How Beautiful We Were by Mbolo Mbue

One angry woman did everything, and she failed.~from How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

I read Imbolo Mbue's first novel Behold the Dreamers as a galley and for book club. I jumped at the chance to read her second novel, How Beautiful We Were. 

Was money so important that they would sell children to strangers seeking oil?~from How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

The novel is about an African village struggling for environmental justice, powerless, caught between an American oil company and a corrupt dictatorship government. 

They are a proud people, connected to the land of their ancestors. They have lived simple, subsistence lives, full of blessings. Until the oil company ruined their water, their land, their air. A generation of children watch their peers dying from poisoned water. Their pleas for help are in vain. 

School-aged Thula is inspired by books, including The Communist Manifesto, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and The Wretched of the Earth. "They were her closest friends," spurring her into activist causes when she goes to America to study. In America and becomes an activist. Meanwhile, her peers in her home village lose faith in the process and take up terrorism. 

How could we have been so reckless as to dream?~from How Beautiful We Were by Mbolo Mbue

The fictional village, its inhabitants and history, is so well drawn I could believe it taken from life. The viewpoint shifts among the characters.

We wondered if America was populated with cheerful people like that overseer, which made it hard for us to understand them: How could they be happy when we were dying for their sake?~from How Beautiful We Were by Mbolo Mbue

The fate of the village and its country are an indictment to Western colonialism and capitalism. Slaves, rubber, oil--people came and exploited Africa for gain. The village loses their traditions and ancestral place as their children become educated and take jobs with Western corporations and the government.

This story must be told, it might not feel good to all ears, it gives our mouths no joy to sat it, but our story cannot be left untold.~from How Beautiful We Were by Mbolo Mbue

This is not an easy book for an American to read. It reminds us of the many ways our country has failed and continues to fail short of the ideal we hope it is. And not just abroad--we have failed our to protect our children here in America.

I was given access to a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

from the publisher:

We should have known the end was near. So begins Imbolo Mbue’s powerful second novel, How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells of a people living in fear amid environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of cleanup and financial reparations to the villagers are made—and ignored. The country’s government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interests. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight back. Their struggle will last for decades and come at a steep price.

Told from the perspective of a generation of children and the family of a girl named Thula who grows up to become a revolutionary, How Beautiful We Were is a masterful exploration of what happens when the reckless drive for profit, coupled with the ghost of colonialism, comes up against one community’s determination to hold on to its ancestral land and a young woman’s willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people’s freedom.

How Beautiful We Were
by Imbolo Mbue
Random House Publishing Group - Random House
Pub Date: March 9, 2021
ISBN: 9780593132425
hard cover $28.00 (USD)

The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich

Last summer my husband and I met with the Blue Water Indigenous Alliance to donate an heirloom bible given to my husband's fourth-great-grandmother by John Riley, Ojibwe chief of the Black River Band. The bible is currently on display in the Port Huron Museum and will become part of a new museum highlighting native heritage in the Port Huron area.

The 1826 New Testament had been published by the American Bible Society without a binding. Someone encased it in thick, rich brown leather held together with coarse thread. The book has a gentle curve as if kept in a back pocket for a long time, the edge of the book worn away.

My husband's great-great-grandmother read that volume daily until the day of her death, and that made it special to her family, but to hold an artifact that once was in the pocket of their ancestor and kin was even more sacred to those of Native heritage gathered to accept it.

I have often thought about that meeting. For all my research on John Riley and my reading about Native American history, after that meeting I felt my otherness and my ignorance. I read the white man's histories and think I know Riley. What arrogance.

Reading The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich reinforced my awareness of ignorance born of privilege in a European dominated society. I had never heard of the Indian Termination Policy being carried out just after the time of my birth. Natives were to be assimilated with all the rights of an American citizen. It was intended that individuals find work and become self-supporting and pay taxes. Reservations were taken out of Native control, health care and education no longer provided. Life was harsh before termination; it got worse after termination. It was 'extermination' under a new name.

