44 pages • 1 hour read
How Beautiful We Were
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Themes
Protest and Rebellion
How Beautiful We Were explores various forms of protest, or methods of affecting change. These methods can generally be grouped into education/pedagogy, property damage, violence, appealing to powers, working from within the system, and complicity. Multiple factors determine how an individual will decide to protest against oppression. For example, the ways different generations think about protest are informed by their life experiences: Village elders, who have been exposed to oppression for longer periods, are less prone to impulsive action than their progeny. The novel chronicles how these perspectives emerge through the voice of collective narrative voice of the children, whose opinions and practices change as they exit adolescence and enter adulthood.
The Restoration Movement and Thula embrace the education/pedagogy theory of change. One of the NGO’s primary tenets is that educating people will save places like Kosawa: “[I]f a child of ours could go to America and bring knowledge back to us, someday no government or corporation would be able to do to us the things they’ve been doing to us” (130). Thula’s education does teach her about political ideology, while her inferior status as a woman allows her to speak freely when she is working in Bezam. However, the government’s lack of a response to her advocacy shows how unthreatened it is by the idea that education will spur change. Thula believes what the Restoration Movement says wholeheartedly until she arrives in America and learns that people in democratic, educated places face great oppression, too. At this point, she begins to consider fighting with not only words.
Thula’s peers—the other children who make up the collective first-person narrator—first follow the property damage model and then the violence model of resistance. They do not trust companies or governments, and their despair and rage turns destructive in the hope that enough violence will pressure those in power to stop ignore Kosawa’s plight. The strategy partially works: Pexton, a company whose bottom line is its most important value, eventually makes a deal with the children if they stop their attacks. However, because the country’s government is too corrupt to enforce the result of any such negotiation, when the children uphold their end of the deal, Pexton does not. Instead, the children’s retributive violence is met with further violence at the hands of Pexton and the government. Ultimately, the children and Kosawa end up dead.
Many characters in Kosawa agree that appealing to oppressive forces, such as Pexton, government officials, and colonial countries, is the best way out of their subjugation. They try to draw out the empathy of Pexton officials, get Austin to bring their story to the US in hopes of provoking foreign pressure on Pexton and their government, and work to convince their government to respond to Pexton’s exploitative and environmentally degrading presence. This form of protest is almost completely futile—advocates who go to the capital are disappeared, villagers who meet with Pexton employees are ignored or spoken to condescendingly, and when Kosawa becomes too vocal, the dictator simply has it razed to the ground.
Juba believes that change can be effected from the inside, hoping that Kosawa could be saved by replacing corrupt government officials with people who have experienced subjugation and violence. His belief is quickly shattered when he enters the government leadership school. He graduates a complicit bureaucrat, whose wealth does not give him the ability to help his people.
Yaya, the oldest narrator in the book, has given up on saving Kosawa entirely; she wishes that her family would give up trying to foment revolution, too. In the end, her nihilistic resignation is proven prophetic, as everyone else is killed or eventually forced out of Kosawa.
Neocolonialism and Foreign Aid
This novel is a critique of neocolonialism and foreign aid. Readers watch the depredations of resource extraction companies, which rely on colonial tactics and government corruption, and the repeated failures of the foreign aid figures.
The Restoration Movement exemplifies the well-intentioned but ultimately pointless work of foreign NGOs, which often do not fully understand the systems within which they operate. In the beginning, the Restoration Movement’s primary goal is to attain better education for children in Kosawa—a goal they impose on villagers without consultation. While seemingly a net good, this focus on education ignores Kosawa’s cultural suspicions of the nearby village where the school is located, and neglects villagers more immediate needs, such as remediation of the contaminated water supply. The hapless representatives of Restoration Movement are clearly out of their depth: “they knew stories like ours existed, because fighting for people like us was what they did, but they’d never seen a case like ours, this magnitude of subjugation” (137). Eventually, rather than admit its failure, the Restoration Movement becomes complicit in Kosawa’s ruin, recommending that Kosawa capitulate to Pexton.
