Endless Wants
Review of How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue (USA: Penguin Random House, 2021)
By Rebecca Kwee
“For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.”—Frantz Fanon, from The Wretched of the Earth
Midway through Imbolo Mbue’s second novel How Beautiful We Were, the protagonist, Thula, finally comprehends the revolutionary power of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. She was first gifted this book, along with Pedagogy of the Oppressed and The Communist Manifesto, by her uncle, who did not understand it. Only when she goes abroad to study in America years later does she fathom how these works could provide the blueprint for the liberation of her people. Through this scene and many others, How Beautiful We Were skillfully weaves a multigenerational tapestry of an oppressed people’s search for justice, each generation in dialogue with past and future, each character seeking their own answers to the question: Is there a way out of the ruthless cycle of colonialism, one that evolves with globalization, which systematically removes agency and dignity from oppressed peoples?
At the heart of the novel is a decades-long fight for the restitution of one’s ancestral lands. Set in the fictional West African village of Kosawa (Mbue herself is Cameroonian-American), How Beautiful We Were spans the 1970s to 2010s, and depicts the destruction that Pexton, an American oil corporation, has wrought upon Kosawa. As a result of Pexton’s incessant drilling, Kosawa’s waters are poisoned, its soil infertile, and its residents—especially its children—dying. Each generation seeks answers and reparations from Pexton, with each approach informed by the failures of the last generation but all driven by the continued deaths of Kosawa’s children. Violence pervades from the beginning of the novel, often told in memories and flashbacks. Mbue does not hesitate to describe the burials by mothers of infants who have died from pollution, and the mourning by wives of husbands who are killed in military attacks. Reading about the Kosawa children stoically discussing the deaths of their friends on the way to school, I am reminded of a quote from The Brothers Karamazov: “some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education […] If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days.” But what happens to a generation of children whose memories are death and destruction by the hands of an imperialist, faceless corporation?
To answer this question, Mbue provides a powerful, emotional examination of the neoliberal workings of extractive colonialism. Her fictional account is rooted in truth—oil-extraction giants such as Shell have spilled more than 40 million liters of oil across the Niger Delta each year, contaminating air, land, and water, while poisoning residents through exposure to high levels of heavy metals. Shell has been accused of complicity with the Nigerian military in various human rights abuses and corruption cases, including bribes, killings, and burning of villages.
One consequence of Pexton’s arrival in Kosawa (and the fictional country it is situated in) is the shift in notions of land sovereignty. Although the villagers of Kosawa have long considered themselves the rightful heirs of their lands, descendents of a pair of brothers who forged a blood pact with a leopard they had freed before founding the village, Pexton claims the legal right to operate on their lands, with the help of a complicit, corrupt local government. This tension between the ways of the ancestors and the ways of the modern-day colonizer resonates throughout, often surfacing in memories of traditions and rituals. Young Thula recounts such a memory of her father:
Sometimes he asked me to sing the song our ancestors sang as they laid the foundation for Kosawa, the song that would later become our village anthem […] I knew Papa’s heart needed a balm, so I would sing for him: Sons of the leopard, daughters of the leopard, beware all who dare wrong us, never will our roar be silenced.
Pexton’s argument for the right to operate on Kosawa land is derived from the imperialist Doctrine of Discovery—that regardless of the claims of existing communities, whoever first discovers a resource (in this case, oil) and exerts labor on the land has a rightful claim to it. In fact, this argument was first stated in English philosopher John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government to provide an economic defense of British colonialism. Mbue links past to present in order to ask whether colonialism is any less attenuated in the 20th century: old masters have been replaced by new ones—American megacorporations—and the influence of neocolonialism is now more insidious, hiding behind cultural imperialism (Luxury brands! Junk food!), opaque bureaucracy, and empty promises of better economic futures for all citizens. Characters who confront Pexton and the corrupt local government are met with vague corporate-speak and labyrinthine processes with no central authority taking direct accountability. They come to realize that globalization absolves many sins by dividing responsibility into discrete categories and allowing corporations to pursue profit above all else. Juba, Thula’s brother, explains Pexton’s deal with the local government years after the inciting incident:
Pexton’s agreement with our government was that Pexton would extract the crude and our government would be responsible for all negative externalities […] if the case ended up in a trial, Pexton wasn’t going to deny that its practices led to spills that famished Kosawa’s soil […] They wouldn’t even need to argue that the children’s deaths had nothing to do with them. All they would need to show was evidence that our government had relieved them of any responsibility to the land and people in exchange for splitting the oil profits.