Erdrich's novel is based on her grandfather's life and his successful endeavor to block the termination of the Turtle Mountain Reservation.

The night watchman is the hardworking hero of the story, a family man who works nights at the new factory that employs Ojibwe women to perform the delicate job of creating jewel bearings. He is determined to protect their reservation and people from termination, working around the clock and raising money to travel to Washington, D. C. to present their case before Congress. Their way of life, their community is threatened. They feel a deep connection to the land that supported their ancestors since time immemorial.

Patrice is one of the young Ojibwe women working at the factory. The job allows her to support her mother and brother. She dreams of going to university to study law. She tries to blend into European society but encounters racism and sexual harassment. Two men vie for her attention, unaware of her naivety about relationships and sex and desire.

When Patrice's sister Vera goes to the city disappears, she goes takes all her savings to look for her. It is a nightmarish trip into the depravity of the underside of the city, a place where young native women are vulnerable prey. She returns with Vera's baby.

It is hard to write about this novel. It left me with strong feelings, including deep shame for how the prevalent European society has treated Native Americans since we landed on these shores. Erdrich does not exploit our feelings, there is no melodramatic writing when describing chilling scenes of exploitation and abuse.

The courage and strength of the characters is inspirational. I loved how one love storyline was handled, showing that true love is communal and not about personal desire.

Fiction can educate and enlarge our limited experience. And I thank Erdrich for furthering my understanding.

I was given access to a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

The Night Watchman
by Louise Erdrich
HarperCollins Publishers
Pub Date 03 Mar 2020
ISBN: 9780062671189
PRICE: $28.99 (USD) hard cover

Frida Kahlo in America; The Creative Awakening of a Great Artist by Celia Stahr

In 2015, I saw the Detroit Institute of Art (DAI) exhibition Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit. I knew Diego Rivera from the DIA court murals but I had known little about Frida Kahol. Reading Frida Kahol in America by Celia Stahr, specifically about Kahlo's time in Detroit, I could clearly remember her painting of her miscarriage in Henry Ford Hospital. We listened to the story on headphones and studied the unforgettable painting. 

Although the exhibit included works by Rivera, it was Kahlo's that stuck in my mind. Rivera's painting of a flower seller was more accessible, 'prettier', but Kahlo's self-portraits grabbed my attention--those eyes, so direct and almost challenging, her self-confidence and self-acceptance revealed. 

Stahr shares that many who knew both Rivera and Kahlo said Kahlo was the better artist. She stood in the shadow of her husband's charismatic personality, diminished by the press, struggling to develop her artistic voice. 

Kahlo was in her early twenties when she married the older, famous artist, only twenty-three when they arrived in America. Her life had already been eventful, suffering polio, scoliosis, spina bifida, and the life-threatening bus accident when she was a teenager. Pain accompanied her every day. She was a Communist, she challenged society's prescribed sex roles, and had suffered heartbreak as a spurned lover. 

It was so interesting to see American during the Depression through Kahlo's eyes. The wealthy industrialists were her husband's patrons--they paid the bills. They also represented a privileged class Kahlo who found revolting. 

Kahlo wrote to her mother, "Witnessing the horrible poverty here and the millions of people who have no work, food, or home, who are cold and have no hope in this country of scumbag millionaires, who greedily grab everything, has profoundly shocked [us]."

Of course, I was very interested in the artists' time in Detroit. The city had been one of the hardest hit by the Depression, 50% unemployed. I was shocked to read about the Ford Hunger March. Ford had reduced salaries and laid off workers, and since the workers lived in Ford housing they became homeless as well. Four thousand marched in freezing weather to the gate of the Rouge River plant to be met by bullets and fire hoses, killing four people. River and Kahlo arrived a month after the event.

Stahr addresses each painting created by Kahlo, explaining the work and its symbolism in detail, including the self-portrait made for her estranged lover, the groundbreaking paintings about her abortion and the miscarriage that spurred a traumatic 'rebirth' as had her bus accident when she was eighteen years old.

Stahr addresses the duality "at the root of Frida's sense of self," part of her "search for a unification of opposites, as the Aztecs and alchemists espoused."

