Between Silence and Resistance: Environmental Risk Narratives in Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful we were Morayo Joy Akingbelue

This paper examines Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were through the lens of the Integrated Model of Ideological Representation in Discourse (IMIRD) to explore how environmental risk is communicated as a tension between silence and resistance. Developed by Ogungbemi (2016), IMIRD synthesizes the ideological depth of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the structural precision of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), and lexical analysis to investigate how language encodes power, agency, and ideological positioning. Applying this model, the paper analyzes transitivity structures, agency assignment, and discursive silencing in Mbue’s depiction of a fictional African village devastated by corporate oil pollution. Through a close reading of narrative voice, clause structure, and dialogic framing, we demonstrate how Mbue’s linguistic choices—such as collective narration, passive constructions, and high-transitivity clauses—represent the villagers’ oscillation between voicelessness and defiant resistance. The study reveals how narrative grammar functions as a site of ideological struggle: one where corporate actors are obscured or backgrounded, while subaltern voices struggle for recognition. Ultimately, we argue that How Beautiful We Were is not only a literary account of environmental injustice but also a compelling discourse of resistance, showing how storytelling—when examined through IMIRD—operates as a vehicle for reclaiming agency, memory, and ecological justice.