America or bust
Imagine Lorraine Hansberry’s play/film “A Raisin in the Sun” with a Cameroonian cast of characters in early 21st century New York City, and you may come up with something close to “Behold the Dreamers,” a poignant and bittersweet debut novel by Imbolo Mbue.
The author plunges her protagonists, married couple Jendi and Neni Jonga (like Mbue, natives of Limbe, Cameroon, who now live in the Big Apple), into the maelstrom of the 2008 economic crisis. For many in the U.S., that vicissitude of global proportions transmogrified the American dream. For Jende and Neni, parents of a young son, Liomi, it gets piled atop several concerns already weighing on them. What will happen if Jende’s application for asylum, which he based on the flimsiest of grounds, is turned down?
“He would have to return to a country where visions of a better life were the birthright of a blessed few, to a town from which dreamers like him were fleeing daily.”
Mbue alternates between the perspective of Jende and that of Neni. Initially, their shared reverence for both America and their employers ( Jende works as a chauffeur for Lehman Bros. senior executive Clark Edwards, Neni as a maid for Clark’s wife, Cindy) renders them almost indistinguishable from one another in outlook.
However, as Mbue, through an often unadorned prose style that relies a bit too heavily on dialogue, enmeshes both Jende and Neni in different aspects of the Edwards family’s strained domestic life, they each come into their own. And thanks to the author’s nuanced and sympathetic approach to family portraiture, the troubled Edwardses (including kids Vince and young Mighty) are not made to serve as an insufferable upper-class foil for the story’s toiling immigrant protagonists.
Meanwhile, the Jongas are about to gain a new member. Neni, who’s busy with her duties as a maid, her classes at a community college (she wants to become a pharmacist) and the demands of running a household, discovers that she’s pregnant. Soon, a diligent and indefatigable Jende has “spent hours wiping the dust-covered walls of their apartment and killing the roaches that sprinted from one end of the living room to the other like trackand-field athletes, all so he could protect the health of his unborn child.”
“Behold the Dreamers” suffers from a dearth of action, the Wall Street crash qualifying as the only exception, albeit one relegated to the background. Mbue partially compensates for this deficit by injecting the story with generous doses of suspense. Of course, the asylum application, which keeps the Jongas “stuck in an immigration purgatory” so long as it remains pending, looms large over the proceedings. But the author deftly inserts other twists into her tale to stoke the reader’s apprehension.
The economy’s nosedive does not claim Jende’s job. After all, he works for a highpowered executive, the kind who emerges from such otherwise costly dust-ups unscathed — and still handsomely moneyed. (Indeed, Clark retains his post, reporting to Barclays once it acquires Lehman Bros.) But when Cindy demands that Jende record Clark’s every move (she correctly suspects him of marital infidelity), the suspense quotient soars.
Mbue proves adept at elongating story lines even after they seem to have reached their end. When Cindy eventually discovers that Jende has deceived her about Clark’s comings and goings, she convinces her husband to fire him. A diminished Jende, “pitilessly bowed by life,” sinks into a funk. It falls upon Neni, who’s staying home with newborn baby girl Timba, to demonstrate that the fat lady hasn’t sung just yet. She screws up her courage and sets in motion a cunning plan to secure financial compensation from Cindy.
Ethics and risks aside, such a strategy, even if successful, might still fail to significantly ameliorate the Jongas’ situation. “I don’t know if I can continue suffering like this just because I want to live in America,” an emotionally depleted and physically ravaged Jende, now an overworked and poorly paid dishwasher at two restaurants, confesses to Neni.
“What happens to a dream deferred?” asks Langston Hughes in his poem “Harlem.” He wonders whether it dries up “like a raisin in the sun” — which provided Hansberry with the title of her play. The Jongas (who, as it happens, live in Harlem) know a thing or two about putting their shared dream on hold. That’s all they did back in Cameroon. Yet husband and wife begin to come around to a devastating reality: They would do best to take America out of their dream altogether.