Anna V. Ortiz Juarez-Paz has asserted that

At a time when the fear of deportation can make undocumented immigrants understandably hesitant to tell their stories, fiction can play a role in bringing attention to the experiences and the humanity of such immigrants. At the same time, the majority of narratives about undocumented immigrants tends to focus on specific demographics—primarily immigrants from Mexico or various countries in Central America. Undocumented immigrants who come to the United States from other regions are seldom depicted in fiction. One exception is Kiran Desai’s Booker Prize-winning novel, Inheritance of Loss, which features Biju, a young man from a working-class family in India who arrives in New York City and works in a series of restaurants as part of a “shadow class” of undocumented immigrants who are desperate to remain in the country and therefore particularly vulnerable to exploitation. His story challenges the typical representation of South Asian immigrants to the United States as being part of a “model minority”—those who arrive in the United States pursuing or already armed with a tertiary education and who go on to make comfortable middle-class lives for themselves as professionals in the hostland.

Another exception to the dearth of fiction about undocumented immigrants from outside the Americas is Imbolo Mbue’s recent and highly-acclaimed novel Behold the Dreamers (winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction, a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year, and named one of the best books of the year in numerous other venues, as the cover blurb proclaims). According to Mbue, herself an immigrant from Cameroon who lost her job in market research in New York during the financial crisis of the last decade, “I wanted to write about what it’s like to be working class [. . . .] To be struggling with poverty, to be barely getting by in America. I wanted to write about what it’s like to be an immigrant. I wanted to write about me” (Rocco 22). Her debut novel presents undocumented immigrants from Cameroon, who arrive not only after the events of 9/11 but around the time of the global financial crisis in 2007–2008. The novel explores what it means to be in pursuit of the much-vaunted American Dream without the aid of necessary documentation and at a particular moment in the recent history of the United States when people at all levels of American society were affected by the economic downturn.

Arjun Appadurai has asserted that imagination is no longer a mere fantasy, an escape from reality, or an act of contemplation; instead, it is “a form of work (both in the sense of labor and of culturally organized practice) and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (‘individuals’) and globally defined fields of possibility” (30). An instance of the kind of work that Appadurai refers to can be seen in the efforts made by the protagonists of Mbue’s novel to bridge the gap between their place of origin and the locus of desire and, thereafter, the work they put in—the desperate measures they take—to stay in the desired location. My essay analyzes the way in which Mbue depicts how and why the hegemonic idea of the American Dream becomes ingrained in people outside the United States and what, if anything, can lead to its dissolution.

The novel begins with Jende Jonga, a young man from Cameroon, on the day he obtains employment as the chauffeur of Clark Edwards, a senior executive at Lehman Brothers, and it explores the developing relationship between employee and employer. While the focus is on Jende and his wife Neni’s life in Harlem, there are flashbacks to their lives in their homeland in Central Africa and the series of events that led to their emigration. The novel also goes on to examine the subsequent interweaving of the lives of Jende, Neni, and their young son Liomi with those of Clark’s wife Cindy and their sons Vince and Mighty as a result of Jende driving the Edwards family around and Neni doing temporary work for Cindy and getting to know the Edwards offspring. Similar to the upstairs/downstairs dynamic depicted in many Victorian novels and also in more recent novels, like The Remains of the Day and television productions such as Downton Abbey, Jende and Neni become privy to what goes on in the Edwards household—from Clark’s marital infidelities and Cindy’s seeking refuge in prescription pills and alcohol to Vince’s growing disillusionment with the materialism and exploitation of the capitalist society in which he lives and Mighty’s anxieties about his parents’ crumbling marriage. While one family struggles to save money and get the much-desired “papiers” that will lead to permanent residency and citizenship, the other faces disintegration as a result of the stress caused by the imminent collapse of Lehman Brothers, which exacerbates the already dysfunctional relationships among the family members.

Mbue captures the precarity faced by undocumented immigrants in their daily lives. When Jende is being interviewed by Clark initially, he is petrified when the subject of documentation comes up, and he has to “keep his desperation from bursting through the thin layer of dignity it had been wrapped in throughout the interview” (Mbue 10). As undocumented immigrants, Jende and Neni have both been frequently cautioned against talking to anyone about their legal status even though this is what is uppermost in their minds: “You tell person say you no get paper, the lawyer had said, the day you get palaver with them, they go call Immigration, report you” (236). Consequently, they are hesitant to mention their anxieties to even their closest friends. They do not feel free to move around the country at will and returning to the homeland for visits is an option that is foreclosed to them. When Jende’s father passes away suddenly, “his sorrow at not being able to bury his father was as heavy as his grief at the death” (303). Friends gather to console him, but none of them asks whether he will be going back home for the funeral because they do not want to broach the sensitive topic of immigration status: “They figured he would tell them if he was going, and if he wasn’t going, well, no grown man should be made to tell anyone that he couldn’t go home to bury his father” (301).

