WHAT WE OUGHT TO DO: THE SONG OF IMBOLO MBUE
THE SONG OF IMBOLO MBUE
In her second novel, How Beautiful We Were, Imbolo Mbue uses the chorus of voices in a small African village fighting for justice in the shadow of an American oil company to sing in celebration of community, connection, and enduring hope.
IN THE FIRST pages of How Beautiful We Were, published by Random House in March, Imbolo Mbue writes about a “sickness that had arrived like a thief in the night,” an illness that brought fevers and “raspy coughs” until soon “death had grown more ruthless.” She writes: “They told us it would soon be over, that we would all be well in no time.”
Sounds eerily familiar, yet this is not a novel about the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite uncanny similarities to the present—and unlike much contemporary dystopian fiction about environmental collapse—the second novel by the Cameroonian-born author is a more realistic saga about taking a stand against all odds. Thriving in the shadow of colonialism in the fictional African village of Kosawa, the multinational corporation Pexton profits from the oil beneath the land without regard for the air and water, which has “progressed from dirty to deadly,” as the country’s dictatorial leader enjoys the wealth and privilege that accompanies this arrangement. It is such intricacies of power that Mbue, who calls herself “a student of human complexity,” explored in her first novel, Behold the Dreamers (Random House, 2016), and that she spreads onto a larger, more dramatic canvas in How Beautiful We Were.
Zooming from the Hudson Valley region of New York, where she has settled during the pandemic, Mbue says she is looking forward to the March 2021 launch of How Beautiful We Were, delayed almost a year from its original publication date of June 2020 because of COVID-19. She muses that she is perfecting her Spanish and French as she continues to shelter in place, hoping to return to her home in New York City soon while her schedule fills up with online events to promote the new book. But then, a few more months hardly seem to matter for a novel that has taken its time—nearly
In her second novel, How Beautiful We Were, Imbolo Mbue uses the chorus of voices in a small African village fighting for justice in the shadow of an American oil company to sing in celebration of community, connection, and enduring hope.
two decades—to come to fruition.
Mbue wrote most of the opening chapter of How Beautiful We Were after the election of 2016, a time when she “couldn’t have imagined such a thing as this pandemic, nobody could,” she says. Still, “it was a dark time for America and the world,” she points out. “Being present with that pain and frustration allowed me to go to that village and see through the eyes of children.”
But it was actually fourteen years earlier, when Mbue was in her early twenties, that she started what turned into this sweeping story of corporate greed, environmental degradation, and grassroots movements for change. Even in those early years when she hadn’t yet imagined herself as a writer, she believed she had a story to tell: “Even as a child, I was very aware of injustice, of inequality, so when I finally started writing, this was the only story I wanted to tell. It was about a village and what happened when the people decided to fight against far more powerful forces than themselves. It was always about oil and a country led by a dictator, and I spent many years writing and rewriting. Finally, I had to put it aside because I wasn’t equipped— as a writer or a person—to tell a story of this magnitude.”
Having come to the United States from Cameroon in 1998, when she was seventeen, Mbue went on to receive a BA in business management from Rutgers University and a master’s degree in education and psychology from Columbia Teachers College. An avid reader from childhood, she learned her craft from great literature, citing the influence of Shakespeare, Chinua Achebe, Toni Morrison, the Bible. In 2011, in the midst of the financial crisis, she had her inspirational moment walking through Columbus Circle in New York City, where a line of limousines awaited their wealthy passengers. She describes wondering how or if the drivers talked with the titans of industry and finance who were in the back seat. That curiosity led to Behold the Dreamers, the story of two vastly different families: a chauffeur, Jende Jonga, and his wife, Neni, who are immigrants from Cameroon, and Clark Edwards, whose position at Lehman Brothers makes him and his wife, Cindy, part of the powerful 1 percent.
