58 pages • 1 hour read
Behold the Dreamers
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Themes
The American Dream
Starting with the title, Imbolo Mbue invites the reader to explore the idea of the American Dream, the long-standing premise that through hard work, anyone can achieve the trappings of the good life—upward class mobility, a home, an education, and a future in which children can expect to exceed the gains of their parents. Cindy and Clark’s origin stories and the repercussions of the recession on them reveal the hollowness at the center of this myth of American identity.
To all appearances, the Edwards family is the fulfillment of the American Dream. Clark has exceeded the class status of his professor father by becoming an executive at a finance company. His work at Lehman Brothers means that he can ensure even greater things for the future of his two sons. Cindy, the product of rape and poverty, has become a professional nutritionist and vacations at the Hamptons, things she believes she achieved through her hard work in college. A closer look at how the Edwards family benefits from privilege, and what it does with their gains, undercuts the ideals upon which the myth is built.
Clark’s origins as the child of a professor is hardly a rags-to-riches story. The cultural capital—all the knowledge, networks, and resources that accrue to people as a result of class position—that comes with such a background gave Clark the chance to vault into the realm of affluence, something most poor or even middle-class people could never hope to achieve. Cindy’s origin story is indeed marred by poverty and abuse, but her interactions with both the Jongas and her deep insecurity show that she did not make the jump from working class to affluent unscathed. Despite having made it, she is insecure about her status. Beyond her insecurity is the fact that Cindy’s move from nutritionist to affluent woman is ultimately achieved by marriage, rather than under her own steam.
The story of both Cindy and Clark’s origins show that the actual tendency is for people with various kinds of privilege to accrue more privilege. The fact that Clark and Cindy are able to weather the recession with few changes, and that Clark is able to land a cushy lobbying job after leaving his work, show that such privilege insulates people like them from the disasters that plague people who are actually poor. The disasters that do strike the Edwards family—an ungrateful child, infidelity, loss of work, and death—are sympathetically portrayed by the author but are nevertheless ones that are self-inflicted.
Immigration and American Identity
Running parallel and in contrast to the story of the Edwards family is that of Jende and Neni Jonga. One of the corollaries of American Dream mythology is that even immigrants can become American and fulfill that dream through hard work, thrift, and assimilation to American culture. The tale of how such fervent believers in this dream and hard workers are nevertheless unable to become Americans is a stinging indictment of American values and the legal framework of the American immigration system.
Like many immigrants, Jende and Neni work multiple jobs, stash savings to avoid accruing debt, and pursue education as one of the key elements of assimilation and progress for the next generation. When Jende receives a paid vacation while the Edwards family is at the Hamptons, Jende finds more paid work, rather than sitting idly. Neni raises her family, is a full-time student for much of the novel, and works as a health aide to fuel her dreams. They defer luxuries like vacations and travel because they exemplify traits that are supposedly American—thrift among them—but are seemingly absent from the lives of most of the Americans they encounter.
Despite how exemplarily Jende and Neni exhibit these desirable traits, their desire to grasp the American Dream is thwarted by the American immigration system and the larger historical circumstance of the recession of 2008 in the United States. The incompetence of Bubakar and the drawn-put process by which Jende’s case moves through the courts show how illogical and plagued with inefficiency the American immigration system is. The inability of Neni to secure scholarships when life intervenes, and the implacability the dean who stands between Neni and her dream of becoming a pharmacist, show that the system is stacked against exemplary people like the Jongas, no matter how hard they work.
There are nevertheless lighthearted moments when Jende and Neni catch brief glimpses of the land flowing with milk and honey that is referenced in the epigraph. Jende and Neni’s excursions to iconic New York locales like Columbus Circle, Cindy’s bribe/gift of designer goods and fancy toys to Neni, Winston’s racially-diverse birthday party, the success of other Cameroonian immigrants in Houston and Phoenix, and Vince and Mighty’s happy visit to the Jonga apartment are all examples of the reality approaching the myth.
As Jende and Neni struggle to secure a future for themselves and their children in America, they increasingly choose to engage in actions that compromise their integrity. Jende, caught between a philandering boss and his suspicious wife, fabricates Clark’s itinerary to avoid losing his job and lies on his application for asylum. Neni blackmails a desperate Cindy by threatening to expose Cindy’s drug abuse unless Cindy provides the funds the Jongas need to pay lawyer’s fees and tuition. These morally gray and black choices are in vain; the Jongas are forced to return to Cameroon and salvage what they can out of their dream-turned-nightmare. The inability of the country to welcome the Jongas indicates that the American Dream is just a myth and one that corrupts those who seek it at all costs.
The final nail in the coffin of the American Dream comes with how the Jongas achieve the immigrant dream, which is focused on returning home from America as a success. The Jongas achieve their triumphant return in part by hard work but almost half of the capital with which they return home is from Neni’s blackmail of Cindy.
The Great Recession
The central events of Behold the Dreamers occur in the months leading up to, during, and after the economic crisis that devastated the United States in 2008 and the ripples of which were felt around the world. The Great Recession of 2008 is therefore an important part of the historical setting of the novel and shapes the plot and character arcs in important ways.
Economists and historians now point to complicated financial instruments created by banks by bundling together shaky mortgages made to people who were poor credit risks as key contributors to the collapse of the American economy. Opening the housing market to people with poor credit drove up the value of their properties to unrealistic levels, making it seem as if the financial instruments that bundled such mortgages together were worth much more than they really were; this situation created a bubble in value that allowed these borrowers to get loans against the artificially-high values of their homes.
