Imbolo Mbue - Behold the Dreamers

“My brother,” Bubakar said to Jende, looking at him across the bare desk in his ultraclean and perfectly organized office, “why don’t we start by you telling me more about you so I can see how I can help you?”

Jende sat up in his chair, clasped his hands on his lap, and began telling his story. He spoke of his father the farmer, his mother the trader and pig breeder, his four brothers, and their two-bedroom caraboat house in New Town, Limbe. He spoke of attending primary school at CBC Main School, and the interruption of his secondary education at National Comprehensive Secondary School after he impregnated Neni.

“Eh? You stopped because you pregnant a girl?” Bubakar said, jotting down something.

“Yes,” Jende replied. “Her father put me in prison because of it.”

“Boom! That’s it!” Bubakar said as he lifted his head from his writing pad, his eyes glowing with excitement.

“What is it?” Winston asked.

“His asylum. The story we’ll tell Immigration.”

Winston and Jende looked at each other. Jende was thinking Bubakar must know what he was talking about. Winston looked like he was thinking Bubakar must know nothing about what he was talking about.

“What’re you talking about?” Winston asked. “The imprisonment happened in 1990, fourteen years ago. How are you going to convince a judge that my cousin’s afraid of persecution back in Cameroon because he impregnated a girl and got sent to prison a long time ago? Mind you, in our country, and maybe even in your country, it’s perfectly within the law for a father to have a young man arrested for complicating his daughter’s future.”

Bubakar looked at Winston with scorn, his lip curled down on one side. “Mr. Winston,” he said after a long pause, during which he wrote something down and deliberately placed his pen on his writing pad.

“Yes?”

“I understand we’re both lawyers, and you’re Wall Street smart. Is that not so?”

Winston did not respond.

“Let me guarantee you something, my friend,” Bubakar continued. “You wouldn’t know the first thing to do if you were put before an immigration judge and asked to fight for the likes of your cousin. Okay? So, why don’t you allow me to do what I know, and if I ever need a lawyer to help me find a way to hide taxes from the government, I’ll let you do what you know.”

“My job is not to help people find ways to hide taxes,” Winston replied, keeping his voice low even though Jende could tell from his unblinking eyes that he yearned to reach across the table and punch out all the teeth from Bubakar’s mouth.

“You don’t do that, eh?” Bubakar asked with mock interest. “So, tell me, what is it that you do at Wall Street?”

Winston scoffed. Jende said nothing, equally as angered as his cousin.

Perhaps afraid he’d gone too far, Bubakar tried to rein in his comments and appease the cousins.

“My brothers, make we no vex,” he said, switching to a blend of Cameroonian and Nigerian pidgin English. “Now no be time for vex. We get work for do, abi ? Now na time for go before. No be so?”

“Na so,” Winston replied. “Let’s just stick to the matter at hand.”

Jende sighed and waited for the conversation to return to his asylum application.

“But just so you know,” Winston added, “my job as a corporate lawyer does not involve any lying or manipulation.”

“Of course,” Bubakar replied. “I’m sorry, my brother. I must have mistaken it with another kind of law.”

The two men laughed.

“What happened to the young lady you impregnated?” Bubakar said, turning to Jende.

“She is back in Limbe.”

“And the child you had with her?”

“She died.”

“I’m so sorry, oh, my brother. So sorry.”

Jende averted his gaze. He needed no sympathies. He certainly did not need condolences coming fourteen years later.

“You went to prison before or after she died?”

“Before she was born, when my girl’s parents found out I was the one who pregnant her.”

“That’s how it normally works,” Winston said. “Parents call the police, boyfriend gets arrested.”

Bubakar nodded, double-underlining a word on his writing pad.

“I was in prison for four months. I came out, the baby was one month old. Three months later, she died of yellow fever.”

“Sorry, oh, my brother,” Bubakar said again. “Truly sorry.”

Jende took a sip from a glass of water on the table and cleared his throat. “But I have another child in Cameroon,” he said. “I have a three-years-old son.”

“With the same woman that you had the daughter with?”

“Yes. She is the mother of my son. She is still my girlfriend. We would be married now and be a family with our son if only her father would let me marry her.”

“And what’s his reason for disapproving of the marriage?”

“He says he needs time to think about it, but I know it’s because I’m a poor man.”

“It’s a class thing,” Winston said. “Jende’s from a poor family. This young lady’s family has a bit more money.”

“Or maybe it’s because this young lady’s father hasn’t gotten over what happened to his daughter?” Bubakar said. “I mean, as a father, to see your young daughter get pregnant, drop out of school, and then lose the child, it’s all very hard, abi ? I don’t think I’ll ever like the person who did this to my daughter, whether he is from a rich family or poor family.”

Neither cousin responded.

“But it doesn’t really matter what his reason is,” Bubakar continued. “I think the story is our best chance for your asylum. We claim persecution based on belonging to a particular social group. We weave a story about how you’re afraid of going back home because you’re afraid your girlfriend’s family wants to kill you so you two don’t get married.”

“That sounds like something that would happen in India,” Winston said. “No one does anything like that in Cameroon.”

“Are you trying to say Cameroon is better than India?” Bubakar retorted.

“I’m trying to say Cameroon is not like India.”

“Leave that up to me, my brother.”

Winston sighed.

“When can we send the application?” Jende asked.

“As soon as you provide me with all the evidence.”

“Evidence? Like what?”

“Like what? Like your prison record. Birth certificates of your children. Both of them. Death certificate of the little girl. Letters. Lots of letters, from people who’ll say that they’ve heard this man say he’s going to kill you if he ever sees you again. People who’ve heard his brothers, his cousins, anyone in that family talk about destroying you. Pictures, too. In fact, anything and everything about you and this gal and her father. Can you get it for me?”

“I’ll try,” Jende said hesitantly. “But what if I cannot get enough evidence?”

Bubakar looked at him with a dash of amusement and shook his head. “Ah, my brother,” he said, putting down his pen and leaning forward. “Do I have to spell it out for you? You got to use your common sense and produce for me something I can show these people. Eh? It’s like that man Jerry Maguire says, show me the money. These people at USCIS are going to say, show me the evidence. Show me the evidence! You get me?”

He laughed at his own joke. Winston puffed. Jende did not react — he’d never heard of a man named Jerry Maguire.

“We got to show a lot of stuff to convince them, you understand me? One way or another, we produce a lot of evidence.”

“We’ll see what we can do,” Winston said.

Jende nodded in agreement, although he knew getting the kind of letters Bubakar wanted would be difficult. Neni’s father didn’t like him — that he’d known for years — but the old man had never once threatened to kill him. No one in Limbe could attest to that. But filing for asylum was his best chance at staying in the country, so he had to do something. He would have to talk it out with Winston and see what could be done; Winston would have ideas on how to do it.