How Beautiful We Were

The children’s perspective on Protest and Rebellion shifts in Chapter 7 as they come to understand that getting people to hear their story is not enough to motivate change. They realize that Pexton has little reason to ever leave: “There was still so much oil under our land—why abandon it because of a conscience?” (192). Whereas the children have been hopeful and jubilant in past chapters, wishing peace upon themselves and their enemies, they now adopt a more pragmatic attitude that looks favorably on destructive or even violent action. In response to their lived experiences, the children begin to act under a moral code similar to that of their enemies.

The novel’s focus on how outside forces influence former colonial states continues in a nuanced discussion of different kinds of Neocolonialism and Foreign Aid. Village elders believe that Thula’s going to America will save Kosawa, once again showing the reverence they have for the US. This reverence requires a certain level of cognitive dissonance, as they also understand that Pexton is an American company and that wealthy nations keep poor nations poor. Kosawa’s country is kept poor by rich countries, which value resource extraction more than they want to pressure its government to do the right thing. Nevertheless, Kosawa’s residents feel their only option is to rely on rich countries for help even when NGOs like the Restoration Movement fail to bring about change. It is telling that after promising a better future, this organization tells villagers to make peace with Pexton’s presence. In contrast, Thula’s experience reveals that the US is itself a country with wide disparities between the haves and the have-nots. Meanwhile, her encounter with the older man with a history of violent activism reveals a different way that NGOs can influence Kosawa—Thula describes his approach to her peers in Kosawa, and they adopt it for their own.

Kosawa’s cultural insistence on ignoring certain truths is an underlying theme in these two chapters. This unwillingness to confront the darker sides of the community adds to Grief and Intergenerational Trauma. Yaya learns that not only was Big Papa sexually abused as a child, but the adults who should have protected him instead put the burden of keeping the abuse a secret on his shoulders. As Yaya considers why Big Papa’s older sister’s husband told Big Papa to say nothing, she imagines the man telling Big Papa’s sister “that everyone needed to make sacrifices for the sake of their families and villages and countries, to keep them together, to move them forward, to prevent them from falling apart from within” (251). This section reveals the negative aspect of collectivism, in which individual pain must be ignored for communities to go on.

Yaya’s perspective provides an important juxtaposition to the children’s growing desire to fight and avenge Pexton. In old age, Yaya has come to see life as ridiculous and meaningless, a point of view that comes from observing the cycles of harm in Kosawa—how a new colonial pursuit arrives each time the old one leaves. Yaya’s biggest regret in her marriage was not laughing more, and she applies this end-of-life wisdom to her descendants. She wants her family to let go of tradition and the fight for Kosawa so that they might sooner achieve joy, but instead she sees younger villagers adopt their elders’ maladaptive responses to trauma. She compares Thula to Big Papa: “Like you, she seems doomed never to find peace until a new earth is born, one in which all are accorded the same level of dignity. How I ache for you both” (251). Neither Yaya nor the children believe that saving Kosawa or changing the nature of neocolonialism is likely to happen, but to Yaya, the world is meaningless so fighting is meaningless, whereas for the children, the only thing that brings meaning to their lives is fighting.