Abstract

This paper is an exploration of intergenerational trauma and immigrant identity in Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were through Rob Nixon’s ‘slow violence’ and Homi Bhabha's ‘thirdspace.’ The novel depicts the environmental destruction of Kosawan village by Western oil companies, creating cascading trauma that extends beyond immediate ecological damage to profound psychological wounds transmitted across generations through contaminated resources and destroyed traditional life. This devastation forces migration to the West—the very region whose corporate interests caused their suffering—creating a cyclical violence where perpetrators become destinations for victims. Nixon’s slow violence framework illuminates how environmental destruction generates accumulating intergenerational trauma, while Bhabha's thirdspace concept reveals how immigrant characters navigate between African heritage and American assimilation while carrying inherited wounds of environmental racism and corporate exploitation. Through textual analysis, this study demonstrates how Mbue’s work challenges individualistic trauma narratives, presenting intergenerational trauma as both product of slow violence and catalyst for collective resistance, ultimately contributing to literature that centres community-based healing practices over Western-centric approaches to trauma recovery.