Kahlo's deeply personal art defied convention, delving into female experiences never depicted in art before. In comparison, Rivera's masterpiece murals at the Detroit Institute of Art look to the past, glorifying the pre-Depression industrial worker and the scientists and entrepreneurs who created industry.

Memorialized in Rivera's mural, Edsel Ford and William Valentiner
chose Rivera to paint the walls of the DIA courtyard 

These same industrialist millionaires were aiding Hitler, Ford a known anti-semite, and oil companies supplying fuel and poisonous gasses to the Nazis.

After Detroit, they went to New York City where Rivera was to create a mural for the new Rockefeller Center and a battle over a patron's control of an artist's content played itself out. It could have happened in Detroit, but the scandalous murals drew record crowds to the DIA and turned around their finances.

"Love is the basis of all life," Stahr quotes Kahlo. Love of country, for friends and family, sexual love, for home. Her relationship with Rivera was conflicted, their love affairs rending their marriage, resulting in divorce and remarriage.

This is a revealing and deep study of Kahlo that truly educated me while engaging me emotionally with its subject.

I was given a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Frida Kahlo in America: The Creative Awakening of a Great Artist
by Celia Stahr
St. Martin's Press
On Sale: 03/03/2020
ISBN: 9781250113382
hardcover $29.99; $14.99 ebook

Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and the United States of America (1932) 

Learn more about the DIA exhibit at
https://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/2015/03/diego_rivera_and_frida_kahlo_i.html

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins

I was nine years old when I concluded that being a writer was the most important career in the world because books could make us cry and laugh and dream and envision another reality. The idea of being an art teacher or a music teacher or someone dedicated to God dropped by the wayside. I wanted to be a writer because of the great power of the pen, the way books change lives.

A book like American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins exemplifies the wisdom of the nine-year-old me. For in telling the riveting story of people who must leave their beloved homes to save their lives, Cummins gives faces to those we are told to fear, and when their stories move us we connect to the 'other' and experience our common humanity.

The cover blurb calls this novel "The Grapes of Wrath for our time." Steinbeck's novel was published in 1939 and was an instant best-seller in spite of being labeled "socialist propaganda." The Depression and Dust Bowl had driven 5000,000 people to leave their homes and travel across America, hoping to find work--to just survive. Steinbeck showed America who these migrants were, how they were treated, how they suffered on their journey.

Today's migrants also flee for their lives, not because of environmental degradation has destroyed their livelihood, but because of violence and lawlessness and human trafficking. They just want the freedom to survive.

American Dirt begins with an explosive chapter of horror and violence, with Lydia and her eight-year-old son in Lucas hiding, listening to the sound of sixteen family members being murdered. The choices made by Lydia and her journalist husband Sebastian brought them to this moment. Lydia was drawn to befriend Javier, a patron in her bookstore, unaware he was the head of a deadly cartel. And Sebastian wrote an expose' on Javier for his newspaper.

As Lydia and Lucas flee and make their way from Acapulco north they accumulate a rag-tag family, Soledad and Rebeca, sisters from the idyllic cloud forest now controlled by a cartel, and Beto, a world-wise child from the garbage dumps. Other travelers exemplify the diversity of migrants--a teen trying to escape the cartel, men who go north for work, a grad student brought to America as a child, a middle-class mother in America legally who is arrested during her routine check-in.

These people encounter all the terrors of the migrant journey, learning to scramble onto moving trains, hunger and thirst and weariness, continual fear, capture and ransom, rape, abuse--and the charity of helpers.

I was literally brought to tears when a man escorts Lydia, Lucas, and the sisters through town, protecting them with his size and machete. When asked why he did this for migrants he replied, "For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink," with Lydia finishing, "A stranger and you welcomed me."

I spent my entire adult life as the wife of a clergyman. I know both scripture and what is required of us and the many ways we justify our actions--or inactions-- our sins of commission and omission. The ways we twist things, grab onto worldly values to sidestep doing what is right.

I also have seen how true faith is risk and perilous and how false faith separates, judges, and protects one's self-interest.

