Book 2 of 54: "Behold the Dreamers" by Imbolo Mbue

About the author: Imbolo Mbue

Imbolo Mbue was born in a small village just outside of the town of Limbe in Cameroon. She spent much of her childhood in Limbe and after finishing high school, moved to the United States of America to attend Rutgers University in New Jersey. Like the immigrant characters in her book, the only images and perceptions Mbue had about America were the things she saw on television and (also like her characters), she says she was not prepared for what she found once she arrived.
After completing her bachelors degree, she worked a myriad of different jobs: as a dental-office receptionist, a bank teller, a preschool secretary, a dishwasher, she was a lingerie saleswoman at an American department store and also sold vacuum cleaners door-to-door. She managed to put herself through graduate school and obtained a masters degree in education and psychology at Columbia University.

After completing her masters degree, she got a job for a media house doing market research. She has said that she always wanted to do a doctorate degree, but when she got into a PhD programme in California, she turned it down to stay in her job in New York. She subsequently lost that job after the financial crisis of 2008 and remained unemployed for two years. In those two years, she started writing "Behold the Dreamers" (originally titled "The Longings of Jende Jonga") and a number of years later received a seven figure deal with Random House--the biggest book deal for an unpublished African author in history!

Before it was even published, the book's film rights were optioned by Tristar, a division of Sony Pictures. Mbue's literary Cinderella story is just as intriguing as her novel.

Behold the Dreamers (Cameroon)

I finished this book three days ago, but I have found it very difficult to write about it because it made me feel so many things.


Beginning in 2007, the book is about Jende Jonga and his family, who immigrate to America from Cameroon in search of a better future. They are trying to escape a life where they have to be content with the limited opportunities that come with being born poor in Cameroon and go after a life where there is an illusion of equal opportunity. They go to a country that has sold us the dream that we can all make it if we work hard enough, showing us only the success stories while hiding the many faces of failure for every one that made it.

Jende started out as a dishwasher and managed to get himself a drivers license. This provided him the step-up in life that he needed. He used the license to get a job driving those famous yellow taxi cabs of New York City and as a result could afford to bring his wife and son to join him in America.

When the book begins, Jende gets a job as a chauffeur for a Lehman Brothers banker. We then see the inevitable build up to the financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath through the eyes of the immigrant characters.

The part of the book that has stayed with me is when Jende is reflecting about the financial crash and its aftermath. He compares it to a financial crisis they had in Cameroon in the eighties; he talks about the"money doublers" of Cameroon who promise people that they will double their money and how no one has seen this happen, but because of their desperation, people always go to them to lose large sums of money; and he thinks about all the people that have lost everything and how lucky he is to still have a job.

Then he thinks about all the dreams that people lost: dreams of sending children to college, dream weddings, dream vacations, dreams of retirement. "In many ways, it would be an unprecedented plague," he reflects, " a calamity like the one that had befallen the Egyptians in the Old Testament. The only difference between the Egyptians then and the Americans now, Jende reasoned, was that the Egyptians had been cursed by their own wickedness. They had called an abomination upon their land by worshiping idols and enslaving their fellow humans, all so they could live in splendor. They had chosen riches over righteousness, rapaciousness over justice. The Americans had done no such thing."

It is easy to dismiss Jende's naivety because of his idolization of America. His belief in "the American dream" blinds him to the wickedness of the financial tycoons of Wall Street. His employment by one of these tycoons blinds him to the fact that the bankers on Wall Street do the exact same thing as the "money doublers" in Cameroon, just on a much bigger scale. But when everything comes crashing down on him, Jende is able to see the lie that he has been sold and has the courage to escape a life that was slowly eating away at his humanity.

I can't help but think about the inter-connectedness of everything. The Wall Street banker's son says to Jende's wife later in the book: "I have to find a way...to stomach...all the bullshit the masses are blind to...so much mindlessness. People sit on their couches and watch garbage interrupted by messages to buy more garbage which will create a desire for more garbage. They go to their computers and order from incredibly horrible corporations that are enslaving their fellow humans and pretty much destroying any chance of children growing up in a world where they can truly be free. But hey, we have our material comforts and we're saving money and corporations are creating sixty-hour-a-week jobs with sick leave so what does it matter  if we're complicit? Let's just carry on with our lives while our country continues to commit atrocities all over the world."