Route or Root?: Towards the Creation of the Third Space in Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers

Abstract

In the the present global context, the international flow of human beings from one nation to another in search of greener pastures has attained unprecedented proportions. And both creative writers and literary critics have respectively captured this reality and critiqued it in their works over time,  highlighting the contours of this phenomenon that is characterised by ambivalence. Communities and individuals succumb to the flux of change, yet they feel the need  to militate for cultural preservation. This paper attempts to investigate immigrants’ predicament as they are torn between the home and host countries in Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers. The paper hinges on the hypothetical premise that Mbue’s migrant characters in Behold the Dreamers create a Third Space as a route of escape from the tensions they experience as they are torn between the changes brought about by globalisation, and the desire to remain rooted in their culture. Postcolonial theory is handy as the frame of analysis of Mbue’s novel as it sheds light on characters’ dilemma and these characters’ efforts at creating the Third Space through negotiation, subversion, transgression and resistance. Mbue’s choice to make her characters come back to Cameroon as heterotopia is evidence that the characters’ dystopic perception of Cameroon is corrected, a suggestion that the millions of Cameroonians in the diaspora and those that are still leaving the country today to find an utopia elsewhere can come back home, or stay home, and create their eldorado here.