130,000 displaced people in just two days Judy Woodruff told me last night. Can we even imagine this? Turkey doesn't want these Kurdish families driven from their homes by the ongoing war in Syria. Italy no longer wants the Africans who still wash up daily on the Sicilian shore. The United States certainly doesn't want the central Americans - operative word - Americans who are fleeing gang violence and poverty. How do we wrap our minds around the courage that it takes to leave everything one has ever known, to start from scratch in a new place with nothing but hope?
It is usually fiction that teaches me the many truths I never learned in school. Over the past few years there has been a bursting at the seams of amazing literature that speaks to the anguish of the immigrant experience. Several of these novels grace the list of books that I'm evaluating for Library Journal's top ten literary fiction for 2019.
Today I finished listening to a remarkable debut novel by Cameroonian writer Imbolo Mbue - http://www.imbolombue.com/. "Behold the Dreamers" is
devastating, uplifting, and ultimately hopeful, though perhaps not in the way readers might expect. Mbue dares to ask if resettling in the United States is always the best route up and out of poverty. She poses the question, how long must one struggle before Langston Hughes's dream deferred becomes a dream not worth attaining?
Jende and Neni Jonga are characters who just leap off the page. They share their aspirations with us through every conversation, interaction, and move they make as they work hard and save mightily for something a little better than their three room walk-up in Harlem.
Jende, with a word from a Cameroonian relative already established in New York, lands a fabulous job - $35,000 annually - as a chauffeur for a Lehman Brothers exec and his family. Often working eighteen hour days, Jende tries to connect with Clark Edwards by telling stories of his life back in Limbe, explaining how he can provide a better life for his wife and son in the United States. Meanwhile Neni, less nostalgic for the circumscribed life for a woman in Cameroon, excels at college where she is studying pharmacology on a student visa, and works as a nurses' aid, all while raising their boy.
Jende, with a word from a Cameroonian relative already established in New York, lands a fabulous job - $35,000 annually - as a chauffeur for a Lehman Brothers exec and his family. Often working eighteen hour days, Jende tries to connect with Clark Edwards by telling stories of his life back in Limbe, explaining how he can provide a better life for his wife and son in the United States. Meanwhile Neni, less nostalgic for the circumscribed life for a woman in Cameroon, excels at college where she is studying pharmacology on a student visa, and works as a nurses' aid, all while raising their boy.
But the year is 2007 and Mbue imbues her novel with a terrible sense of foreboding.To the naive Jende, the Edwards family appears as shiny and bright as a newly minted coin. But when Mrs. Edwards asks Neni to spend the summer working for her at her Hamptons mansion Neni sees the shimmer fade away, the dark underside of the lonely, empty lives of her employers on full display.
The crash, when it comes, will break you as you read. Not for Clark Edwards, who will be able to find a way forward, but for the Jongos, waiting for their green cards, desperate to stay in a country that saps the spirit from their souls. Jende and Neni grow farther apart as their ideas of what's best for their family diverge. I wondered, as I listened, would this country break them? You may be surprised by the answer.
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