Undocumented immigrants like Jende and Neni are compelled to learn very quickly about the complexities of immigration policies in the United States as well as the implications of sudden changes to such policies. They read up about these policies online, discuss them with a trusted few friends and relations, and consult lawyers when possible. In the case of Jende, he has the help of his cousin Winston—who won a green card lottery and then joined the army, which allowed him to get an education and eventually become a successful lawyer working on Wall Street—and Bubakar, the Nigerian storefront immigration lawyer whose services they have procured. Jende had originally arrived on a three-month tourist visa, though his intention was always to stay on. As he ponders on the seeming naiveté of US immigration officials later,

Once the tourist visa expired, he applied for asylum. As a result of a delay in an asylum hearing, his lawyer was able to get him his EAD (Employment Authorization Document), which in turn enabled Jende to save enough money to bring over his then-girlfriend and their son. His status as an asylum seeker with a work permit and a driver’s license makes it possible for Neni to get a student visa and enroll in community college.

The information available or proffered to immigrants is not always reliable or sufficient, however. Instead of applying for political asylum, Jende offers as truthful a reason as he can come up with for his asylum application—the story that his wife’s father will throw him in prison if he returns to Cameroon, even though he is not facing any such persecution in the homeland. He finds out too late that a more dire-sounding reason is required, even if that narrative has no connection to truth or reality. As Bubakar puts it, “How’d you think all these people who gain asylum do it? [. . .] You think they are all running away from something? Puh-leez. [. . .] I just won asylum last month for the daughter of a prime minister of some country in East Africa. [. . .] And here she is, saying she’s afraid for her life back home” (Mbue 20). Jende and Neni also find out the many restrictions imposed on those who do not have US citizenship. Neni, for example, is selected for an honor society due to her excellent academic performance in community college but is not eligible for many of the scholarships that she so desperately needs to stay on in school.

In certain ways, Jende and Neni experience what all immigrants have to face as a result of their relocation. There is constant pressure from family and friends in the homeland for financial help, which strains the protagonists’ meagre savings: “Someone back home would always need money from him; a month never went by without at least one phone call asking him for money. [. . .] relatives had no consideration for those who sent them money because they thought the streets of America were paved with dollar bills” (Mbue 86).

Immigrants have a type of “double consciousness” that enables them to observe and comment on the differences between their homeland and the hostland, as Homi K. Bhabha has observed in his famous apothegm that “the truest eye may now belong to the migrant’s double vision” (Bhabha 8). This double consciousness is distinct from that which W. E. B. Du Bois defined in The Souls of Black Folk as “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body” and identified as central to the African American experience in the United States (Du Bois 7). It does, however, offer certain analogies, as Jende and Neni view the United States through a Cameroonian lens, even as they are compelled to view themselves through an American lens. Jende, for example, is flummoxed by Cindy’s job as a nutritionist: “People in this country, always worrying about how to eat, they pay someone good money to tell them: Eat this, don’t eat that. If you don’t know how to eat, what else can you know how to do in this world?” (Mbue 28). Neni freely attends African parties thrown by people whom she has never met before on the premise that: “most African people didn’t care about fancy white-people ideas like attendance by invitation-only” (31). Through her protagonists’ observations, Mbue is able to satirize certain American norms, values, and lifestyle choices.

Immigrants are also able to appreciate and be nostalgic for their country of origin despite the negative aspects of that country that have driven them to leave it. Like most first-generation immigrants, Jende and Neni have times when they are homesick and yearn for the familiarity of the lifestyle they enjoyed there. Jende refers to his hometown as a “town made of magic” and tells his employer that “in Limbe, we live simple lives, but we enjoy our lives well” (Mbue 38). He thinks longingly of the network of friends that he spent time with, while Neni savors the memory of market days and the pleasure of bargaining with vendors for the best deals.

