To be slowly killed is still to be killed: necropolitics and slow violence in Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were

The novel How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue portrays the effects of oil extraction on the everyday lives of people living in the fictional village of Kosawa. This paper contends that the multinational corporation, through its extractive activities, destroys the environment of the village, causing the communities to endure sickness, death, and insecurity. This study places Mbue’s novel within existing discussions of environmental justice and postcolonial critique. It examines how intergenerational trauma is enacted over time through ecological destruction, and how resistance is slowly generated from that destruction. Using Mbembe’s idea of necropolitics and Nixon’s idea of slow violence, the paper maintains close analytical engagement with Mbue’s narrative voice. It pays attention to the collective perspective of the novel and everyday experiences of people facing environmental problems. The paper demonstrates how fiction represents long-term environmental harm and everyday forms of violence that often remain unrecognized within legal frameworks. It further explains how resource extraction produces environmental damage that disproportionately affects certain communities and becomes normalized within everyday life.