“From This Love We’ll Demand Our Rights, and We Shall Win” A Postcolonial Ecocritical Reading of Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were

Abstract

This article proposes a reading of How Beautiful We We Were, a timely novel about intergenerational justice and politics published in 2021 by Cameroonian-American author Imbolo Mbue. The first part of the article introduces the field of postcolonial ecocriticism and examines the historical and contemporary impacts of colonialism on the environment as represented in the novel. My reading then foregrounds the voices of resistance and activism of How Beautiful We Were’s young protagonists and their coming-of-age as postcolonial eco-citizens, and finally moves to highlight the urgency for environmental justice and decolonization in the face of ongoing global environmental challenges.