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FICTION
Imbolo Mbue’s ‘How Beautiful We Were’ Exposes the Human Cost of Capital
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Credit...Cannaday Chapman
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ByOmar El-Akkad
* NYT,March 8, 2021UpdatedMarch 12, 2021
HOW BEAUTIFUL WE WERE
**By Imbolo Mbue
364 pp. Random House. $28.
A kind of moral claustrophobia hangs over the opening pages ofImbolo
Mbue’s
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/19/books/imbolo-mbue-how-beautiful-we-were.html>sweeping
and quietly devastating second novel, “How Beautiful We Were.” In
October of 1980, in the fictional African village of Kosawa,
representatives of an American oil company called Pexton have come to
meet with the locals, whose children are dying. Nearby, the company’s
oil pipelines and drilling sites have left the fields fallow and the
water poisoned. The residents of Kosawa want the company gone and the
land restored to what it was before Pexton showed up, decades ago. The
company’s representatives say they’re doing everything they can, though
their audience knows it’s a lie — Pexton has the support of the village
head as well as the country’s dictator and, with it, impunity. Nothing
will be done. But just as the meeting concludes, Konga, the village
madman, bursts in. He’s got another idea: Until they get what they want,
the villagers should hold Pexton’s men as prisoners.
It’s a propulsive beginning, though one that feels at first as though
it’s about to roam familiar ground — a tale of a casually sociopathic
corporation and the people whose lives it steamrolls. By the end of the
first chapter, I couldn’t help bracing for a long march toward one of
two conclusions: the corporation’s inevitable victory, or its wildly
unlikely but inspiring defeat.
/[ This novel was one of our most anticipated books of March.//See the
full list/
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/books/march-2021-books.html>/. ]/
I was wrong. What carries Mbue’s decades-spanning fable of power and
corruption is something much less clear-cut, and what starts as a
David-and-Goliath story slowly transforms into a nuanced exploration of
self-interest, of what it means to want in the age of capitalism and
colonialism — these machines of malicious, insatiable wanting.
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Not long after the villagers of Kosawa kidnap Pexton’s representatives,
a group of national soldiers show up asking questions about their
whereabouts. It’s one of the narrative’s first — and least violent —
confrontations between the state and the village, and an introduction to
the myriad ways in which Kosawa’s residents must scheme in order to
avoid the wrath of a government that would think nothing of wiping them
out altogether. In the months and years that follow, the villagers try
everything they can think of to get the oil company off their land. They
meet with an American journalist, hoping that an article might change
public (i.e., Western) sentiment in their favor; they travel to the
capital to plead with the national government; they consider taking up arms.
Image
/[ Read an excerpt from//“How Beautiful We Were.”/
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/10/books/review/how-beautiful-we-were-by-imbolo-mbue-an-excerpt.html>/]/
In Kosawa, Mbue has created a place and a people alive with emotional
range. There is no consensus among the villagers about what to do —
whether to free their Pexton hostages after one falls severely ill;
whether to lie to the soldiers; whether to take the oilmen’s money;
whether to buy guns. The central moral and philosophical conflict of
this novel boils down to one between those willing to trust Pexton to do
what’s right, those who want to solicit the support of well-meaning
American activists and those who see no difference between the two.
“Someday, when you’re old, you’ll see that the ones who came to kill us
and the ones who’ll run to save us are the same,” Konga says. “No matter
their pretenses, they all arrive here believing they have the power to
take from us or give to us whatever will satisfy their endless wants.”
The story unfolds in the alternating points of view of individual
villagers — the most fully realized of whom is Thula, a young girl who
eventually becomes a guide for Kosawa’s resistance movement — and a
chorus of children. At their best, the choral chapters have an impact
similar to the collective voice of the seaborne brides in Julie Otsuka’s
“The Buddha in the Attic
<https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/books/review/the-buddha-in-the-attic-by-julie-otsuka-book-review.html>,”
a sense of hardship dispensed en masse yet suffered individually. But
over the course of 360 pages, the constant returns to this collective
voice become a bit cumbersome. Describing individuals within their
group, the children use the awkward phrase “our age-mate” so often that
eventually I couldn’t not notice it. At times, the individual and
collective narrators seem to step on each other’s toes, covering the
same events and recollections in a manner more repetitive than it is
illuminating.