David Ebershoff, an editor at Random House and the author of the best-selling novel The Danish Girl (Viking, 2000), describes his certainty of Mbue’s success upon first reading the manuscript. “When her agent, Susan Golomb, sent the manuscript to me, and I dove into the story of two families, one Cameroonian, one American, both in New York City, I knew,” he says. “I knew I was reading a powerful novel by a masterful storyteller working in the biggest themes of American life—race, class, immigration, gender, equality, and opportunity. I knew one day Imbolo would be a literary star. I knew readers would fall in love with her characters and her writing. I knew how rare her gifts are, and I knew I very much wanted to be her editor.”
He continues: “A few days later Imbolo and Susan came to my office. As I listened to Imbolo speak about the novel and her own remarkable life, I was even more certain. The late, wonderful Susan Kamil, the publisher of Random House, was in the meeting, and afterward she and I walked Imbolo and Susan Golomb to the elevator. As the doors closed, Susan Kamil told me to call Susan and Imbolo immediately and not let them leave the building until they accepted our offer. I got them on the phone in the lobby of Penguin Random House and asked if we could be her publisher.”
Their confidence was well-founded. Acquired with a seven-figure advance,
RENÉE H. SHEA , a retired professor of English and modern languages at Bowie State University in Maryland, has profiled numerous authors for Poets & Writers Magazine, including Paisley Rekdal, Arundhati Roy, Tracy K. Smith, Julie Otsuka, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Edwidge Danticat, and Maxine Hong Kingston. She also coauthors textbooks for Bedford, Freeman and Worth. Her most recent book, American Literature and Rhetoric, was published in January.
Behold the Dreamers received praise from reviewers, became an Oprah’s Book Club pick, won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and has been optioned for a television miniseries. Washington Post book critic Ron Charles praised Mbue for illuminating “the immigrant experience in America with the tenderhearted wisdom so lacking in our political discourse.” His review ran under the headline “The One Novel Donald Trump Should Read Now.”
APRAISE song to storytelling itself, How Beautiful We Were features a complex plot that unfolds over four generations, with characters from Kosawa, Pexton, the country’s dictatorial leadership, and the international community. The narrative moves from the local village to the town of Bézam, the seat of government, to the United States and back again. Mbue conveys the profound ties the villagers feel to ancestral land, the birthright of their children, through vivid descriptions of cultural traditions, such as an origin story involving a leopard, the bonds signified by umbilical cord bundles, and the mystical power of twins. While some of the details reflect the author’s own experience growing up in Cameroon—essentially in two villages where her mother was a community development expert—much of the culture of Kosawa is a composite. A self-described “lover of anthropology,” Mbue acknowledges “borrowing heavily from cultures all over the world, not only African cultures” to create a distinctive, vibrant, and plausibly authentic system of beliefs and practices.
Nowhere is Mbue’s mature command of her craft more apparent than in the novel’s narrative structure. We hear the story through the voices of the Nangi family: the central figure of Thula; her father, Malabo; her mother, Salweh; her grandmother, Yaya; her uncle, Bongo; and her brother, Juba. Such layering is not unusual in contemporary fiction, but what is most striking in How Beautiful We Were is the communal voice of the children of Kosawa that frames the story and is threaded throughout the novel. The children speak—always in the collective “we”— with the authority of shared experience and generational wisdom, always in past tense, as though they are historians bearing witness. Late in the novel one of these chapters opens with the quiet cadence of simple facts that take on the gravity of truth: “We are the age-mates of Thula and the Five [community leaders], the ones who had long ago moved on from the group and gone silent. This part of the story can only be told by us.”
