Abdullahi, K. A.Boyinbogun, Erasmus Dare2022-12-062022-12-062021-110795-2309https://uilspace.unilorin.edu.ng/handle/20.500.12484/8007This paper focuses on migration as a social protest in Bulawayo’s We Need New Names with a view to studying the dialectics of agony at home and in exile. The specific objectives are to analyse how Bulawayo captures the uneasiness that torment the characters at home and even on arrival in exile. It also illuminates how the character’s reinvention of self in a new place confronts the protective memories of the way things were back home. The essay studies the thematic transcendence that takes the story beyond its gratuitous dark concerns to other levels of meaning. It x-rays the melancholic, funny, ferocious, joyful and defiant characterization in Bulawayo’s first person narrator in her trenchant observation of human behaviour. To achieve these objectives, the essay deploys the postcolonial theory to account for several issues raised by the novelist. The study concludes that many African Diasporas are not necessarily better in exile as mostly earlier anticipated. The finding of the study shows clearly that voluntary migration is mostly necessitated by the growing emotional trauma that most African government unleashes on her citizenry and thus making exile the painful option.enMigrationDiasporaIdentityTravailEmotionArticle