Fiction of Our Climate: On Imbolo Mbue's "How Beautiful We Were"

Imbolo Mbue | How Beautiful We Were | Random House | 2022 | 384 pages

“But these Americans, with their abundance of knowledge, how can they be powerless too? How is it that their government, which is supposed to be their servant, is acting as their master?” So asks the protagonist of Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were as she pursues her education in New York City after growing up in an African village. Throughout her childhood, her village was polluted by an American oil company, and this recognition—that Americans, too, are powerless in the face of environmental degradation and climate change—transforms local pain into a global crux that implicates us all. The word “implicate” implies guilt, incrimination, but the etymology comes from Middle English, to convey a truth bound up in a fable, from Latin implicāre, implicāt-, to entangle, unite, and this entangling, potentially uniting truth is what Mbue’s fabular novel works to convey.

This review is part three of a four-part series considering candidates for “the great climate novel,” in conversation with Amitav Ghosh’s critique of climate fiction from 2016. In The Great Derangement, Ghosh identifies four elements ripe for exploration in novels serious about wrestling with climate change: The nonhuman, the cataclysmic, the extractive mindset, and the collective. Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were does not explicitly confront climate change, but instead uses a collective point of view to expose the consequences of the Western colonial extractive mindset. Centering on a small community that seeks redress for and reversal of the environmental—and spiritual—damage it has suffered at the hands of an American oil company, the novel invites itself to be read as a parable of our intractable global crisis. 

A native of Limbe, Cameroon, Mbue lives in New York City. Her first novel Behold the Dreamers (2016) explored the dark side of the American dream, the sacrifices immigrants must make to ensure a purportedly better life for their families. With her second novel, How Beautiful We Were, Mbue unearths the backstory to this dream: the historical forces behind immigration to the U.S. from regions that have been systematically impoverished by colonial extraction. Its darker parable counterpoints the satisfying resolution of the immigrant who returns home in Behold the Dreamers. Now, the most that the exploited can hope for is to send their children abroad to lead a life dependent on oil extraction, causing further damage to their home village. The story’s narrative sparseness enables the fate of our protagonist’s village to stand in for post-colonial communities around the world, entangling its local story with the global repercussions of climate change. 

Set in a fictional African village with few temporal signposts (from which one can hazard that its action covers the span of the last 40 or so years), How Beautiful We Were rests on archetypes—the corrupt leader, the village madman, the dutiful father, the medicine man and medium—without succumbing to superficiality. The novel is as interested in developing full, complex characters as in exploring its political ideas, which evolve through and within the characters themselves. Narrated by a powerful “we” who appear to be inhabitants of the village, the opening paragraphs of How Beautiful We Were set up the first of many paradoxes: 

We should have known the end was near. How could we not have known? When the sky began to pour acid and rivers began to turn green, we should have known our land would soon be dead. Then again, how could we have known when they didn’t want us to know?

And:

We hated them and we hated their meetings, but we attended all of them.

“They” are the representatives of the Pexton oil company who have been holding these meetings to address complaints about polluting the villagers’ land, most of which has been sold to Pexton by a corrupt government and backed by the European power that drew the country’s arbitrary boundaries. Crops won’t grow, the air is foul, the well water is poisoned, and children have been dying from an undefined illness marked by coughing and fever. Many villagers work as laborers for Pexton so that they can support their families and have access to bottled water. 

The narrative conveys the mysterious pull of meetings, of words, of coming together to air problems and work out solutions—in other words, democracy in its most basic form. The villagers are slow to give up the belief that if their suffering is made clear, those responsible will work to remedy it. Six men go to the capital to demand a guarantee from the government and Pexton that the health of their village will be restored. Before leaving, one man, Mulaba, had asked over his family’s objections, “Is the government a rock, a thing with neither brain nor heart?” Yes, it turns out. The six men vanish, and a second group sent after them finds out nothing about their fate. 

As the first chapter progresses, the narrative’s “we” begins to define itself, narrowing to the children of the village, and then to a group of age-mates, children old enough to begin to see through and differentiate the self-serving lies of their village leader, the protective lies of their parents, and the stonewalling lies of Pexton. The only living member of the “we” given a name is Thula, Malabo’s daughter, who carries with her his charge “to never forget what it felt like to be a child when [you] grow up, never forget how it felt to be small and in need of protection, much of the suffering in the world was because of those who had forgotten that they too were once children.” The need to protect the unprotected among us—to remember how powerless we all begin in our lives—brings pathos to the children’s point of view as it swings from optimism to cynicism, trusting to scorning. They do not get to be children.

As another meeting wraps up, the village madman announces that he has stolen the keys to the Pexton men’s car. Emboldened by his action, the villagers resolve to keep the Pexton men prisoner in ransom for restoring the clean water of Kosawa. Either Pexton stops killing their children, one man threatens, or they will kill three of its children. As the Kosawa children go home for the evening, they think:

Tomorrow the soldiers will arrive, and we might be dead by sunset.
Tomorrow Pexton will surrender, and we might live to see our old age. 

Kidnapping the three men and their driver buoys everyone with a sense of purpose. As the plan evolves, the villagers’ confidence in it is contagious, until we learn that it relies on getting the names of powerful people, giving them gifts of food, and having the village medicine man and medium erase the captives’ memories. When the Pexton driver laughs at them for their naivete, we know the villagers are wrong to think they will find compassion from the oil company or the government. But the novel invites us to reflect on our awareness of our own individual powerlessness before the collective “person” of corporations and governmental bodies; on our own inadequate reasoning about and accommodations to unacceptable policies and conditions, like lead in children’s drinking water and subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. 

