In this expansive second novel from PEN/Faulkner Award winner Imbolo Mbue (Behold the Dreamers), an African village's protracted and sometimes violent downfall at the hands of a corrupt U.S. corporation inspires revolutionary leanings in one of its daughters.
"When the sky began to pour acid and rivers began to turn green, we should have known our land would soon be dead," says a chorus of children from Kosawa, a village polluted by the unsafe drilling practices of Pexton, an American oil company. In October of 1980, tension between Pexton and the citizens of Kosawa comes to a head, during a visit from company officials to pacify the village after the deaths of several children. Led by "village madman" Konga in a moment of clarity, Kosawa's men imprison the Pexton delegation and their own complicit leader. The resulting events end in loss on both sides as the village makes contact with a sympathetic journalist but faces bloody retaliation from soldiers of their nation's corrupt government.
Though a more sensationalized take on the topic might use this incident as its climax, Mbue's nuanced and realistic approach positions it as one skirmish presaging decades of struggle. Thula, a sharp and determined little girl who witnesses the 1980 events and loses her father to the conflict, grows up watching her village suffer. An opportunity to attend school in New York City in 1988 opens Thula's mind to the tools of revolution, and her letters home to her friends encourage dissent against their country's leadership. However, even Thula is unprepared for the lengths to which her friends will go to safeguard their home.
Told through the first-person viewpoints of multiple villagers, as well as the chorus of Thula's contemporaries, How Beautiful We Were captures the small yet universal dramas wrought by love, birth and death. To the people of Kosawa in 1980, indifference to human life, to the deaths of children, is unfathomable, and Mbue, a native Cameroonian currently living in the U.S., creates painstakingly deep character sketches that show the human cost of environmental exploitation. Thula's letters connect the plight of her village to that of underprivileged U.S. communities, mentioning poisoned water and pipelines on sacred land that make her think, "America had revealed itself to be Kosawa." This epic and empathetic saga shines a truthful albeit unflattering light on globalization. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads
Shelf Talker: This challenging and empathetic novel gives voice to African villagers desperate to save their land and children from a greedy U.S. corporation.