History teaches that silence is consent, inaction is approval. Something must stir the public's heart. Nothing does that like a good story.

The Grapes of Wrath caught Eleanor Roosevelt's attention and she called for the government to look into migrant camp conditions. As Susan Shillinglaw notes, “Empathy is the signature of the book—an empathetic response to human suffering."

And that is what American Dirt accomplishes.

I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

American Dirt
by Jeanine Cummins
Flatiron Books
Pub Date 21 Jan 2020 
ISBN 9781250209764
PRICE $27.99 (USD)

There There by Tommy Orange

When I read the powerful Prologue in Tommy Orange's novel There There through the First Look Book Club I knew I had to read this book. A distinct, strong voice offered an abbreviated history of Indian-European relations and our stereotyped images of Indians. It was brutal and blunt.

"We are the memories we don't remember, which live in us, which we feel, which make us sing and dance and pray the way we do, feelings from memories that flare and bloom unexpectedly in our lives like blood through a blanket from a wound made by a bullet fired by a man shooting us in the back for our hair, our heads, for a bounty, or just to get rid of us." Prologue, There There   

I was a lucky giveaway winner and began reading the book as soon as it arrived.

Orange imagined a novel for the untold stories of urban Native Americans, people who have lost their traditions yet are labeled as 'other' by society. Readers meet a community of characters seeking to understand who they are, struggling with alcoholism, broken families, poverty, and addiction. 

They are all headed to the Big Oakland Powwow, to reconnect with family or their heritage or to find an easy way out.

"We all came to the Big Oakland Powwow for different reasons. The messy, dangling threads of our lives got pulled into a braid--tied to the back of everything we'd been doing all along to get us here. We've been coming from miles. And we've been coming for years, generations, lifetimes, layered in prayer and handwoven regalia, beaded and sewn together, feathered, braided, blessed, and cursed." from Interlude, There There

There are a lot of characters--twelve--and each chapter skips from one character to another, building our understanding of a bigger picture. We know from the first character's story that everyone is heading into danger which creates tension as our investment in the characters deepens. The climax likewise is told from multiple viewpoints, and with Orange's beautiful writing, even violence becomes a dance and an awakening.

The book is already a national bestseller that has garnered acclaim. It is a sensational debut.

There There
by Tommy Orange
A. A. Knopf
$25.95 hardbound
ISBN: 978-0-525-52037-5

The Tyre by C. J. Dubois & E. C. Huntley

Reincarnation brings hope to Ranji. He accepts his fate with resignation. He lives under a Banyan tree in a grass-roofed hut.

Ranji is an untouchable in Tamil Nadu who supports his family by gathering wood from along the road, returning home after dark. Cars rush by, deadly cobra lurk near anthills. Yet he is content. He has a beautiful wife who loves him, a son making a living in the city, and a scholarly daughter who hopes for the college education her elder brother had to forgo. He needs little, money for his daughter's schooling and for food. His wife saves money and dreams of a new sarai, while Ranji dreams of a bicycle.

One evening Ranji is returning home when he hears a noise and discovers a large tire has fallen off a passing truck. He hides it in the bushes to retrieve later.

As Ranji life changes. A holy man, once an engineer, teaches him about the tire. His knowledge impresses the man who hires him to harvest rice and he is given a better job. Meanwhile, his wife has attracted the attention of a richer man, a known seducer. When the monsoon season becomes deadly, all Ranji's problems and good fortune bring him to question: was the tire given to him to ruin his life, or to bring good fortune?

I enjoyed being immersed in a world so vastly different from my own, living with these characters who are content with so little while deserving so much more. The novel is more than a look at another culture, it is a mirror in which we can reflect on our own values, hopes and dreams, leaving us to wonder at the strange serendipity that sometimes alters our lives in unimaginable ways.

I received a free ebook from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Tyre
by C. J. Dubois, E. C. Huntley
Thistle Publishing
Pub Date 31 May 2018
EDITION Paperback
ISBN 9781786080646
PRICE £7.99 (GBP)