Behold The Dreamers Character Analysis

Home Beyond Recognition
A home is not synonymous with a house. A house is merely a structure, a place of residence, a location where a person lives for a period of time. A home, on the other hand, is a part of a thriving and wholehearted community, a place where a person feels acceptance, love, and safety, and generally has ties back to one's family. So in the case of a home beyond home, one of these locations is often a house, whereas the other is the true home. This is the case for the Jonga family in Imbolo Mbue's Behold the Dreamers, where Jende eventually decides that he will never be able to turn New York City into a home for his family, and returning to Cameroon will be the only way to rekindle this sense of home. In The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Adichie, many of the characters, despite being in different circumstances as Jende, also make the same decision to return home to Nigeria. In addition, Chuckwuma from …show more content…
The process of immigration is long and grueling, and each movement poses the imminent fear of deportation, a fear that does not exist upon returning home. In a home beyond home, cultures can differ so greatly so that, like in Akunna's case, one person may entirely fail to understand another in a meaningful way. Finally, leaving home often results in a form of pressure on families that can begin to stretch the familial threads to their very limit, and these rifts can only be mended by returning to the family's true home. As Imbolo Mbue says, "people [don't] understand how difficult it is to leave behind what you know and come to a country where everything about you is considered 'different'" (Winfrey), and in these cases, the only solution is to return to the one and only