There’s a gulf of difference between knowing injustice is happening and seeing the depth of that injustice from a front-row seat. In Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were, the heartbreak of seeing that is enough to make about anyone empathetic to the plights of people it’s more convenient to not think about.
In the village of Kosawa, in a remote part of an unnamed African country, generations have thrived from the fertile soil, river, and forest surrounding them. But when an American oil company, Pexton, starts drilling for oil nearby, the utopia quickly fades to a dystopia of dead soil, poisoned water, and tainted air. Children begin falling ill, and many die. Food becomes scarce. The bottled water the oil company sends isn’t enough for all the village’s needs. When a group of men go to the nearby city to plead for government intervention, they’re never heard from again. The complicity of the village’s leader becomes evident when the villagers and some of Pexton’s employees come together in a meeting that turns violent. Consequences from that day ripple for years to come.
Watching this unfold is Thula, who was just a young girl when her father and the other men went to the city and disappeared. She’s precocious and excels academically, even with the poor educational options available to her in the village. As most of her peers marry and begin families of their own, she takes a lifechanging opportunity to go to college in the United States with the aim to eventually save her village through policy and legal means. Not everyone in the village agrees with her patient approach, and it soon becomes clear that time is running out for Kosawa.
Kosawa is a product of its people, so we get to meet many of them in the multi-POV structure Mbue uses. The only recurring point of view is that of the children, a group of peers who are young at the start of the novel, about 1980, and tell the story as a nameless collective over the next forty years as they grow to adulthood, middle age, and finally into retirement. Attitudes shift with age, and with changing circumstances. The world the children’s parents grew up in is almost unrecognizable from the one they inherit and pass down to their children.
How Beautiful We Were doesn’t try to be coy about the nature of Kosawa’s predicament. Practically from page one, it’s clear that the enormous appetite for oil worldwide, and especially in the U.S., is perhaps indirectly but unmistakably the cause of Kosawa’s troubles. Kosawa is small and has little influence, making it difficult to stop a force like Pexton even if it didn’t have the grave misfortune of being located in an authoritarian country where corruption runs rampant. The ecological devastation and clear disregard for life and health isn’t half as depressing as Kosawa’s powerlessness time and time again. Infractions by villagers done in desperation are punished swiftly and harshly, while countless deaths at the hands of the government or Pexton go unremarked. And while this is a work of fiction, its parallels to true stories—not just internationally, but uncomfortably close to home—makes this a read that is at once chilling and guilt inducing.
It’s chilling because the same equation that determines the lives in Kosawa or its real-life counterparts are worthless could be all-too easily aimed our way if circumstances shift. The guilt, though, isn’t hypothetical, even though this is fiction. It’s one thing to understand that the status quo demands a human cost in some far-off corner of some anonymous country. It’s another to put faces and stories to that cost, and to see how steep that cost really is, and how our culture is complicit to it.
Ring Reads 