At the same time, they both have specific reasons for leaving their homeland and their families and coming to the United States. For Jende, the reason relates to class—if he had stayed on in the country of his birth, he would never have been able to achieve his goals due to a lack of resources and connections, which preclude his obtaining a good education or a white-collar job and therefore any hope of upward mobility. As Jende tries to explain to Clark, “I stay in my country, I would have become nothing. I would have remained nothing. My son will grow up and be poor like me, just like I was poor like my father. But in America, sir? I can become something. I can become a respectable man. My son can become a respectable man” (Mbue 39). Jende goes on to say “Because . . . because in my country [. . .] for you to become somebody, you have to be somebody first. You do not come from a family with money, forget it. You do not come from a family with a name, forget it. That is just how it is, sir. Someone like me, what can I ever become in a country like Cameroon?” (40). Jende cites the case of Barack Obama, who at the time in which the novel is set was running for the presidency, as the perfect example of what a man who comes from nothing—someone without family wealth or influence like himself—can achieve in the United States. For Neni, on the other hand, gender is the reason for her desire to emigrate—the patriarchal society of Cameroon made life difficult and limited her choices as a high school dropout and single mother: “She’d been unable to get a job because there were too few jobs in Limbe, never mind one for a young woman who hadn’t made it as far as high school. She had been bored and frustrated at home, unable to have any sort of independence because she was financially dependent on her parents, unable to marry Jende because her father would not let her marry a council laborer” (311-312). She feels that she is stagnating—in limbo in Limbe—and fantasizes about life in America as a panacea for her tribulations.

In a sense, like many who aspire to immigrate to the United States, Jende and Neni subscribe to the idea of the American Dream that has been promoted through the global dominance of American popular culture—the notion that the United States is a kind of utopia that guarantees success to all those who are willing to work hard. As Jende tells Clark, “Everyone wants to come to America, sir. Everyone. To be in this country, sir. To live in this country. Ah, it is the greatest thing in the world!” (Mbue 39). When Clark’s elder son Vince, a law student, tries to list the devastation wrought by American policies and interventions in order to “unindoctrinate [Jende] on all the lies [he] has been fed about America,” the latter assures Vince that he will never stop believing that “America is the greatest country in the world” (103). Due to the spread of American television programs and movies, the protagonists in Mbue’s novel have internalized the idea that if you are determined and work hard, anything is possible in the United States.

Another reason for the hold that the United States has on people’s imagination is that everything shared by first-generation immigrants with friends and family members in the homeland is carefully curated. “Every picture [Neni had] seen of Cameroonians in America was a portrait of bliss: children laughing in snow; couples smiling at a mall; families posing in front of a nice house with a nice car nearby” (Mbue 312). Since only good fortune is publicized and other sorrows and misfortunes are kept hidden, it is not surprising that those who remain in the homeland assume that all immigrants inevitably succeed in the United States once they get there.

Initially, this assumption seems to hold true for Jende and Neni, as they inch toward their dreams. The former has been able to scrape enough money as a cab driver to get his now-wife (on a student visa) and his son (on a visitor’s visa) to the United States. His job with Clark enables him to support his wife and son, send money home, and even save at a good rate for a “down payment for a two-bedroom in Mount Vernon or Yonkers,” which is their ten-year goal (Mbue 30). Neni, meanwhile, revels in what she has been able to achieve within a year and a half of her arrival: “For the first time in her life, she had a job, as a home health aide through an agency that paid her in cash, since she had no working papers. She was a matriculated student for the first time in sixteen years. [. . .] And for the very first time in her life, she had a dream besides marriage and motherhood: to become a pharmacist” (13-14). She has to pinch herself to believe that she is really in New York City and often finds herself singing more than she ever has before as she goes about her work.

Mbue’s story illuminates the ironies that haunt such initial optimistic impressions. The hegemonic belief in the accessibility of the American Dream is gradually eroded by the experiences that Jende and Neni undergo in the United States. The precarious nature of the life of an undocumented immigrant means that if just one aspect of this life goes awry, it can create a domino effect and lead to disaster. First, Jende’s asylum application is denied, and he is informed that he will have to face an immigration judge, which leaves Jende and Neni tense, full of trepidation, and desperate to find enough money to appeal the decision. Neni cries for the first time since her arrival in the United States at the prospect of being deported, while Jende is haunted by the fear that he will have to return to Cameroon “empty-handed” and ashamed (Mbue 60). While they try to keep each other’s spirits up, they are affected psychologically by this development, which hinders communication within their relationship.

Secondly, Jende is suddenly and unjustly dismissed from Clark’s employment. His attempt to regain his previous job as a cab driver is unsuccessful due to the economic downturn, which means that there are too many people competing for work in such a capacity. Jende has to work two jobs as a restaurant dishwasher—working twice as hard to earn less than half the money he earned as Clark’s chauffeur—and develops severe back problems due to stress. He starts to question whether his stress and suffering are worthwhile and begins to consider the possibility of returning to his homeland. This series of events emphasizes how easily the arrangements that enable undocumented life can unravel.

