gem.

You only have to walk through the streets of London, affluent or desolate, to get a hint of Bulawayo’s novel. It could be a Filipino nanny walking her Notting Hill charge to and from school. It could be the African parking attendant hovering around the streets with camera in hand. It could be the Sri Lankan guy in the 24 hour service station, the one you use regularly but never seem quite able to strike up a conversation beyond a please and thank you. You know that behind all these faces and millions more just like them, there is probably a story of desperate immigration, of horrendous circumstances and now of grinding poverty in the metropolises of the developed world. They clean our schools. They serve us food in our hospitals. They do any manner of dirty, low-paid work, and they do so around the clock – 24/7 to use that over used Americanism. We sense there is a connection between them and us but we don’t want to think about it too much. The results may not be to our liking.

Bulawayo drags all this barely hidden reality into the harsh light of day. It makes for uncomfortable reading in places but you do quickly grow to love and care for her main protagonist Darling, a young girl from the urban slums of Zimbabwe who soon enough finds herself in the urban slums of America. Darling comes from Zimbabwe but she could have come from any one of a hundred or more counties, any of those countries that are forced to supply cheap resources and labour for the global chain of production. Every electronic gadget that we hold and cherish almost certainly was produced in this dehumanising global chain. Ditto for the clothes we wear, the toys our kids play with and much of the food we love to eat.

A relatively small handful of people manage to escape the globalised production chain and get to the promised lands in Western Europe, the United States or Australia, but they don’t really escape at all. When they get to these cherished lands their role is either one of indentured service to the wealthy and privileged, or to do the drab and dirty work that we now collectively think is below our western dignity. We Need New Names shines a light on all of this institutionalised corporate slavery, a slavery that we are taught to celebrate as the new liberating globalism. I think not.

The Zimbabwean section of the book is particularly graphic. Told through the eyes of a small child, Bulawayo shows herself to be a most accomplished story teller, though perhaps her view of Zimbabwe is a tad one-sided. The Zimbabwean government is portrayed as ruthless, brutal and uncaring. It may be just that, but it is nevertheless attempting to redistribute land that was exclusively held by white colonial farmers. I understand that some of these farmers held up to seven different farms. The government told them they could keep one of their choosing and the rest had to be returned to the Zimbabwean state. Some farmers flatly refused so the state legitimately re-expropriated all of it. It was obviously a violent process but not nearly as violent as the centuries of colonial rule in this part of Africa. Bulawayo’s story might have been strengthened had the complex dynamics of land seizure and slum clearance been dealt with more dialectically. Perhaps two opposing narrators might have been usefully deployed. Still, Bulawayo has plenty of time and talent to return to these themes, as surely she will.

Taken as a whole, the Zimbabwean and North American chapters, this is a valuable contribution to world literature and one that is a damn good read in the process. Here is a sample and just re-reading it reminds me of how much I enjoyed this novel. It is Bulawayo at her brilliant best.

How hard was it to get to America harder than crawling through the anus of a needle. For the visas and passports we begged, despaired, lied, grovelled, promised, charmed, bribed – anything to get us out of the country. For his passport and travel, Tshaka Zulu sold all of his father’s cows, against the old man’s wishes. Perseverance had to take his sister out of school .Nqo worked the fields of Botswana for nine months. Nozipho, like Primrose and Sicelokuhle and Maidei, slept with that fat black pig Banyile Khoza from the passport office. Girls flat on their backs, Banyile between their legs, America on their minds. P240

If you have a reasonable imagination it is easy to write in your mind a thousand scripts like this. Every person of colour that you walk passed in London or any big cosmopolitan conurbation is likely to have a similar desperate, humiliating story to the type described by Bulawayo. And as Bulawayo makes clear, the desperation and humiliation doesn’t stop even if the promised land reached. In some respects it can, with the isolation and alienation that comes with a strange and hostile city, be even worse than the impoverishment that the immigrant desperately tried to leave behind. No family and friends for protection and comfort, just the relentless battle for survival within a relentlessly dehumanising global capitalism. Bulawayo is uncompromising in her first novel.