Behold the Dreamers

“For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land—a land with streams and pools of water, with springs flowing in the valleys and hills; a land with wheat and barley, vines and fig-trees, pomegranates, olive oil and honey; a land where bread will not be scarce and you will lack nothing; a land where the rocks are iron and you can dig copper out of the hills. (Deuteronomy 8: 7–9)” 

Mbue uses the epigraph, taken from the Bible book in which God promises his chosen people that they will find a land of their own, to raise the themes of the American Dream and immigration in the novel.

“And for the very first time in her life, she had a dream besides marriage and motherhood: to become a pharmacist like the ones everyone respected in Limbe because they handed out health and happiness in pill bottles.” 

Most characters in the novel are dreamers of one sort or another. Neni’s dream to be a pharmacist in America represents her desire to escape from the restrictive gender roles to which she has been confined since she was a teen mom.

“No, people like him did not visit America. They got there and stayed there until they could return home as conquerors—as green card- or American passport-bearing conquerors with pockets full of dollars and photos of a happy life. Which was why on the day he boarded an Air France flight from Douala to Newark with a connection in Paris, he was certain he wouldn’t see Cameroon again until he had claimed his share of the milk, honey, and liberty flowing in the paradise-for-strivers called America.” 

This quote articulates the immigrant American Dream that Jende holds at the start of the novel. He hopes to make it in America through hard work. He buys into this ideology unabashedly, in other words. One of the ironies of the novel is that he achieves this dream using money he did not work for: the blackmail money Neni takes from Cindy.