But these are minor quibbles, and easily overlooked given the novel’s
incisive appeal to the reader’s empathy. Mbue is masterly at shading in
the spaces where greed and guilt intermingle: the loneliness that
follows a spouse’s early death, and on its heels the secret desire to be
touched again; the wavering between whether to fight the Americans or
take their money. Like Carolina de Robertis’s “Cantoras
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/03/books/review/cantoras-carolina-de-robertis.html>”
or Huzama Habayeb’s “Velvet,” “How Beautiful We Were” charts the ways
repression, be it at the hands of a government or a corporation or a
society, can turn the most basic human needs into radical and
radicalizing acts. In one of the novel’s more understated and moving
sections, Thula’s grandmother, now nearing the end of her life, admits
her one regret about her marriage is having adopted her husband’s
predilection for sorrow; she wishes she’d laughed more. “Why did this
world become amusing,” she asks, “only when I realized I was about to
leave it?”
Indifferent to these appeals to humanity, to the human consequences of
its actions in and around Kosawa, the oil conglomerate, Pexton, becomes
another of Mbue’s sharply drawn characters. The way that indifference
clashes so jarringly against Pexton’s public-relations offensive — its
many hollow declarations of support for the village and the loved ones
of the dead — will ring instantly familiar to anyone who’s ever
witnessed these machinations in the real world, be it by the shores of
West Africa or in the sinking oil country of southern Louisiana. So
authentically does Mbue render the plain hypocrisy of corporate
double-speak that it sometimes becomes difficult to tell whether even
Pexton’s own employees believe any of the things they’re saying. At one
point in the novel, after an American activist group decides to sue the
oil company in order to force it to clean up Kosawa’s land and water, a
Pexton executive comes to visit the village with an offer. The company,
he says, has decided to give the villagers a share of the profits it
makes off their land, though he can’t quite say what the exact
percentage will be. “You have to remember, Pexton has a lot of people
who want its money,” he says. “The government in America wants some of
it. The government here wants their share. All the people who work for
Pexton, they need their monthly salaries. But your share is also very
important, because together we inhabit this valley, and we must do so
peacefully.” The executive then says his employer would be happy to
offer the villagers advice on what to do with their newfound wealth,
such as use it to move somewhere else.
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In her widely acclaimed 2016 debut, “Behold the Dreamers
<https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/books/review/imbolo-mbue-behold-the-dreamers.html>,”
Mbue tethered the story of Cameroonian immigrants to a specific time and
place (the 2008 recession in New York City). “How Beautiful We Were” has
few such anchors. America in general, and New York specifically, appear
both up close and from a great distance (the children of Kosawa learn
from their teacher that America is a place where people live in brick
houses and mash their potatoes before eating them with things called
“ferks”). But for the most part the novel takes place in an invented
setting, and although it begins in 1980, time becomes increasingly
malleable as the narrative goes on.
There are a lot of structural elements to keep track of, and to her
credit, Mbue does more than just duct-tape them together. It is
profoundly affecting to watch the surviving children who were present
for the first meeting with Pexton grow older over the decades, until
they become parents and then grandparents, relating stories about what
the village used to be. The elegiac register that runs through the
entire narrative finds its best fit here in this wider arc, charting the
negative spaces of these lives, all the things the children could have
been and done were they not engaged in a lifelong battle to keep a
foreigner from splitting open their land for profit. In this way the
novel can be seen as a meditation on a question one villager asks toward
the end, a question that might just contain its own answer: “Why do
humans fight when we all want the same things?”
Omar El-Akkad is the author of “American War.” His next novel, “What
Strange Paradise,” will be published in July.
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