We think we know better than to succumb to misplaced hope—to think that appealing to measurable, foreseeable harms will change minds and priorities—but succumbing to cynicism closes off the future and comes at a deep moral cost. We feel the pull of the villagers’ reasoning, which allows for a continued sense of purpose: “What sense is there in having total certainty that something is one way and no other way? Who has lived through all the years the earth has existed and seen all possibilities?” Then they ask, naively, “How could [Americans] be happy when we were dying for their sake?” We see their fault lies in assuming others want to do what is right, and not what is profitable. In other respects, the villagers come across as astute psychologists: “A man’s anger is often no more than a safe haven for his cowardice,” they reason. 

When one of the Pexton men becomes deathly ill, the villagers know they are in trouble. They grasp at a last chance to leverage their momentary advantage when the sick man tells them of his American nephew, Austin, a reporter who can tell their story to the American public. When three of the villagers decide to seek out Austin, the madman appears once more to try to dissuade them: 

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… they all arrive here believing they have the power to take from us or give to us whatever will satisfy their endless wants.

This is one of the few moments in which I feel a character speaking beyond themselves, though perhaps his role as madman, like King Lear’s fool, grants the author this leeway. The warning echoes after the book ends, in part because the three villagers he addresses will never grow old. They, like Thula, are caught in a dilemma: If the villagers don’t have enough power, and if they can’t reliably appeal to those who have power, what recourse do they have? 

But Austin does come, and he manages to document the retribution to the village for their kidnapping—a brutal massacre by the government’s soldiers. His article shocks American readers and spurs temporary change: The Restoration Movement brings modest sums of money and bottled water to the town and enables Thula to go to the U.S. for her education. In New York City she studies The Wretched of the Earth, she is homesick, and she writes letters back to her friends, telling them of a meeting in the coincidentally named “Village” (Greenwich Village), where she ran into Austin and learned that people in great countries, people with knowledge and even money, are as powerless as in Kosawa. People are angry about pipelines going through sacred ground, about children being poisoned by bad water, about land disappearing into the sea. Contemporary readers will be able to fill in names—Keystone, Flint, the shorelines of Miami, Louisiana, North Carolina, Southern California—and we can imagine future readers filling in these allusions with their own contemporary disasters. A further advantage of writing a fable is that it avoids being quickly dated. 

“Listening to this,” Thula writes, “I thought I was in some bizarre dream in which America had revealed itself to be Kosawa.” She recognizes, finally, the powerlessness of Americans and the paradoxical tyranny of its government, and the difficulty of locating the enemy. 

I’m realizing that something far more complex is going on all over the world, something that binds us to these beset Americans and others like us in villages and towns and cities in nations big and small.

This crux of the book—what exactly is going on in the world?—is never explicitly answered. It’s more than greed, Austin says. It feels as amorphous and impersonal as climate change itself. Warnings from the tech world of an artificial intelligence takeover displaces a current reality onto the future: We have already created something outside of our control, governments and other incorporated interests that are more invested in sustaining themselves than in sustaining life on earth.  

Thula and Austin begin a friendship that promises to become something more, but Austin is unable to deter Thula from her determination to save her village, no matter the moral cost. Having listened to an activist who served time for destroying buildings, Thula has begun to think of how they might fight Pexton: “They speak to us in the language of destruction—let’s speak it to them too, since it’s what they understand.” She sends money to her village for the purpose of damaging property, she specifies, not harming humans. No one is surprised when that line is crossed. Thula proceeds step by rationalized step, from journalism to the courts, to revolution and violence that is met by more powerful violence.  

By the end of the novel, we understand why Thula’s brother and his wife—who was orphaned by her father’s activism—decide to turn their backs on politics and focus on the material well-being of their own family, just as we understand how the initial group of children have become radicalized by trauma beyond Thula’s control. We are left with a dual discomfort: A skepticism about the efficacy of activism, whether nonviolent or violent, balanced by a distaste for simply joining the forces of materialism and extraction and getting the most for oneself that one can. As Thula takes on mythic status in the final chapters, she comes to represent anyone who is persuaded of the urgency to stop environmental destruction or other acts of complicity between and among governments and corporations. Climate change is the most global of these. Thula’s fate may leave us without a clear way forward, but it does offer a lucid understanding of the roads that are closed.  

I can’t help but wish for a different ending—the love story that the novel (and Thula) rejects in favor of activism—but the one we are given feels true to an insoluble situation. We wish to be able to celebrate and grieve the balance of life—not to “politicize” grief—but how can we not? The novel is particularly haunting as I re-read it the week after the Uvalde and Buffalo shootings. The same forces that impede progress against climate change are stacked against gun reform. A parallel fable could be written, replacing the unwillingness of the government and Pexton to prevent the deaths of more children with the unwillingness of Congress and the NRA to implement substantial gun control—even as the judicial branch weakens the few restrictions in place—despite the more than 314 mass shootings this year. Reading the obituaries—the lives that could have been the subjects of novels but instead are an elegy of what might have been—I hear the echo of Mbue’s title: How Beautiful We Were.