Family and Belonging Theme Analysis

What both the Edwards and Jonga families have in common is a mutual need to feel a sense of belonging, as well as their reliance on family to foster that sensibility. The Jongas remain anchored in an unfamiliar land by remaining closely connected to friends and family from Cameroon, particularly Jende’s cousin, Winston. Conversely, Cindy Edwards exhibits increasingly erratic and unstable behavior as her family drifts apart, starting with her eldest son, Vince’s decision to leave for India, and culminating in her discovery of her husband Clark’s infidelities with prostitutes. In Behold the Dreamers, family is key in facilitating some feeling of security among the Jongas, even when they are at their lowest points, while the absence of family ties results in unease, and even destruction, among the privileged Edwards family.

Cindy Edwards’s obsession with keeping her family together arises from her need to create and sustain the family she never had. Cindy was born as a result of rape; knowing that she was the result of her mother’s trauma, which included being forced to carry Cindy to term, Cindy tried, unsuccessfully, to get her mother to love and accept her. Instead, her mother projected her anger and hurt onto Cindy, who, resembling her mother’s rapist, became an easy target for her wrath. Cindy’s fruitless attempts to forge bonds with her mother and her half-sister, who was born as a result of their mother’s marriage, reveal the need to have a sense of family, even in circumstances in which once ostracism has been predetermined.

Cindy’s inability to repair the fault of her birth results in her trying to create the life and the family that she always wanted. She lifts herself out of poverty by marrying Clark and legitimizes her existence by dedicating herself to marriage and the rearing of children. When Vince leaves and Clark commits infidelity, she regards their actions as signs of her own failure to create a meaningful life. She is once again relegated to feeling as though her efforts to create a new family were just as futile as her initial efforts to love her mother and sister. Cindy’s death is a direct result of drug and alcohol abuse, but it is an indirect result of feeling powerless to generate the life that she wants.

Cindy’s pain reverberates to her son, Mighty, who finds the love and care that he needs among the Jongas. During the Edwards’s summer vacation in the Hamptons, Neni Jonga serves as Mighty’s nanny and, as a result, becomes a surrogate maternal figure for the ten-year-old boy. It’s at the Hamptons house where Neni overhears Cindy and Clark arguing about Clark’s seeming indifference toward his family. It is also where Neni first notices that Cindy abuses substances to cope with her feelings of alienation. Cindy insists that she’s been “a perfectly good mother,” though, ironically, it is Neni who spends the most time with Mighty in the Hamptons—“playing video games with him, and tucking him in bed.”

Neni and Jende not only provide Mighty with emotional succor but introduce him to their culture through cuisine. Neni makes puff-puff, or fried dough, for him that summer and later, in the city, when Mighty visits the Jonga’s home for Vince’s farewell dinner, he forges a friendship with Liomi. In the Jonga household, food is a source of connection, while, for the Edwardses, it’s another marker of social status. Mighty’s ability to form a kind of informal brotherhood with Liomi, a boy his own age, offers him companionship which, along with Neni and Jende’s care, help him to feel less neglected.

The novel shows that, despite the Edwardses ability to purchase every necessity and privilege, the need for a strong familial bond still eludes Cindy. It isn’t until her death—which could be regarded as a sacrifice, due to its ability to refocus Clark’s energy on his sons and to discourage Vince’s urge to distance himself from his living parent—that her husband recognizes the importance of family and pursues closer relationships with his children. For the Jongas, their pursuit of the kind of life that they imagine that the Edwards live, nearly causes their family to unravel. The travails of both families become exemplary of the ways in which materialism and status-seeking can cause people to lose sight of the relationships and markers of identity that are most important.