Mbue sees this point of view as the shift that brought the story to life. Earlier versions of the novel “were very focused on the adults,” she says. “I finally realized this wasn’t a story about one person but about a place, a community acting together in this struggle to fight against the oil company. ‘The Children’ came about because when I returned to the novel in 2016, so much was happening to children that was very upsetting to me, specifically in Flint, Michigan, where all they did was drink water, but polluted water, and the school shootings in Sandy Hook that continue to haunt me. I was thinking about what it was like to be a child in a world in which you are not well protected by the system.” She points out that even though the story takes place in an African village, much of it is rooted in current events in the United States: Donald Trump’s election to the presidency, the Women’s March of 2017, and the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe pipeline protests in North Dakota. These large political events were, Mbue says, very personal to her: “I was trying to understand how we get to a situation where we are so complacent about the world we live in and will leave to our children.” Thus, the “sickness” that sets the plot in motion does not strike randomly: It “preferred the bodies of children.”
MBUE has long been fascinated with freedom fighters, dissidents, and revolutionaries. In How Beautiful We Were, this attraction finds form in the extraordinary character Thula, a Zulu name meaning “be still” or “peace.” Early in the novel Thula’s father, who “swears by his ancestors that nothing will stop him from doing what he needs to do for his family,” vanishes in his efforts to gain the attention of government officials, leaving his wife, mother, son, and daughter in Kosawa. His presence persists throughout the novel in Thula, the quiet girl who becomes a full-fledged revolutionary. “I
think Thula and Malabo put together are me to some extent,” Mbue says. “What is it that drives them? Why are they willing to make these sacrifices? What is the price they pay?” These are the questions that she wanted to address in this novel, questions about what it means to take a stand, “to study what it was like to be part of a movement.”
Growing up in Limbe, Cameroon, in the turbulence of the 1990s, Mbue describes being in awe of revolutionaries such as Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara, and Nelson Mandela. “I was fascinated by those men and their tactics. I leaned heavily on revolutionaries of the twentieth century because I wanted to understand the individual cost that comes with standing up against your oppressors when you can’t know the likelihood of success.” Reading Mandela’s autobiography, The Long Walk to Freedom, Mbue was moved to learn Mandela was serving a life sentence in prison when his eldest child, Thembekile, died in July 1969: “It must be the worst feeling—to know you’re doing this for your family, for your country, the world, but you have to make personal sacrifices,” she says. “You really have to feel you are chosen—anointed— to make that level of sacrifice.”
Education is very much a part of the commitment to change, as Mbue sees it. Thula, mirroring the author’s own journey, comes to the United States for her education. Twenty years later, Mbue is still here, but Thula stays only a decade, all the while maintaining a close correspondence with her age-mates who are fomenting rebellion at home in Kosawa. In her letters, part of the sections narrated by the children, Thula recounts her growing radicalization as she assumes leadership of her village community. From thousands of miles away, she signs every letter, “I’ll always be one of us,” a reminder of the role of community in the fight for justice. Mbue explains that in early drafts, Thula was telling her father’s story, but Mbue soon realized that the story belonged to Thula. Part of this shift, Mbue speculates, was her own history: “When you grow up in a world where you don’t see women in certain positions, it’s hard to imagine it. When I heard about the freedom fighters in my childhood, they were all men. As I learned more about women who are and have been doing this work, I began
moving away from making it about Malabo to Thula: It was her mission.”
Mbue draws on her conviction that the great change-makers of the late twentieth century like Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Malcolm X, and Mandela were formed by their education, even if self-educated. Thinking about her own journey as a seventeen-year-old coming to the United States to attend college, Mbue says, “Growing up as a Cameroonian gave me my character, but America shaped my mind.” So in her new novel young Thula studies the iconic thinkers of her era—The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon and Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire—as she deepens her understanding of power dynamics. She is introduced to radical ideas not only in her American college, but in the meetings she attends in “the Village,” a reference to Greenwich Village in Manhattan, the name alone giving her a sense of kinship and community. There she engages in intellectual debate and dialogue as an equal among peers, gaining agency as she applies everything she learns and encounters to the fight for justice in Kosawa.
