Published by Random House on March 9, 2021
How Beautiful We Were tells a sorrowful story from multiple perspectives. The story is of Kosawa, an African village that has survived multiple challenges imposed by the outside world. The villagers avoided the Europeans who came with chains to snatch slaves for Americans. The villagers listened politely to missionaries who threatened them with damnation if they did not accept the white Spirit, but chose not to worship a Spirit who would “throw us into a fire if we hadn’t done anything to offend it.” Europeans arrived to take young men at gunpoint to work in rubber plantations, wiping out a generation. After the demand for rubber abated, villagers learned to live with Europeans and their strange notions of money and religion, in part because Europeans were less often visiting “not to befriend us but to make us do whatever it was they wanted us to do.”
The village’s latest ordeal involves an oil company called Pexton. The national government gave Pexton land that is adjacent to the village. Pexton has been drilling for oil and fouling the river with runoff. Village children are dying after drinking water contaminated by spillage. Attempts to negotiate with Pexton have resulted in smiles and promises of future action that never come to fruition. When a few villagers try to take matters into their own hands, fourteen villagers are massacred by soldiers. When a journalist tells an American audience about the oil company, their country’s president deports the journalist for hurting the president’s image. Villagers who dare to criticize the president are executed.
Five chapters are narrated by five key characters. Yaya is a grandmother and widow, the mother of Sachel, who lost her husband Molabo when he decided to travel to the capitol and ask for the government’s help. Tribal tradition prevents Sachel from taking another lover, although it is a tradition that Sachel longs to break. Yaya no longer believes in any tradition that binds women to the demands of men. She also comes to understand that traditions of secrecy might bind a village while destroying its inhabitants.
Sachel has a daughter named Thula who becomes the novel’s central character. Thula’s sister gets a chapter to describe life from a local perspective. Thula escapes the boundaries of Kosawa when she goes to America to pursue an education. She becomes a social justice warrior, writing letters that inspire the youth of her village to sabotage Pexton, much to the chagrin of village elders who worry about the consequences of protest. Thula preaches nonviolence but some of the village youth choose not to be limited by Thula’s vision. Whether they make the right choice is for each reader to decide.
Thula’s experiences in America are enriching, as is her relationship with the deported journalist, but they make her yearn for home. She has grown up eating savory dishes: pepper soup with goat meat, land snails with tomato sauce and rice. The cuisine to which she is exposed in New York has its merits, but it isn’t home cooking. Thula is therefore happy to return home, where she is granted a teaching position because the government needs people who are well educated. Thula’s goal is to inspire students and citizens to replace the dictator with a democratically elected government, but the government doesn’t worry about her because, after all, she’s just a woman.
The subordinate role of women in her society is one of the novel’s themes. Thula does make an impact on her village and nation, but revolutions are not easy to ignite, particularly the peaceful revolution that she champions. The gap between dreaming of change and bringing it about is another theme.
How Beautiful We Were is not a feel-good story. The title is in the past tense for a reason. The story spans decades. Villagers grow up, grow old, watch husbands disappear and children die while little about their relationship with Pexton changes.
Much of the story is tender and moving. Scenes of loving children caring for aging parents, of parents grieving for lost children, of celebratory dances and somber death rituals, illuminate lives that are superficially different from western experience yet fundamentally the same.
At the same time, the novel reads like a documentary. Despite (or perhaps because of) its first-person narration from multiple perspectives, the characters seem a bit distant. About half of the chapters are narrated by “the children,” a device that makes it easier to feel empathy for the characters than to make an emotional connection with them. By spreading the focus among multiple characters, some of them nameless, the novel loses some of its power.
Still, the horrifying story conveys a horrifying sense of reality. Corrupt dictators who rule in their own interests and in the interest of wealthy companies that support them cause havoc in developing nations around the world. The story takes an honest view of corporate America’s elevation of profit above morality and of the American government’s hand-off approach to foreign injustice caused by American businesses. The final chapter is sad only because it is honest. In the real world, stories of the powerless and oppressed always have a sad ending.
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