Oil as a Trope in the Literary Construction of the African Postcolonial Nation-State in Saro-Wiwa’s Looking for Transwonderland and Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were

Abstract:

This article examines oil as a trope in Noo Saro-Wiwa’s Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria (2012) and Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were (2021). These two texts are used comparatively to demonstrate how the petro-trope functions across both autobiographical travel writing and fictionalized narrative. It proceeds from the argument that oil in these texts is not merely a thematic backdrop but a recurrent figurative device through which the nation is imagined, indicted and reimagined. Drawing on postcolonial theories of the nation as narration, petrocriticism and postcolonial ecocriticism, and guided by a qualitative, interpretive design that combines close reading with thematic analysis, the study advances three claims. First, in Saro-Wiwa’s generically hybrid travelogue, oil operates as a trope of spectacle and deferred wealth, so that the nation appears as a mirage, flashy on the surface but crumbling within. Second, in Mbue’s novel, oil operates as a trope of curse and dispossession. Mbue uses magical realism to allow the oil-bearing community of Kosawa to emerge as a counter-nation whose spiritual cosmology resists the rationalities of both corporate institutions and the state. Third, read together, the texts narrate the petro-state as a betrayal of the independence promise, in which sovereignty is hollowed out by the alliance of political elites and foreign capital. The article concludes that oil, as trope, reconfigures nation-building from a story of development into a story of dispossession and witness, and that literary form is itself a political response to petro-modernity.