You might say that Imbolo Mbue has spent a lifetime working on her new novel, How Beautiful We Were (Random House, March 9). The author, who was born in Cameroon and lives in New York, first began writing the book nearly 20 years ago; she interrupted work on it to write her acclaimed debut novel, Behold the Dreamers, which was published in 2016 and went on to become an Oprah Book Club selection and win the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The new novel was at last set for publication in June 2020 when the global pandemic upended publishing schedules and pushed the release date by another nine months.

Now this long-gestating novel is finally reaching readers. It’s the tale of the fictional village of Kosawa, in an unnamed African country, which is slowly and inexorably being poisoned by oil spills caused by Pexton, an American company drilling on its land. The novel is narrated by several characters, including a chorus of children who observe the tragedy unfolding. But How Beautiful We Were is also a narrative of resistance and struggle, as a local woman becomes the leader of a movement to change the situation.

We recently spoke with Mbue over Zoom; the conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I understand you actually began this book before your first novel, Behold the Dreamers.

This is the very first thing I ever started writing. I knew nothing about storytelling. I had no idea about craft. I’ve been a reader my whole life, so I just started writing based on my imagined idea of excellence. I didn’t have any plans to have my work published—I was just writing to discover that side of myself.

I went to Columbia and got my master’s in education and psychology. After that, I got a corporate job, and the whole time I was writing this. And then I lost my job during the financial crisis. I was trying to get a new job, and it wasn’t exactly working out very well for me. That is when I went for a walk one day and saw these chauffeurs and had the inspiration to write a story about a chauffeur and his employer during the financial crisis.

That became Behold the Dreamers.

It wasn’t easy—I still had to teach myself a lot about writing. Behold the Dreamers came out in 2016, and the moment it came out, I knew that I had to go back to this book. I’d never left these characters, I’d never left this story, and everything about it was still haunting me. And in the process of writing Behold the Dreamers, I had become a more confident writer, I knew myself, I had more ownership of my voice.

How much of the original story remains intact?

It’s still very much about a community pushing back against corporate imperialism, it’s still very much about hope and dreams. What changed was a lot of the structure. I had never conceived it as a story that would be told primarily from the point of view of children. That came as a result of going back to the book in 2016, at a time when a lot was happening in America. I’m speaking specifically about [the school shooting at] Sandy Hook and [the water crisis in] Flint, Michigan—two events that really broke my heart and still haunt me. I thought a lot about what it is like for children growing up in a world that doesn’t do as much as it can to understand them and to protect them and to give them what they need. That is where [the group of children who narrate the novel] came from.

One of those children, a girl, grows up to become a leader in the village’s fight against the oil company.

The character of Thula was [originally] the one telling most of the story, and the book was very much focused on Thula’s father. Men were the people who led movements, the people who change the world, all the freedom fighters, the revolutionaries—when I started the book, I didn’t imagine a woman like Thula, even though there were women like Thula and there still are. I had been raised in a world in which the people we celebrate are men. It was only later that I started questioning that—again, it came as a consequence of being older and seeing the world through new eyes.

I wanted to talk with you about a theme that runs through the novel: How do we go about making change in our world?

It’s something that I’ve wrestled with as somebody who lives in the world. You look at the different ways in which change has come about, and you look at the sacrifices. And you wonder, was this the best way? I grew up in a dictatorship in a post-colonial country. I was very aware of what it is like to live in a society [where] so much has been sacrificed and yet it looks as if not much is changing. This novel came from a place of looking at the great revolutionaries that I admired; I read the memoirs of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, Malcolm X, dissidents all over the world. I read in order to understand how they came to their particular ideologies and how they came about crafting their strategies.

The village is up against a whole web of interconnected factors—starting with the oil company and the dictatorship—that keep the system in place.

This story might be set in an African village, but it is happening all over the world. I looked at stories of environmental degradation in Ecuador, in Nigeria, it’s happening in the U.S. Most people don’t know about what DuPont did in Parkersburg, West Virginia, where for decades the people there were being poisoned. When you have a corporation so powerful, what do you do? At least in America, you have the legal system. But the characters in this novel, they don’t exactly have that. Although the U.K. courts just decided that the citizens in Nigeria whose land was destroyed by the [Dutch Royal] Shell company can sue Shell in the U.K., which is unprecedented.

What do you hope readers take away from How Beautiful We Were?

My German publisher [once] asked me, “What is your second book going be about?” I said, “It has to do with characters fighting against environmental degradation in their community.” And he said, “Just remember to keep it about the characters.” That is why I think using that plural voice was important, to look at it from the point of view of children. Children don’t have very sophisticated opinions, they don’t have sophisticated ways of looking at the world. It’s all so simple: We are being poisoned—why? They don’t overanalyze anything. That helped free me from the burden of making it into some sort of manifesto. Because it is not meant to be anything but a work of art to be interpreted by each and every reader in the way they prefer to interpret it.

Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.