Semiotics of Prose in Imbolo Mbue’s Postcolonial Narrative

Ikisiri

The postcolonial novel features two categories of normative apparatus. Each is endowed with cognitive skills, but paradoxically, they entertain a toxic relationship. One, heir to colonial and imperialist practices, believes itself to be better, and more cunning, and arrogates all power to itself, keeping the other in a situation of submission and dependence. This relationship, a hotbed of latent tension, has a negative influence on the forms of life, prevailing in that fictional universe. In terms of intimate motion, members of the dominant category suffer from the strong pressure exerted by the dominant one. As a result, their existence is drastically altered. As to their natural resources, they undergo unprecedented, irrational exploitation, becoming a source of pollution and impoverishment. Imbolo Mbue’s fiction offers the reader a rural space in the grip of similar crises; its inhabitants and ecosystem acquire several states due to the transformations; the title of her novel, How Beautiful We Were exposes some of those states; one is explicit and the other implicit illustrating the concrete level and the abstract one. Each of both levels being crucial in the process of elucidation of the transformations, the current study aims to examine the event represented, including the respective transformations undergone by the bodies such as Kosawa’s inhabitants and its environment. The use of narrative semiotics as a methodological tool will help to look into the factors and types of transformations highlighted in the novel under consideration. For that purpose, two points of interest will be scrutinized, namely “narrative structure” and “narrative transformations”