Mimetic Designs in Chimeka Garricks’ Representation of Oil, Environment, and Coloniality of Power in Tomorrow Died Yesterday

Principles of mimesis play crucial roles in the narrative design in Chimeka Garricks’ Tomorrow Died Yesterday. Garricks deploys them to create a fictive world in which images of oil, the environment, and coloniality of power foreground the contradiction and negation of the postcolonial nation. However, critical responses to this aspect of the novel remain underexplored. With insight from mimesis, I addressed this gap by exploring the implicit meanings suggested by Garricks’ deployment of mimetic designs such as metaphors, images, and symbols in depicting oil and the environment in the novel; the secondary significations in the use of allegory as a mimetic design to portray coloniality of power within the text; as well as the use of irony and paradox to depict the postcolonial nation as a negation or contradiction. Apart from deepening the conversation on the novel, I seek to show the capacity of a literary work to mediate reality through indirection, while engaging burning issues in environmental humanities and postcolonial studies. Lastly, I note how Garricks inserts a thesis of redemption and a philosophy of praxis for the postcolonial nation.