How Beautiful We Were

by Imbolo Mbue

How could he appreciate laws that had not been imprinted on his heart?

much of the suffering in the world was because of those who had forgotten that they too were once children.

I know nothing about how a girl makes men pay for their crimes, but I have the rest of my life to figure it out.

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? Why wouldn’t they ask their friends at Pexton to stop killing us? Was it possible they knew nothing of our plight? Was Pexton lying to them, just as they were lying to us?

Every morning I ask the Spirit to grant me reasons to be grateful.

He’s learning, just as we’re unlearning, that sometimes the best way forward is to do as commanded and offer no resistance.

“But let me tell you something, sweet child. Something you may never have heard before and might never hear again after today: we are the only ones who can free ourselves.”

“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. No matter their pretenses, they all arrive here believing they have the power to take from us or give to us whatever will satisfy their endless wants.”

Only when we became parents did we realize how we could harm our children in an attempt to clean out for them the smothering decay of this world. —

Why do we hope on when life has revealed itself to be meaningless?

My mother always cautioned me against dwelling on the past and the future. What happened will never unhappen, she liked to say; what is to happen will happen—better you focus on what’s happening in front of you.

what happened lives within me, it surrounds me, ever present. I cannot trust the future and its uncertainty.

Or it could be that

she finally recognized we were all in chains and that her pain was unique but in no way greater than others’, so what choice did we all have but to carry on?

Why haven’t I advised my daughter that the most important knowledge she will ever need as a woman is how to find contentment with whatever life offers her?

Fate hadn’t given us numerous chances to be children, but we’d grabbed every occasion we could;

But we didn’t want to wait for kindly Americans. We doubted that their hatred for Pexton burned as fiercely as ours did.

people stand in lines for everything, those who arrived first standing at the front, no one paying attention to who is oldest or neediest.

But then I rise and I remind myself that I did not come here to wish for what I’d left behind. I came here to find what I’m searching for,

We knew we were not the only ones in our country, but could you have ever imagined that such things are happening to people in great countries too?

Knowledge, I believed, would give Kosawa power. But these Americans, with their abundance of knowledge, how could they be powerless too?

But perhaps the point isn’t for us to hurt them in a manner from which they’ll never recover. Perhaps the point is merely to let them know that we’re here. And we’re angry.

we can’t do only what we’re at ease with, we must do what we ought to do.

what song would they be singing if we’d been stolen and displaced and no one was left to tell our stories? The ones who were taken, where are their descendants now? What do these descendants know of their ancestral villages? What anguish follows them because they know nothing about the men and women who came before them, the ones who gave them their spirit?

It seemed to me that there was something about having children to protect, little ones for whom he had to do everything in his power so no harm would befall them, something about making them happy when he couldn’t make himself happy, something about doing all that in a world that to him was perpetually covered in darkness—there was just something about it all that was too much for him to bear, and he simply couldn’t.

My husband liked to say a man’s feet can never stand on his head, but these children, they reminded the elders that, though that might be so, the feet could go wherever they wanted, and there was nothing the head could do except come along.

extraordinary humans never stay dead, not as long as the world continues to need the likes of them—but

Nature makes sure that pain awaits us at every turn so that in our eternal quest to avoid it, or rid ourselves of it, we’ll keep on wanting one thing after another and the earth will stay vibrant. We feel pain, we cause pain, a ridiculous endless cycle.

My entire life has been a game of holding on tightly, and wanting to never let go, and yet losing.

living their callings had freed them to love each other without conditions.