Kosawa elders also hold out hope that the US will somehow intervene in their situation, despite the fact that the countries that bring missionaries and foreign aid are the same countries that are wreaking social and environmental havoc in the name of imperial expansion and capitalism in the first place. At one point, an elder says that “he could imagine the ways in which Lusaka and Bongo would have worked with the Restoration Movement to keep aflame the anger of the American people so our story would not be forgotten there” (198). However, American attention is highly conditional, relying on preconceived biases about African violence: Austin’s photographs of the destruction and death in Kosawa builds enough empathy to make some boycott Pexton oil, but Americans are mostly unwilling to make real sacrifices—they simply buy oil from a different exploitative company.
In Yaya’s chapter, the novel connects this dynamic to the history of colonial projects in Kosawa. Kosawa was spared from the transatlantic trading of enslaved people, but deeply impacted by the rubber boom of the 19th century. Mbue paints a picture of the long arm of colonial and imperialist projects and the impossibility of escaping them: Wealthy countries have always been and will always be willing to harm poor ones to get access to their resources, usually by co-opting governments. A major reason Kosawa cannot fight off the exploitative Pexton is that its country’s dictator has been bought by the companies that “often gave His Excellency loans to create shared wealth” (192) through NGOs like the IMF and the World Bank. This dynamic makes it hard for Western countries to pressure the dictator into making changes to the country’s abysmal human rights record:
Europe […] told him that if he didn’t release the Four they’d stop lending to him, they couldn’t condone the unjust treatment of any human, but everyone knew that these lenders wouldn’t stop making the loans—keeping countries like ours in their debt was why they existed (192).
This passage describes the so-called resource curse—a neocolonial process by which poor countries with natural resources end up dependent on extractor countries for loans, while the extractors build wealth by exploiting these natural resources.
Grief and Intergenerational Trauma
Juba wonders, “Why do humans fight when we all want the same things?” (338)—a question that summarizes one of the novel’s unanswerable puzzles. One contributing factor to the animosity and violence is grief and trauma.
Thula is clearly a product of collective generational trauma. The Nangi family has borne the brunt of violence for generations. Yaya and Big Papa’s ancestors suffered during the rubber boom—a series of traumas that impacted the family in complex ways. More recently, Big Papa’s anger, depressive episodes, and inability to explain them, which stem from the unresolved trauma of his childhood sexual assault, in turn affect his wife, children, and grandchildren. His sons, who are deeply affected by their father’s mental health challenges, also turn into sources of grief for the family’s next generation. Bongo’s trauma is based on the experiences of the village watching village children die from Pexton’s contamination. Even his most positive, most romantic thoughts are subsumed by grief. As he appreciates Wanja’s beauty, intrusive thoughts interfere: “Her body is ripe for babies. Dead babies. I try not to think of dead babies” (81). The next generation is similarly troubled. Juba’s grief and trauma turn into repeated hallucinatory episodes: “At work, a colleague’s head morphs into glass while we’re chatting […] the first time it happened, when Woja Beki was speaking at a village meeting and his tongue turned into a dog’s tail. These days it happens at random” (327). Likewise, Thula has trouble coping with the death of her father Malabo, whose disappearance at the hands of the government propels her into activism. Thula, like her grandfather, falls into intense, depressive episodes; her drive to affect change in her village is her inheritance from her father; and her willingness to buck traditional gender expectations stems from her grandmother’s and mother’s chafing under these repressive norms.
While the grief of Kosawa villagers is at the forefront of the story, Mbue also makes a point of showing cycles of trauma driving the behavior of Pexton employees and government officials. For example, the implacable Pexton official nicknamed the Leader—a man who refuses to feel any pity for the people of the village even when confronted with their children’s death from contaminated water—turns out to be in a desperate situation himself. After his wife and some of his children died on a bridge whose structural failure weren’t fixed because of government corruption, he feels no compunction harm others—the only thing that matters to him was supporting the rest of his children.
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