When the people who received these mortgages were unable to pay them back in large numbers, the true value of the financial instruments held by firms like Lehman Brothers became more apparent. Lehman Brothers was just one of the companies left holding on to virtually worthless debt and unable to raise enough cash to make good on these instruments, but they did not survive long enough to be bailed out by the federal government. In the end, the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the markets created a domino effect that made the disaster spread well beyond the banking sector and the borders of the United States.
Mbue gives the reader a fly-on-the-wall view of the thought process of executives like Clark and the people with whom he talks on the phone as Jende drives him about town. Clark pays lip service to the idea of the need for ethics in business, but he and his fellow executives ultimately allow greed and a desire to maintain the status quo to override their responsibilities to investors and the country. Mbue’s portrayal of how little an impact these actions seem to have on Clark, and how great an impact they have on people like on Jende and Leah, underscore the idea that the capitalist system—and the American Dream that supposedly underwrites it—is indeed rigged in favor of the privileged.
Gender and Identity
Mbue drills down to important aspects of gender and identity by presenting contrasts and comparisons in the masculinity of Jende, Clark, and Vince, as well as between the femininity of Cindy and Neni.
Jende’s masculinity is rugged and shaped by his sense of responsibility to family both in the US and back home in Cameroon. His desire is to fulfill the masculine role as trailblazer (in the sense that he leads the way to America and back to Cameroon for his family) and breadwinner. His willingness to work menial jobs—washing dishes even once he loses his job with the Edwards—shows that he will do anything if it will allow him to take care of Neni, his children, and his family back home in Cameroon.
Jende struggles deeply to fulfill all these masculine roles simultaneously. His struggle to balance responsibility to his immediate family and responsibility to extended family back home indicates that he has a much more expansive definition of family and masculine responsibilities that American men such as Clark and Vince. The intimate weeks Jende spends with Liomi when Neni works at the Hamptons illustrate that breadwinning is no impediment to being engaged with his son, however. As Jende begins to lose the ability to be the breadwinner, he resorts to more brutal efforts—including physical abuse—to maintain control over Neni, who has her own ideas about being an American.
Clark and Vince, to a lesser extent, are characters whose identities are also shaped by the relationship between masculinity and the ability to provide for one’s family. Clark spends almost all of his time breadwinning in an effort to be affluent. His affluence and the sense that he can bankroll his family are key components of what it means to him to be a man; that he purchases the services of escorts to secure his masculinity would seem to indicate that there is something lacking in his approach.
Vince is seemingly the antithesis of Clark. Having seen the cost to his family of Clark’s all-consuming quest to gain more money, Vince espouses a naïve idealism that causes him to label his parents—and Clark in particular—as greedy, materialistic people whose privilege is destroying America. It’s just one of the many ironies of the novel that being rich is what allows Vince to go to retreats in Costa Rica and India to escape the noxiousness of his family’s privilege. Vince’s knowledge that there is a cushion for him, should he hope to return, explains why he so easily casts off the opportunities his position offers him. When Vince does assume some responsibility for his family, they are ones mediated by economic privilege: he attempts to secure Neni’s services as a nanny after Cindy’s death.
The difficulty of navigating gender in America also has an impact on Neni and Cindy. There are stronger contrasts between the women, and Mbue uses these contrasts to critique the privilege of white women and the insidiousness of gender expectations in capitalist America.
Cindy should be a sympathetic character: she has pulled herself up by her bootstraps through education and landed at the top of the economic heap by marrying Clark. Again, using that fly-on-the-wall view, Mbue reveals Cindy’s conversations in the limo to show that Cindy is insecure in her marriage with Clark and the friendships with the affluent women to whom she now has access to, via her marriage to Clark. Cindy is lonely enough that her domestic help seem to be the only women privy to her drug and alcohol abuse. Cindy’s self-destructive habits culminate in what is likely an overdose because Cindy is never able to overcome that her origins make her an imposter among the women in her social circle. Cindy’s worries loom large in her mind—being thin enough, being invited to the right parties—but at root, they are the kinds of problem that, most often, women with privilege have.
Neni’s problems have both continuities and discontinuities with Cindy’s problems. After the birth of her daughter, Neni begins to fret about her weight, having fallen victim to an American beauty standard that dictates thinness as a feminine ideal. Her avid acceptance of the designer clothes and toys Cindy offers in exchange for silence about Cindy’s opioid abuse, and the calculation that goes into Neni’s purchasing of suits for Jende, indicate that Neni sees maintaining such appearances as key to fulfilling her duties as a mother and wife. By highlighting Cindy’s worries about these same issues, Mbue very carefully reveals that these attitudes are in part assimilation to American values and part Cameroonian values related to family and the proper use of property, both of which Neni learned as a wealthy girl back in Cameroon.
Both Cindy and Neni also face challenges that are explicitly the result of being women. Both women are ambitious; it just so happens that Cindy’s ambitions are achievable ones, because she is white and American, while Neni’s are not, because she is a Cameroonian woman in the US on an expiring student visa. Both women also contend with different forms of abuse and disrespect. Clark cheats on Cindy with sex workers and speaks in harsh terms to her, while Jende strikes Neni when she tries to claim the right to self-determination.
In the end, the thing the two women have most in common is that their fates are ultimately tied to that of their husbands. Both Clark and Jende leave the narrative frame as the authors of their own lives, firmly in control despite the events around them. Cindy dies high and intoxicated, seemingly unable to bear the idea of being an object of ridicule after Clark’s cheating comes to light, while Neni is forced to give up her own dream of America for herself and her children once Jende decides he has had enough of fighting to keep them in America. The arcs of all four main characters reveal how unforgiving gender roles can be in America.
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