But even language itself has limits. At several points in the novel, Thula stops speaking. Words fail her after her uncle’s death; she retreats into silence for days after the village was nearly destroyed, a massacre carried out by the military, yet when she comes to the United States she becomes an eloquent and eager speaker. Recalling her own experience as a shy and introverted child, Mbue points out that Thula may not have spoken the words, but in her narrative we see ideas “churning inside her.” In the culture of Kosawa, Thula grew up in a place where girls were not encouraged to speak openly or have opinions, much like Mbue’s childhood in Cameroon. “As a child I didn’t say a lot, though I was very sensitive,” she says. “As I got older and came to America, there was a sort of release. Learning new things pushed me to talk, and I put some of that in Thula. Coming to America and finding like-minded people gave her the freedom to speak—and to be listened to.”
Mbue brings more to the politics of language than the usual consideration of voice. After all, she grew up an English speaker in Cameroon, where 80 percent of the population speaks French. In recent years this linguistic split has brought the country to the brink of civil war. After a separatist movement was formed to create a new country for the English speakers, the government used force to quell what was viewed as rebellion. In “Rough Passages,” which appeared in the New York Times last February, Mbue wrote about the historical marginalization of the English speakers and the recent violence. Asked if that situation resonates in the new novel, she quotes the Indian activist and writer Arundhati Roy: “There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless.’ There are only the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard.” Once Thula is in New York City, Mbue says, she “is determined to see that she and her people are no longer the ‘preferably unheard.’ That’s one of the beauties of literature: that the ‘deliberately silenced’ are given center stage.”
At one point Thula writes to her age-mates: “I promised myself after the massacre that I would acquire knowledge and turn it into a machete that would destroy all those who treat us like vermin.” As this character imagines knowledge alchemizing into a weapon of destruction, a means to an end, Mbue examines complex moral and ethical questions in the fight for justice. Even after the village massacre, Thula spoke out against the use of guns and bullets. Ultimately she cannot dissuade the village leaders, who argue that their oppressors have shown them that “blood was the only means by which power was transferred.”
Asked about this means-to-an-end dilemma of revolutionaries, Mbue smiles and turns from her references to great philosophical thinkers to Game of Thrones (she is an unapologetic fan). She recalls a scene in which a character who dreams of ascending the Iron Throne asserts that “knowledge is power” until his adversary counters, “Power is power!” That, she says, is Thula’s situation: “She went overseas, she studied the ways of the Western world, but there’s only so much you can do if you don’t have the power to make the change. Ngu~g~i wa Thiong’o, one of my favorite writers, has a character in his novel Matigari who asks, ‘Is it enough for me to just say that now I know?’ How can knowledge be a weapon to overturn an unjust system?”
In How Beautiful We Were, the courts are useless, either because they’re corrupt or impossibly sluggish, the military is brutal, humanitarian organizations are well-meaning but ineffectual, and journalism seems a victim of both broken faith and short attention spans. “Hence we have the world today,” Mbue responds with a knowing shrug—but there is hope, she insists. Such institutions are made by humans and can be changed, reformed, even replaced. She optimistically characterizes this novel not as a David versus Goliath story but rather as Goliath versus Goliath. “It is about people who realize that they are powerful, they have what it takes to rise and do something that the corporations never imagined.” She stresses that the stakes may seem enormously high, but the goal, the dream, is actually humble: “Living a clean, simple life in your village, your home, where the people who came before you walked.”
During these days of multiple crises, Thula’s advice to her age-mates might be words to live by: “We can’t do only what we’re at ease with, we must do what we ought to do.” Mbue knows how hard that can be. She sees the evocative image by photographer Daniel Arsham on the book’s jacket—two battered forearms entwined—as a symbol of resilience. “We’ve been battered and broken, but we’re going to hold hands and keep marching,” she says. No wonder she chose her title from the biblical Song of Solomon (“How beautiful you are, my darling! Oh, how beautiful!”) because, as she says, “I had to capture the fact that, ultimately, the story is a love song.” An activist in her own way, Mbue is a writer who sings in celebration of community, connection, and enduring hope.