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How Beautiful We Were

di Imbolo Mbue

UtentiRecensioniPopolaritàMedia votiCitazioni
6162737,806 (3.83)61
"'We should have known the end was near.' So begins Imbolo Mbue's exquisite and devastating novel How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells the story of a people living in fear amidst environmental degradation wrought by a large and powerful American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of clean up and financial reparations to the villagers are made--and ignored. The country's government, led by a corrupt, brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interest. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight the American corporation. Doing so will come at a steep price. Told through multiple perspectives and centered around a fierce young girl named Thula who grows up to become a revolutionary, Joy of the Oppressed is a masterful exploration of what happens when the reckless drive for profit, coupled with the ghosts of colonialism, comes up against one village's quest for justice--and a young woman's willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people's freedom"--… (altro)
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“We should have known the end was near,” the story begins. “When the sky began to pour acid and rivers began to turn green, we should have known our land would soon be dead.”

How Beautiful We Were takes place in a fictional African country, but the story bears a close resemblance to some very similar problems in real life. The book explores topics, such as imperialism, political corruption, environmental destruction, acts of rebellion, and courage.

Imbolo Mbue is a highly talented writer. Considering the topic, the book is sobering and difficult to read, yet she writes it so beautifully. I’m officially a fan of Imbolo Mbue!

( )
  nadia.masood | Dec 10, 2023 |
When the American oil company first started work on the village's lands, the villagers were excited about the benefits and improvements that were sure to come. But what followed were lands destroyed and dying children, the water undrinkable and the village stuck between a company that insists that they'd like to help, but their hands are tied, and a government that silences anyone who might get in the way of the current arrangements.

This isn't a fun read, but it is an informative one. Mbue has made some interesting decisions about how she told this story, including the use of the first person plural for some chapters, a choice that works far better here than in other places I've encountered it. This is very much a book written by an African (Mbue was born in Cameroon and now lives in New York) for an American audience but it isn't a book that coddles the reader. It explains without over-simplifying. At heart, though, this is less a novel propelled by a story than one motivated by a cause. ( )
1 vota RidgewayGirl | Feb 2, 2023 |
Imbolo Mbue 's second novel, How Beautiful We Were provides an insider's
view of a village whose eden-like existence is ruined by the discovery of oil.
In a village called Kosovo, the oil under the ground winds up being a curse since the American company Pexton started drilling. "Within a year, fishermen broke down their canoes and found new uses for the wood. Children began to forget the taste of fish. The smell of Kosawa became the smell of crude. The noise from the oil field multiplied; day and night we heard it in our bedrooms, in our classroom, in the forest. Our air turned heavy". The use of various narrators and even a Greek Chorus entitled The Children provide the various insights of narrative which reads like a fable. The children have become sick and the once beautiful area is polluted. As the title implies, there's a lot of reminiscing about what this village used to be like.
The story starts with the Pexton, (sound like Exxon), men coming to both hear and ignore the grievances, but the village madman takes their keys and won't let them return. It takes the madman to truly see that no one will listen unless they do something to make them. The second chapter is written in first person from Thula whose father went to reason with the company in the city. The men continue to feel that if they could only talk to the men in charge they would understand and stop the pollution. These men have not been exposed to greed. He and a few men took buses and supposedly met with the company to complain about the death of the children, but they never returned. The mayor, who has profited from the company, just tries to keep the peace. When armed men come looking for the missing company men, they are told that perhaps they are visiting relatives, and the town gets a conspiratorial chuckle at their successful deception. The chuckles will stop soon after.
Mbue goes on to chart the next couple decades and centers her story around Thula as the prodigal child going off to America to get educated, always promising to come back and resolve this problem. I recommend you read to find out if she does.
Lines:
Opening-
We should have known the end was near. When the sky began to pour acid and rivers began to turn green, we should have known our land would soon be dead.”

“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.”

I had just turned nineteen. I remember I wore a layer of anxiety that day—I’d reached marriage age with no one handsome in sight. A man in my village named Neba was my only option, but I couldn’t look past his nostrils, which flared like a windswept skirt.

In our response, we reminded her of the story about the ants that killed the growling dog, bite by bite. We could do such a thing too. There was no better time to start biting Pexton than now.

She had the fortitude of the sun—no matter how dark and thick the clouds, she was confident she could melt them and emerge in full glory.

Wasn’t it time every tribe started looking out for itself? they wondered. My sister tried to argue against such thinking. She tried to contend that the country might be made up of dozens of tribes but it was still one nation, a garden with flowers of assorted shapes and colors and fragrances, in unison forming an exquisite beauty. Few listened—unity seemed too vulgar a notion.

Washington Post -Ron Charles
Growing up under a dictatorship in Cameroon, Mbue knows the despair that germinates in the contaminated soil of these industrial crimes. Her novel follows out the endless cycles of acquiescence and resistance, exposure and neglect, litigation and corruption that grind down exploited people…. In any practical sense, the village that Thula and her friends are trying to save is already gone. From the first line, we know what awaits Kosawa. But the fatalism of this story is countered by the beauty of Mbue’s prose and the purity of her vision. “We hoped,” the children say, “that we would die where we were born.” As long as there are novels this powerful, the fight’s not over. ( )
  novelcommentary | Jan 18, 2023 |
How Beautiful We Were, the second novel by Imbolo Mbue, has a strong opening. It depicts the story of a people who live in fear amid environmental destruction brought on by an American oil firm in the imaginary African community of Kosawa. Farmlands have become barren as a result of pipeline spills. Toxic water has killed children while the locals have been given cleanup instructions and financial compensation, but these promises were broken. The dictatorial government of the nation provides no help. With few options left, the Kosawa population decides to rebel. Their battle will cost them dearly and last for years.

How Beautiful We Were is a simplistic examination of what occurs when a community's determination to hold on to its ancestral land and a young woman's willingness to give up everything for her people's freedom clash with the apparent reckless drive for profit and the ghost of colonialism (although there is no explanation how the oil firm makes a profit when their oil pipeline is broken - just one example of how the narrative does not quite hold together). The narrative is spread over a generation of children and the family of a girl named Thula who grows up to become a revolutionary.

I was disappointed with this book as I found the narrative disjointed and repetitive. By the middle of the book I grew tired of the story. I was not impressed with the presentation as it seemed fantastic mixing the evil corporation and colonialism in a way that ultimately defied belief. Certainly bad things can and do happen but this book seemed to portray the situation in a simplistic narrative that did not pass muster with this reader. ( )
  jwhenderson | Dec 20, 2022 |
This is a sad and somewhat bleak book about a town ravaged by an American oil company and its affects on a small African village. Beautifully written and heartbreaking, it feels to me kind of like the continuation of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. ( )
  Anniik | Nov 26, 2022 |
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The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death, a light has dawned.
—Isaiah 9:2
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For my beautiful, beautiful children
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We should have known the end was near.
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Only when we became parents did we realize how we could harm our children in an attempt to clean out for them the smothering decay of this world.
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"'We should have known the end was near.' So begins Imbolo Mbue's exquisite and devastating novel How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells the story of a people living in fear amidst environmental degradation wrought by a large and powerful American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of clean up and financial reparations to the villagers are made--and ignored. The country's government, led by a corrupt, brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interest. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight the American corporation. Doing so will come at a steep price. Told through multiple perspectives and centered around a fierce young girl named Thula who grows up to become a revolutionary, Joy of the Oppressed is a masterful exploration of what happens when the reckless drive for profit, coupled with the ghosts of colonialism, comes up against one village's quest for justice--and a young woman's willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people's freedom"--

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