"This story must be told:" unveiling environmental and social tapestry in Imbolo Mbue's How Beautiful We Were

The article situates oil culture and climate change within Energy Humanities, arguing that climate change is fundamentally driven by fossil fuel extraction and combustion. While Northern petro-discourses are prominent, the environmental and social harms of oil extraction in the Global South remain under-examined and often erased by spatial amnesia. The study proposes reading Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were through eco-narratology to foreground how narrative structures communicate environmental crises, corporate–state collusion, and community resistance. It underscores the urgency of addressing memory, environmental justice, and empathy to illuminate petroculture’s material realities and to foster an energy-conscious society.

The paper reviews key debates in petroculture and narrative theory: oil’s spectral invisibility (Salvaggio), the call to recognize petrofiction (Ghosh), and Energy Humanities’ emphasis on oil’s hidden infrastructures shaping politics, culture, and knowledge (Szeman, Boyer). It notes critical barriers to reading fossil fuel narratives (Barrios) and industry framings of climate as a non-urgent dual challenge (Straub). On narrative adequacy, Morton and Colebrook’s skepticism is contrasted with Trexler’s claim that the novel is privileged for Anthropocene representation. The novel’s role in nation-building and postcolonial identity (Anderson, Brennan; Goodbody & Bradon; Kapstein) supports examining energy via narrative. Bartosch’s ‘petroleum unconscious’ and Welling’s bioregionalism urge techniques that foreground material energy realities over mere thematic identification. African petro-literatures (e.g., Habila’s Oil on Water; Saro-Wiwa; Okpewho; Agary; Egbuson; Osundare; Bassey; Okarafor; Osofisan; Munif’s Cities of Salt; Hogan; Bacigalupi) document extractive violence, with Nigeria’s Niger Delta emblematic of slow violence and corporate–regime complicity (Nixon). For Mbue’s novel specifically, scholarship highlights global coloniality and ecological injustice (Nare, Moopi & Nyambi; Ehanire), children’s political awakening and gendered leadership (Xausa), and critiques of extractivism and Western modernity while valuing Indigenous knowledge (Gasztold). These strands motivate an eco-narratological approach to Mbue’s text.

The study employs eco-narratology, integrating narratology with ecocriticism to analyze how narrative form mediates environmental meaning. It examines storyworld construction, focalization (notably the first-person plural ‘we’/The Children), temporality and spatiality via Bakhtin’s chronotope, characterization, symbolism/metaphor, plot structure, and pacing. It intertwines environmental justice, post-/environmental memory, and affect, including Suzanne Keen’s ‘strategic empathizing’ (insider/outsider perspectives) to trace how the text elicits empathy and mobilization. The method is qualitative, interpretive close reading situated in postcolonial and Energy Humanities frameworks; no empirical datasets are used.

- Narrative perspective and tone: The apocalyptic opening and sustained first-person plural ‘we’ construct a collective storyworld of Kosawa that centers communal experience, environmental harm, and the epistemic fog produced by corporate–state gaslighting. Early lexical choices (‘end,’ ‘dead,’ ‘poison,’ ‘perish’) frame slow violence and ecological collapse. - Chronotope and generational time: Bakhtin’s chronotope reveals the entanglement of past, present, and future—linking trans-Atlantic slavery, rubber plantations, and oil to contemporary neocolonial extraction. Characters across generations (Yaya; Malabo; Bongo; Thula; The Children) embody the continuity of harm and resistance, showing how historical injustice shapes present identities and futures. - Petro-environmental memory: Building on Buell, the article coins or foregrounds ‘petro-environmental memory’ to name the carcinogenic, traumatic planetary memories forged by oil. Collective memories (e.g., ‘when the sky began to pour acid, and rivers began to turn green’) resist erasure, preserve identity, and mobilize action, while registering intergenerational trauma. - Environmental justice and corporate–state collusion: The novel depicts disproportionate burdens—contaminated water/air/soil, health crises, displacement, and gendered/sexualized violence—produced by Pexton’s negligence and the government’s complicity (‘His Excellency’). It maps the uneven distribution of risks and the suppression of participation and recognition central to EJ theory. - Strategic empathy and media: Through the outsider journalist Austin, Mbue leverages ‘strategic empathizing’ to amplify subaltern voices, link local harms to global audiences, and critique media capture. Austin’s ethical journalism becomes activism, countering dominant ‘development’ narratives. - Agency, resistance, and gender: Women (e.g., Thula) emerge as key organizers and moral centers; The Children symbolize both vulnerability and insurgent hope. The text registers the constraints of legal redress, the turn to protest and sabotage, and the ethical dilemmas of resistance. - Contribution to Energy Humanities: The analysis shows how narrative techniques render petroculture legible, advancing methods for reading oil/climate in Global South contexts and advocating shifts in energy consciousness and responsibility.

By reading Mbue’s novel through eco-narratology, the study demonstrates that narrative structures (collective focalization, chronotope, memory-work, and affect) are not ancillary but constitutive of how environmental injustice is perceived, remembered, and contested. This addresses the research problem—how to read Oil Culture from climate change vantage points—by showing that formal choices shape ethical and political uptake. The findings foreground Global South experiences typically marginalized in petroculture discourse, reveal the mechanics of corporate–state obfuscation, and illustrate how literature cultivates empathy, solidarity, and resistance. The work thereby enriches Energy Humanities and environmental justice scholarship, suggesting that narrative form can catalyze public awareness and support transitions away from fossil-fuel dependence.

The paper argues that How Beautiful We Were entwines memory, space, and extractive violence to illuminate justice, resilience, and collective action. Kosawa functions as a character—a repository of communal memory and identity—so that spatial destruction is also cultural erasure. The title’s ‘We’ and ‘Were’ mourn lost beauty while mobilizing restoration, urging recognition of Indigenous and marginalized voices and envisioning planetary solidarity. The analysis shows how eco-narratological attention to storyworlds and chronotopes reveals environmental harm’s temporal depth and social reach, converting nostalgia into a call for equitable energy transitions and sustainable futures.