Mbue excels in adding a global context to the narrative, once NGOs become involved and Thula receives a scholarship to leave Kosawa and further her studies in New York City. Whereas the first half of the novel depicts the tragic exploitation of fictional Kosawa, we are jolted into reality when Thula learns of similar, recent instances in America where capitalistic greed has upended indigenous lands and poisoned its own citizens. The 2014-2019 Flint water crisis in Michigan and the 2016 Dakota Access Pipeline protests, in fact, prompted Mbue to return to writing this novel. She depicts the Restoration Movement, the NGO that brings advocacy and aid to the Kosawa people, in a nuanced manner, suggesting that although their efforts have somewhat helped Kosawa, their “white savior” tendencies and superficial approach to restoration (cash for lives lost) do not hold the answer to the true liberation and empowerment of the people of Kosawa. If anything, NGOs may be complicit in the greenwashing of corporate guilt, enabling Pexton to atone for their sins and murders with bags of cash. Mbue’s depiction of neocolonialism is highly perceptive, reminding readers that in a late-capitalist age, the battles to be fought are not by the Global South against the Global North, but by working classes around the world against megacorporations and corrupt governments. As Thula wonders, in a letter to her friends in Kosawa, representative democracies such as the USA do not guarantee true political representation:
But these Americans, with their abundance of knowledge, how could they be powerless too? How is it that their government, which is supposed to be their servant, is acting as their master?
The narrative structure of How Beautiful We Were plays a critical role in unraveling a story that spans vast time and space. Each chapter depicts the point of view of a different character in the novel, and alternating chapters, titled “The Children,” provide the perspective of the children of Kosawa, a Greek chorus of sorts, who are indeed children at the beginning of the novel but become parents and grandparents by the novel’s end. Other than the inciting incident at the beginning of the novel, most events are revealed indirectly, told through characters who have already experienced them, sometimes years or decades after the act. Much of Thula’s adult plotline is told through letters, as well as through the perspectives of her relatives and friends. The narrative distance adds a heightened sense of fait accompli and helplessness, though the grief and anger remain very raw, even when refracted through kaleidoscopic lenses.
At times during my reading I wished to understand adult Thula’s inner thoughts directly instead of through others’ accounts, especially in the uncomfortable scenes where others exploit her for their own agendas. However, the distance between Thula and the reader is a deliberate choice of Mbue’s—a rejection of the smug, self-aggrandizing “savior” narrative so often seen in novels depicting marginalized groups. Thula is not so much a unique character as an archetype, one of many patterns of behavior against a destructive imperial force—a pattern of childhood trauma, an education abroad, and subsequent exposure to anticolonial ideas.
The rotating cast of characters highlights the varied interpretations and reactions to generational oppression and trauma: some pursue assimilation, some nonviolent negotiation, whereas others seek retaliation. Rather than providing judgment of which method is better, Mbue is more interested in what leads a character to adopt a certain approach, and she allows the consequences of her characters’ actions to play out throughout the novel. As a result of these fragmented viewpoints, the reader is left with more questions than answers. Thus the divisive structure of the novel mirrors its plotline: when a hegemonic power forces itself on a community, the political, social, cultural, economic, and environmental conflicts that arise are incredibly complex. Arriving at a consensus on how to resolve them is almost impossible. By the end of the novel, Mbue still does not provide answers; in fact, she seems to have a cynical view of restoration. She does hint at possible solutions throughout, one of them being self-empowerment and community building instead of reliance on outside forces. This reasonable perspective is ironically held by the village’s madman, Konga:
“You’re young,” he says. “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. 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.”
Reading How Beautiful We Were from Southeast Asia, I am left with an unexpected sense of solidarity, perhaps due to our shared colonial pasts and ongoing instances of economic oppression and environmental destruction across the region, as old masters are replaced by new. It is a reminder of how literature can enable dialogue halfway across the world. We can empathize and learn from each other’s stories in the fight for dignity and self-determination.
Rebecca Kwee is an educator and writer based in Singapore. Her essays and short stories on postcolonial identity and culture are published or forthcoming in Singapore Unbound, Hyperallergic, Catapult, and Shenandoah Literary. She is currently writing speculative fiction on the topics of immigration and diaspora. She misses live music.
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