Podcast Preview: SongWriter Season 6 Continues with Imbolo Mbue and Crys Matthews

Cameroonian-American author Imbolo Mbue’s second novel is How Beautiful We Were. The intimate, closely-observed story is set in a village that has been environmentally victimized by an American oil company.

“At the center of the story is a young girl named Thula,” Imbolo says. “She’s growing up in this village called Kosawa, and she watches as her friends are dying all around her. And even as a child she is very aware that she needs to do something about it, to put an end to the suffering.”

Though the village in the book is fictional, anthropologist and psychologist Dorsa Amir notes that this kind of problem is common in the lives of the indigenous people she works with. Dr. Amir has spent a lot of time in particular with the Shuar, a tribe that has been unusually successful in confronting invading forces.

“Much as what we encounter in this book, indigenous populations in South America—the Shuar among them—often have to come together in terms of collective action to external threat,” Dr. Amir says. “There’s a lot of people that want the resources that are on their land, their land, their labor, and there’s this constant dialogue and sometimes conflict.”

Dr. Amir points out that smaller groups of people, like the Shuar and the people of Kosawa, have real advantages in fighting collective issues, especially relative to western democracies and the polarization that comes along with larger population sizes. The human brain, she notes, simply cannot simulate the difference between one billion and ten billion. Yet we are still affected and swayed by things that would be more accurate or relevant at smaller population sizes.

“Because we’ve kind of broken our brains, so to speak, we think there’s a lot more consensus to things, because there are so many people in the world and so many opinions,” Dr. Amir says. “And so it creates this environment where it’s just really hard to activate people as a collective.”