Double Review: How Beautiful We Were|Imbolo Mbue; The Dragons, the Giant, the Women|Wayétu Moore
It’s been said that when two elephants fight, the grass suffers, and one can’t help but think about the grasses when reading Wayétu Moore’s heart-wrenching but soulful memoir The Dragons, the Giant, the Women, which opens on the cusp of Liberia’s decades-long civil war.
It’s 1990, the mood is festive in honour of Moore’s fifth birthday, and her father and his friends, like many Liberians, are doubtful the rumble between the government and rebels will escalate. This even though some residents have started leaving the country and the topic on everyone’s lips concerns President Samuel Doe, the Hawa Undu dragon of Moore’s dreams, a prince with good intentions whom power corrupts and turns into a monster: "everybody was talking about him because there was another prince who wanted to enter the forest and kill Hawa Undu, to restore peace." That other prince is rebel leader and future president Charles Taylor, who will become a dragon, too.
In a few weeks, the tenuous situation dramatically changes for the worse, catching the Moore family almost by surprise. Gus, the patriarch and titular giant, dashes out the back of their Monrovia home with his three daughters and mother-in-law. There’s no time to telephone and inform his wife, who is studying in the United States and will remain on tenterhooks over the radio silence for several more weeks as her family make the torturous trek through hideaway homes, fields of sugar cane, and bushes.
Ever the consummate father, Gus tries to shield his children from the ugliness of war, telling Moore that the motionless bodies on the ground surrounded by red rings are merely sleeping. Moore’s fluid and visceral prose does more than provide sharp insight into the mind of a five-year old trying to make sense out of a senseless situation. One can almost feel the rays of the merciless sun bearing down on her skin, the thirst ravaging her throat, the thorns cutting her swollen feet.
“Every step made my stomach turn and hurt, and that feeling travelled to my head. The sting was so serious that it felt like all the water in my body left me from my eyes, and the river left a trail on the road out of Monrovia.”
In another chapter, run-on sentences with barely any punctuation leave readers with a sense of the delirium she’s experiencing from extreme heat and thirst. Besides bodily discomforts, Moore dutifully captures the fear and danger that pervade the mood, describing the laugh of a child soldier with “eyes so red they looked like they were bleeding” as “razors cutting bones.”
When Moore and her family eventually migrate to the United States thanks to her mother and a female rebel, nightmares of the war follow her alongside fresh, new ones. She contends with her identity as an African in a foreign land, racism, loss, and displacement — all of which she deftly interlaces and juxtaposes with her mother’s own experiences as a university student in sections of the memoir narrated through her perspective in a bid to interrogate the dominant notion that migrants ultimately start rosier lives in the United States, a seemingly safer and wealthier country.
Similar themes of loss, displacement, poor governance, familial love, and tenacity animate Imbolo Mbue’s sophomore novel, How Beautiful We Were. Set in a fictive African country ruled by a nameless dictator, the book opens with an ominous but unvarnished observation by the children of Kosawa — a village doomed by its vast crude oil wealth.
“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?”
“They” represents a number of people: the greedy, conniving local chief who prances like a “mighty rooster among sickly chicks;” the immoral, profit-driven American corporation Pexton, and the ruthless, out-of-touch government.
Mbue efficiently adopts multiple perspectives that toggle between five members of the Nangi family and the collective voices of the children of Kosawa — thus empowering readers with the ability to zoom in on the intimate, microcosmic effects of “they” on a singular family, and to zoom out on their impersonal, macrocosmic impact on the community. Following another fruitless meeting with representatives of Pexton, the villagers take matters into their own hands — a decision that results in an unintended death, military intervention, imprisonment, displacements, and even more loss. It’s in this morass of familial and communal loss that the story of Thula Nangi unfolds.
Cerebral and ever optimistic, she believes redemption would only come to her people through dialogue and education. So, while her peers in Kosawa grow restive over their unchanging plight, she acquires a scholarship to study in the United States where she soon learns the government there also favours corporations over citizens’ welfare and that knowledge and democracy are not cure-alls for her country’s ailments — disappointments she expresses in a letter to her friends in Kosawa.
“But these Americans with their abundance of knowledge, how could they be powerless too? How is it that their government, which is supposed to be their servant, is acting as their master?”
Mbue’s prose is incisive, lean, and accessible. In describing Thula's commitment to her people, she writes, “she dove forging through a fire, burning yet soaring,” and when Kosawa’s chief ends up in jail in the same dirty brown uniform as other prisoners, an imprisoned member of the Nangi family observes: “Even his gums and sparse teeth no longer seemed notable in a room of such unqualified destitution.”
What’s more, Mbue renders characters in all their foibles and innocence, allowing even the oppressed the right to behave despicably, like the villagers’ choice to impregnate Thula against her will and without her knowledge, or her brother’s capitulation to the corrupting influence of money.
Most noteworthy about the story is, like Moore, she situates ordinary women as drivers of the narrative, where they risk their lives to save their country, family, and strangers, much unlike the nationalist histories that frame such courageous acts as the preserve of men, who are often characterised as founding fathers and heroes. In such renderings, women are unseen and unheard, their contribution to nation-building effectively erased. It’s a fallacy The Dragons, the Giant, the Women and How Beautiful We Were turn on its head by centring women as subjects capable of propelling and making history, just like their male counterparts.
This review originally appeared in Wasafiri Magazine.
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