Jende’s plans to return to Cameroon get stiff resistance, however, from Neni, who cannot bear the idea of going back to the restrictions imposed on her as a woman by a highly patriarchal society. She sees in her husband an example of the gender norms in her homeland that she so resents—he has forced her to quit her job after she becomes pregnant with their second child and tells her to drop out of school for two semesters. “He had brought her to America. He paid her tuition. He was her protector and advocate. He made the decisions for their family. Sometimes he conferred with her about his decisions. Most times he did what he deemed best. Always she had no choice but to obey. That was what he expected of her” (Mbue 172). Neni understands she can expect more of these restrictions being imposed on her not only by her husband but also by society in general if she were to go back to Cameroon and therefore comes up with strategies to avoid going back.

She begs Cindy to get Jende his job with Clark back and, when that fails, blackmails her erstwhile employer with pictures of the latter in an inebriated state. She gathers information from a variety of sources—friends, newspapers, television programs, internet search engines, and social media. She starts frequenting a progressive church not just for spiritual comfort but also in hopes that she will get assistance from the pastor and congregation with regard to her immigration status: “I was watching on the news the other day about this family that was supposed to be deported and they ran to a church. The church people let them stay in the church—the government could not touch them there” (Mbue 229). Neni tells Natasha, the pastor of the church, about her deportation fears because “she believed there were Americans who wanted to keep good hardworking immigrants in America. She’d seen them on the news, compassionate Americans talking about how the United States should be more welcoming to people who came in peace. She believed these kindhearted people, like Natasha, would never betray them” (237). While her husband’s pessimism about life in America grows, Neni steadfastly believes that the United States is better for herself and her children and that “doing nothing was not an option” (285). In her desperation, she even considers divorcing her husband to marry a friend’s cousin who has citizenship for the sake of obtaining a green card. When she is compelled to reject this possibility as unfeasible and risky, she ponders leaving her eldest son in the United States to be adopted by her erstwhile professor and his husband. The contrasting responses of Jende and Neni to their predicament illustrates heterogeneity in the way that immigrants adhere to the pull of the American Dream based on factors such as gender.

The discord between husband and wife concerning whether to go back home or stay on in the United States strains Jende and Neni’s relationship to near-breaking point and actually leads, for the first time in their relationship, to domestic violence. Both have changed: one feels emasculated by his helplessness to change his predicament in an unwelcoming hostland, while the other realizes her own strength and fortitude and the lengths to which she is willing to go—including breaking up her family relationships if it means that they do not have to give up the American Dream. While immigration allows for self-fashioning new identities, the pressures relating to their legal status make Jende and Neni at times unrecognizable to each other and even to themselves.

Ultimately, Jende’s decision to leave the United States is based on what he is not willing to put up with—such as constant stress and uncertainty—or sacrifice—such as dignity—anymore, like Biju in Desai’s novel or the first-person narrator in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. As Jende attempts to explain to his wife, “I don’t like what my life has become in this country. I don’t know how long I can continue living like this, Neni. The suffering in Limbe was bad, but this one here, right now. . . it’s more than I can take” (Mbue 306). The man who once told Vince that he would never stop believing in America’s greatness now sees that even if he had documentation, his lack of education, race, and immigrant status will not enable him to achieve stability in the United States, partly due to the complex system of racial oppression of which he has now become aware and especially as a result of the Great Recession. As he points out to Neni,

Jende’s pessimism is partly informed by his experience of the economic crisis in Cameroon, which lasted from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, and his fear that the economic crisis in the United States could also be a long-running one. Perhaps he has also considered the detrimental impact that Clark’s focus on work and material success had on the Edwards family and re-evaluated what success and happiness might mean for himself. Despite his wife’s resistance and his mother’s astonishment that he would wish to return to Limbe when everyone else is trying to leave, Jende petitions for, and is granted, the option of voluntary departure by the immigration judge.

Though he is unable to obtain the holy grail of the green card, Jende does return to his hometown with “pockets full of dollars” (Mbue 19) at the end of the novel. With the money he and Neni have saved as well as what Neni extorted from Cindy and what was donated by Natasha and her congregation, the couple leave the United States knowing that—as a result of the highly favorable exchange rate—they will be able to build a house, buy a car, send their children to private schools and perhaps start a business. The American Dream, for Jende and Neni, is recalibrated and becomes a Cameroonian Dream. This circular trajectory—not just from a distant homeland to the United States, but back from the United States to the original homeland—captures patterns of migration that can easily be missed when readers assume that every ticket to the United States is a one-way ticket. The Cameroonian Dream with which Jende and Neni end their story suggests the diversity of immigrant experiences and the multiplicity of immigrant dreams.