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now_booking's review
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
Wow. When they say something is an arduous read... this definitely felt like one. Perhaps it is because as a Nigerian person from the oil-producing Niger Delta region, this felt like a salt on a raw wound, like a bandaid slowly, painfully being peeled off a hairy leg, like digging into a raw wound. And yet it is so gorgeously written, that even though I was triggered and absolutely heartbroken and destroyed reading this, I was highlighting large swathes of the gorgeous writing.
The premise is that Kosawa is a (fictional) post-colonial village somewhere in a forgotten, rural part of a fictional unnamed country in Africa. After decades of oil exploration, their land and water have been destroyed by villainous American oil company, Pexton, and the pollution is killing their children and relatives. One family, the Nangi, family seems destined to take on the burden of leading the revolution to bring justice to the community and end decades of exploitation, specifically granddaughter Thula Nangi, but it comes at a steep cost.
This was a book that covered a lot of ground thematically and historically in a really painstaking way, trying to cover varied perspectives. For that reason, it felt a lot slower and a lot longer than it was. This was a somewhat slow and difficult read and not just because it’s meandering through different storytellers with different perspectives of the same story, not because of the sometimes back and forth shifting timelines, or the tedious detail that is gone into to ensure that no piece of the story is missed makes it a slow read, this was difficult because it is real and honest and true and anyone from anywhere who has ever been exploited and treated like justice doesn’t matter will relate.
When I started this book, I imagined that it was based on my country but reading further and deeper, I realized that the book is kind of based off a lot of African countries. The leader, His Excellency, is a conflation of every awful African dictator that has ever existed - you can pick your traits and utterances and identify which real life leaders contributed what to this Frankenstein-like monster. The oil company, Pexton, could really be any foreign mining or extraction company raping African resources and then adding insult to injury, colluding with corrupt governments to exploit the people. The reference to forced labour on rubber plantations and atrocities against those ancestors forced into that labour is clearly from Congo. I feel like this story belongs to many people, however it was inspired.
This book often read like anti-capitalist environmental fiction with an air of dystopia in it, but it’s even more devastating for the fact that I know it’s plausibility and I know it’s true because my people from my place of origin have lived through these exact things, are living through these exact things. So how wouldn’t I feel “a way” re-opening wounds about governments prioritizing corporations over people and over justice. How won’t I sympathize with Kosawa and with Thula and the children. How wouldn’t anyone of conscience empathize and condemn these acts.
This book feels like an indictment of corporate greed and irresponsibility, of leaders who sell their people out, of hierarchies that ignore the deaths and suffering of innocent children, of broken justice systems and of those of us who sit and wait to dialogue everything to death whilst the status quo persists, of the ones who choose violence and the consequences they bring to the innocent and to themselves. It is not a very hopeful book, but the reality of the situation for millions of people around the world who are being exploited by corporations is not a hopeful one either.
This is my second book by this author and what I love about this author’s writing is that she doesn’t tell you what to think, she doesn’t editorialize and tell you her opinions. She reveals the characters and how they think and feel and their opinions- wrong or right in a way that absolutely makes you understand their motivations whether you agree or not. She did this in Behold The Dreamers, and she does it here as well. I have worked on projects around post-conflict reconstruction around the extractive industry-motivated militancy and justice and access to data from the oil exploration sector, and I’ve never read or heard anyone reveal the history of things and provide a justification for the violence and bitterness that ensued like I’ve witnessed from this author in this book. I wish everyone from every other region who says “why are they so mad,” “why resort to violence?,” “why don’t they ask their own regional governments questions,” I wish everyone who looks down and judges my people could read this to understand the whys and the origin story.
But this book isn’t all modern capitalist atrocities and failed governments, somewhere in there are themes of colonialism and loss of heritage, of love and family and responsibility, of grief and heartbreak and loss, of femininity and feminism and sexuality, gender roles and culture and power. And of course, justice. But yes, this is definitely a story about how the worship of profit over people and the exploitation and corruption that result are historical- it’s in the heritage of the slave trade and slavery from Africa to the West, it’s in the way indigenous people in the the Americas (and elsewhere) have been unjustly treated and exploited over their own ancestral land and resources, it in the way that there is some in-born spirit of selfishness in those that seek to exploit others and greed in those willing to sell their compatriots out for money and power. The author then brings it down to the family level and talks about the corruptions and exploitations families overlook even when victims speak up, the misogyny and assault and betrayal amongst friends, the gaslighting, the loss of self and of cultural heritage, the colonization of future generations who were born free citizens. It is pretty depressing and triggering in every single way possible.
This book is divided into chapters by narrator. Each narrator sort of gets one shot to tell the story from their perspective- interspersed by chapters from “The Children” who are a sort of chorus of Thula’s (Thula Nangi is the sort of protagonist) age-mates at different stages in their lives from young childhood to grandparenthood. My favourite chapter was grandmother, Yaya’s chapter. I think that’s the level of resignation I’ve reached with this issue personally. When I read the first chapter of this, I thought I was going to give it 5 stars. But I think this was such a huge undertaking, there were so many themes and so many issues that the author captured that sometimes it felt too much a little and main thread of the story was a little lost. And I think this makes sense with so many sources telling the same story from different points of view and different times in life, and that is executed brilliantly and probably results in the art the author wanted to create even though it lost some of threads I wanted followed and I wanted to read. I think objectively, this is a 5-star book, but I feel a 4-star way about it: so 4.5 stars???? If you pick this up, bring your fury along, you’ll need it for this book. The rage alone!!!
Many thanks to Random House for the complementary review copy through NetGalley.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Ableism, Body shaming, Child abuse, Child death, Confinement, Death, Death of parent, Eating disorder, Genocide, Grief, Gun violence, Incest, Kidnapping, Mental illness, Miscarriage, Misogyny, Murder, Pedophilia, Police brutality, Rape, Sexism, Sexual assault, Torture, and Violence
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